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While the ultra wealthy don't have billions on hand, they do take loans against their assets, which we could tax more.
Should. They should be taxed extremely heavily to try and stop that loop hole and abuse of power.
What about loans against assets like houses? I wouldn't consider simple house owners necessarily rich and they should be able to get a mortgage without penalty.
You know, you can just do things. Like, laws don't need to be applied unilaterally. You can, at the same time, tax a 100,000,000 dollar loan, and not tax a 1,000,000 dollar loan.
Kind of like how generally, low income people do not pay much or any income taxes, or how certain products are subject to additional sales taxes.
Exclude a mortgage for your primary residence, capped at the median house price or something... And only exclude it IF it is paid back in full over a max period.
This is the case in the Netherlands.. paid back in full after max 30 years... No cap in how much. This was because the interest on the mortgage are tax deductible. So some bankers figured.. we keep the loan maxed, and put your paybacks in a special fund.. and at the end of the 30 years the fund pays back the mortgage. That way we get max interests and you get max tax break. In the end the banks made a lot of public funds private this way.
Why? Are any loans ever taxed?
There were tax evasion schemes in the UK where wealthy people could take loans from an offshore entity they contributed to and never pay the loans back. But this was shutdown fairly quickly by HMRC (British IRS) and a bunch of people were fined / went to jail. Don't know if the same is true in America?
If a loan is acting as income (like it does for the ultra wealthy) then it should be treated like income and taxed accordingly.
How do you establish that a loan is or isn't "acting as income"?
Those loans are often several times more than the yearly income and done more frequently.
My mortgage was many times my yearly income.
So then you just have frequency, which is easily gamed by getting fewer larger loans. Maybe one every three to five years? At that point it really is just a mortgage with stock as collateral rather than a house.
Like, you're not wrong in your intuition that the system is problematic. Mine (and others) point is that the devil is in the details, and they're not trivial.
But then the value goes WAAY up. Let's assume you live in a very good house, and mortgage it you're able to get 5 million out of it. Do you think someone like Jeff Bezos could live for 5 years with that?. You can do it fairly straightforward, everytime you take a loan, the full amount of that loan gets added, after a period of 5 years that value disappears, if at any point that value goes above 10 million, you start paying taxes on it. And the higher it goes the more tax you pay on it, just like how income tax has brackets, and just like how up to certain values are exempt.
For you or me if we were ever loan 10 million over 5 years we wouldn't have a way to pay it back. For an Uber wealthy they do that fairly quickly, Bezos mention costs 600k a month, so he'll get into the first bracket from just that in a year and a half.
People need to realize just how big the gap is, there are plenty of ways to tax extremely rich people without affecting the middle class by just putting the bracket so high up that it's impossible for a middle class to reach it.
The problem isn't that i "don't understand the gap". The problem is that this isn't what I'm asking.
How do you define for the purposes of this hypothetical law which loans would be taxed as income?
Telling me how rich Bezos is is completely tangential.
I've been trying to use the Socratic method to prime the pump that
-The root of the problem isn't the loans themselves, it's that they can "realize value" from shares (using them to secure a loan) without selling them.
But that doesn't seem to have gotten anywhere because of how excited people are to hear any question to be somehow a doubting of how rich these guys are?
If that is the case, and you step back, can you consider an alternative strategy besides just some messy spaghetti definition of "income loans" vs other loans?
Read my answer before replying, I provided a solution for that's and it's a solution based on the astonishing difference between what high middle class people and super rich make.
I'll repeat it, every dollar you take from a loan gets tallied, and expires after 5 years. Whenever that value goes beyond 10 million you start paying taxes on the loans. You, or any high middle class person, won't be able to take that many loans in such a short period of time, simply because it would mean that you need at least an income of 2 million per year just to repay those loans, and I think we can agree that's not high middle class.
This way there's no loophole on the type of loan.
This is a bad system for several reasons:
-It requires an arbitrary use-agnostic choice of value. Why 10 million? Why not 5? Why not 50?
-it requires an arbitrary time scale. Why 5 years? Why not 3? why not 10? Why not limit once in a lifetime?
We're defining a system here with numbers out of thin air with no context around anything. These are fundamentally badly designed systems. No amount of fiddling with the parameters will make up for the fact that it's fundamentally flawed.
Also, beyond that, you would be amazed how many scenarios exist for people and businesses to secure large loans that this would impact. The goal is to actually tax the super rich who are dodging taxes, not kneecap legitimate useage. You'd hurt hundreds of thousands legitimate borrowers and just shove Bezos and Musk into using alternative mechanisms to leverage their security holdings.
I know you think I don't understand your proposal. I challenge you to consider that I do, and still think you can reconsider the root cause of the issue and come up with alternative ideas. You're stuck on the loan aspect. That's a symptom, not the cause.
Why are tax brackets the value they are? Would you say that tax brackets are a bad system? They also rely on an arbitrary use-agnostic choice of value.
Same reason taxes are calculated over yearly income and not every 2 years or 6 months. It's also arbitrary, it's just an arbitrary you're used to so you don't question it.
Both cons you found for my solution are also present on tax brackets, i.e. arbitrarily defined values and length, by that logic you also think tax brackets are a bad idea.
The reason why I said 10 Mil over 5 years is to try to exclude as many legitimate use cases as possible. For starters we're talking about people, not business, there are legitimate reasons for a business, particularly large ones, to take much larger loans. But for people? The largest expense on a regular person's life will be the house they buy, and 10 Mil is WAY above the average price for that, if someone is buying a >10 Mil house I'm okay with them getting taxed on the loan, if they managed to get a 40 year 0% loan (impossible) they'll already be paying 20k per month, might as well pay some more on top of it. But wait, you might say, what about smaller loans that compound to >10 Mil, that's why there's a 5 year limit, this means the person needs to loan over 2 Mil per year, which is simply not possible for someone unless they're mega-rich, because again they would need to be paying >20k per month.
And yes, those are arbitrary values and probably they need adjusting via research and experimentation, but again the same is true for tax brackets, and I think everyone agrees those are a good idea.
This answer you acknowledged my proposal, therefore I now believe that you understood it, on your first answer you suggested I had a definition of income/non-income loans, which is not at all what I'm proposing.
Ok, I'm just going to go ahead and pitch an alternative and then you can weigh in on the relative merits.
In my mind, the issues aren't the loans themselves, it's that they're secured by shares. Billionaires are able to realize real value from those shares without paying taxes in them.
I think if you want to use shares as collateral, you need to pay the taxes on them.
You wanna use shares to back a loan, fine, but the instant you do, all taxes on those shares are due at FMV.
This isn't without precedent: when an employee has unvested shares with a company and meet a companies retirement eligibility criteria, the IRS sees that those shares are "no longer at substantial risk of forfeiture" and several social taxes are due, despite the shares not being sold or even technically owned by that person.
We can extract fair tax values from securities even before they're sold. We already do.
Tax the assets used to secure the loans and it gets the taxes into the system without removing voting rights. Win/win, and it's a scalpel directly targeting the root.
And what exactly is the difference between a loan and a loan acting as income?
Those loans are often several times more than the yearly income and done more frequently.
You don't have to repay income. When you repay the loan should you get the tax back?
The loan was used to evade taxes. Those loans on stocks are effectively turning their stocks into gains and should be taxed as such.