I'm thinking more in the category of buying a failing company in anticipation of using it's annual losses to create tax benefits.
The level at which you and I are engineering this stuff is kid's play. But that's kind of the idea. If you have extensive amounts of money, you hire a team to engineer getting you out of paying your fair share, I think the average person has the right to be upset about that, since all of that profit is earned on the backs of ordinary folks.
If someone wants to disagree, fair enough, but I'd be mainly interested in hearing from folks who can't afford to hire a team to engineer their way out of paying taxes.
I wouldn’t claim to be a tax expert. I was responding to a comment that used the term “overpay taxes” differently from how I would. Sure, if you overpay your estimated tax during the year, that’s overpaying. So is failing to use deductions and credits that you qualify for. I only wanted to clarify the distinction.
I’m happy to add that it’s no surprise people consider taxes when they make decisions, and in some cases tax incentives are specifically designed to change people’s behavior. It’s silly to be scandalized when their behavior actually does change. Not everybody agrees on which tax avoidance behaviors are perfectly acceptable (e.g., buying alternative fuels) and which are pure evil.
When people have a lot to lose, it’s no surprise that they hire tax experts. The US government gave up trying to design a system that always gives reasonable outcomes, and instead created the alternative minimum tax specifically for the scenario of rich people getting too creative with credits and deductions. If Trump truly received several million dollars of income in 2016 and legally paid a grand total of $750, then the alternative minimum tax isn’t doing its job and should be reworked.
If I'm understanding the article correctly, the New York Times isn't counting the millions it found that Trump paid in alternative minimum tax over the years when making all its big, attention-grabbing viral claims about how little income tax he paid because technically alternative minimum tax is a different, seperate thing from income tax.
They make a huge deal about the difference between Trump’s “I paid millions in total taxes” and their “he paid a tiny amount in income taxes,” and I overlooked where AMT would fit in that distinction.
From my experience, there is a lot of anger generated when those who have so much, avoid paying even the bare minimum compared to those who have very little.
The average lower-to-middle-income family with a mortgage and a couple of kids, sure they have a lot to worry about and they really need that money. Pay as little taxes as you can because what you save goes to feeding your kids, paying for college, and putting gas in the minivan.
Someone who is essentially playing a game (Trump) to maximize one number (income) while minimizing another (tax), I don't think a lot of people have a lot of sympathy for. Accumulating wealth really is a game at that point, no different than speedrunning RE2, or trying to YOLO options on Robinhood. It's not like Ivanka is putting the money into diapers, summer camp for the kids, and tires on the minivan.
In that sense, Trump doesn't have a lot to lose (anything to lose, really - just monopoly money). It's just numbers in a spreadsheet, it's not your kid's Christmas presents, or fixing the water heater, or getting a new set of tires on the family car. It's paying off Stormy Daniels who you slept with 4 months after your wife gave birth, Jared getting a fancy new tie, and your son Eric getting to go to Africa to shoot some new animal.
People are pissed. I think they have good reason to be. The system benefits those who are playing a game, and hurts those who are actually playing with real odds.
That’s not exactly a tax dodge strategy to get deeper in debt. More than likely, he just isn’t a good business person and fell for the sunk cost fallacy.
The level at which you and I are engineering this stuff is kid's play. But that's kind of the idea. If you have extensive amounts of money, you hire a team to engineer getting you out of paying your fair share, I think the average person has the right to be upset about that, since all of that profit is earned on the backs of ordinary folks.
If someone wants to disagree, fair enough, but I'd be mainly interested in hearing from folks who can't afford to hire a team to engineer their way out of paying taxes.