It is for the purpose of calculating your tax rate. Otherwise rich people who have 0 earned income and make all their money from stocks would pay literally 0%[1]
As I said in the other reply, this is wrong. Only the gain is accounted for as income, not the capital. So you basically have two scenarios - you have huge capital and a small gain, in which case you should pay your damn tax. Or you have small capital and a massive gain, in which case you should pay your damn tax.
And remember- this is only paid if you chose to sell that amount in a financial year.
Oh, and afer you pay your tax, phone up all the people you've met that day and explain to them how you've still payed less tax than they pay on their income despite your income literally being unearned.
Miscommunication, I took the gp's "stock worth more than 350k" to mean gains worth more than 350k. You only pay tax on gains anyway so it seems moot to talk about the original value in terms of thresholds.
No, only the gain is income, the value of the stock is not. In your example you would need your stock to have gained 350k and to sell it all. You could sell 349k this year and pay nothing, and 1k next year and pay nothing.
Exemption? I would call it "ability to not be stolen".The vocabulary of states is very evil. By exemption it lookslike they are saying "we forgive you and do not make you pay what belongs to us" when in fact it is just the opposite, they take what does not belong to them.
I am quite pissed with the political mafia. Not only there. Everywhere.
By the same logic, if you every drive or walk or bike on a road or sidewalk, you are taking what does not belong to you. If you ever eat food that is healthy and nutritious because the government has tested and regulated food production, you are taking what doesn't belong to you.
If you live in your home safe and secure from crime . . . Taxes pay for basic infrastructure, defense, education, and regulation. These things that taxes pay for are good for us and you use them every day. You want them for free apparently. Do you seriously think you would be better off having to procure all those benefits yourself as an individual?
btw about sidewalks, etc. and public areas. They belong to all of us, we paid them through taxes. It is called common property. (Propiedad comunal en español, mi lengua nativa)
there are things we pay and maybe I would pay that are good for all of us. There are also things I would pay for even if my neighbour cannot and would let them use them or even consider it common property, as it is today. What I do not want is a fully coactive, unjust system with artificial regulations and countless state monopolies on top of me. I do not think spoiling half of the effort to someone is a promising proposition or that it is what it takes to sustain this. Needless to say, I am against welfare in a setup where it must be paid with debt. This is not what a responsible person does at home, why they can do it with taxes?
Who told you I need the government to not eat poison? This is so absurd. They have a chain of responsibility to do that today, maybe, but you could have certifications also, without any government intervention. Do you think people manufacturing the products you buy are interested in poisoning you? Would they do it? They would lose all their customers, their reputation would be damaged... no, I do not see it.
You think because the government is not there people do not care anymore whether they eat poison or not? Seriously? There is a clear demand for someone saying: this is safe food. It does not need to be the government. It just happens it is them who do it today. This is like saying people would not want schools if the government does not pay for them or hospitals. It is totally absurd. Things exist because people value them. And many do exist with no value because someone creates artificially from our taxes stuff. There is no more to it.
BTW, security, this is something many of you do not get either: you are safe because people around you have a mindset of respecting others, mainly and above everything else. That is why there are districts where you can go 2:00 a.m. safe and you know nothing will happen to you and some you would not go even at 20:00 p.m. a normal day! It has nothing to do with the police, or to a very little extent. You cannot have a police after each person. If someone takes out a gun and shoots you it will happen anyway.
If the police gave you unconditional security then that could not happen. On the other side, if you go to a prison, you have state workers every few meters. Is it any safer that good districts that are police-free? No way!! They are not. There are people passing drugs and violence, more so than anywhere else. Security comes first, and foremost, by what people are willing to respect or not, and later, there are outliers, yes, but this is not at all all the story.
The food you ate this week--where did it come from? Which pesticides were used in it's production? Was the product adulterated (see: honey)? Do you know the list of food additives the FDA has banned, and do you look for their inclusion on labels? Because someone in the government does, for your protection. So you don't have to. But you would!
Where was the "and then they'll be ruined and they'll never make another red cent," attitude when we received toys with lead paint? Never mind obvious malintent, what about products that have been unintentionally but irresponsibly handled--a e. coli or listeria outbreak? Lots of people who have perfectly good intentions can still kill people.
My question is, why are you so against a government agency (i.e. the people) from taking care of this matter? You get a lot of services at cost. It's cheaper, and there is no weird incentive structure where "well, we could let this product that doesn't make standard, because the ratings company stands to make a lot of money if goes through." Remember fannie mae AAA rating junk mortgage bonds because if they didn't, their competitors would? At least their industry was financial instruments and not food.
We've strayed too far from the topic, though. Calling taxation theft while reaping the benefits is hypocritical at best. And saying "well, some taxation is ok, but partially removing the QSBS break is theft," comes across as disingenuous. Who's to say your QSBS break didn't fund a school or the FDA or a sidewalk?
> Do you think people manufacturing the products you buy are interested in poisoning you? Would they do it? They would lose all their customers, their reputation would be damaged... no, I do not see it.
There's a long history of businesses adulterating their products in order to increase profit. One of the most infamous being the Chinese infant formula scandal[0]. It seems incredibly naive to think that these regulations haven't been paid for in human lives.
The main reason for having the government take responsibility for certain things is that they should be available to everyone in society. Roads and schools are a great examples of this in practice.
Also, who wants to live a world where you constantly have to figure out if something is safe to fucking eat.
> But how come you have to figure out if food is safe just because it is not the government who certifies that food?!
Because rather than trusting a centralised entity responsible for food safety I now need to figure out which of the 5,000 profit driven "certification" authorities are actually trustworthy and aren't just an arm of the food manufacturer. In the best case scenario I end up finding 5 or so organisations that will certify the ingredients I use most often, and I'm a bit fucked if I ever want to eat something they don't cover. In the worst case those 5 organisations have previously been bought by the market leader and now are now operated as fronts.
> Yes, you go to a link for China, where the biggest government is and you have death penalty.
The infant formula scandal is simply the one with the most widespread media attention, probably because the profit motive lead to babies being poisoned. It was a counter example to your initial point that food manufacturers would never dream of adulterating their products.
If you'd rather have a western example, then in the UK a supplier of one of the largest supermarkets Tesco, was caught adulterating their "beef" burgers with horse meat.
> Yes, you go to a link for China, where the biggest government is and you have death penalty.
I don't see how the death penalty has any bearing on what we're discussing.
> A good show of why governments work for food control, right? hahahahahaha! You are just making my point, man. It does not depend on it.
It shows that they had the motivation, resources, and authority to find and punish those responsible. I don't agree with the form the punishment took but it illustrates the limitations of a private certification body once people start dropping dead. In fact they would be incentivised to help cover up any incidents lest they lose customers.
Man, you're digging a grave for your own point of view. If you compare China where the regulation is strict (but compliance is sloppy) with India, where both are lacking, China's incidence of death from poisoning is at least 2x lower.
That is just partial data. There are way more countries and I am sure the correlation is not like the comparison between India and China. Though I admit I did not search that data, just an intuition that there are countries where people stick more to rules and do not cheat you and places where you turn back and they do it. And no, it is not because of regulations. I lived in South East Asia for almost a decade. Anyone will cheat u there way more often than in most european countries. It is not regulations. It is people and culture. Yes.
The alternative isn't no government, it's getting the same treatment from a different authority with even less recourse. You're just blaming the messenger.
If you want to talk about brainwashing, have you considered how the company you work for puts a penalty on your efforts? Their literal model is paying you less than the value you provide and recording that difference as profit. The rate they collect is often much greater than 10% of your efforts.
1.a. given that you could do it by yourself, why do we work for a company instead of running a business ourselves? are you sure you are not missing some variables there?
2. does the employer have any additional risk? In my country, for example, firing a person is quite a bit of money. This is effectively an insurance to pay for the worker, besides the taxes they already pay (a penalty for the economic activity, basically, or, as I think of it: a theft)
3. do I do work for my employer forced by them or I chose to work there because it is my best alternative without coactively forcing someone to do something they do not want? Of course we always want higher salaries. But taxes do not work like this: in taxing systems you do not have a choice to pay or not to pay, you pay and that's all the story. You also have no word on where your money goes or any control over it. The people who manage it do not pay penalties for mismanaging it. In private companies I can assure you this is much more sensitive and you are much more careful with what you do than in public instances.
Please, let us keep the conversation rational. I would like you to discuss this topic rationally. Because I would really like to understand it.
P.S.: noone explained me yet why taxes are not theft. For me they are, I said, because they are coactively putting penalties on something you produce. Coactively, not even by mutual contract as in the case you mention from the employer. Of course we want more from the employer and the employer more of us, but, at the end, this is a mutual contract, not a do it or I put you in jail.
You're absolutely right about 1.a., but you're missing the fact that the same is true for the relationship between companies (and their owners) and the government. So just as the typical employee often could not generate the same value without the infrastructure and resources of the company, that company could not generate the same value without the infrastructure and resources provided by the state.
My entire original "profit is theft" argument rests on the same kind of assumptions as your "taxes are theft" argument. Namely that in both cases the affected party is not getting anything for their contributions and could have done it themselves. In my mind the only difference here is that taxes are explicit and transparent, while "capturing excess productivity" is hidden. The former seems much more honest in this regard.
Edit:
> You also have no word on where your money goes or any control over it. The people who manage it do not pay penalties for mismanaging it. In private companies I can assure you this is much more sensitive and you are much more careful with what you do than in public instances.
This is patently false. Not only do you have less control over how your employer spends your excess value than how your government spends your taxes (I don't recall being able to vote for my CEO), but corruption in companies is not uncommon. It's just less visible because companies are allowed much more secrecy than governments. This is not any better. It's also rare for a CEO to be seriously punished for running a company into the ground. "Failing upwards" is common.
Incorrect: profit from a company is hiring + working cooperatively. No matter you would want more money as an employee: you accepted it. You could go somewhere else to pick something else. You do not because you do not have something better.
Taxes is basically a gun in your head saying: 50% for me. Why? Because I say so. And you have no alternative. That is coaction no cooperation.
Seriously recheck it. We could talk what taxes are used for or ig u get enough from your wage. But the fact is thst the first case is cooperative and the second is coactive.
I should not have control on how my emplouyer spends my money if it is not part of thr contract. After all, we both accepted. But if you really dislike what they do, just go get work from another and NEVER work for such a piece of rubbish right? Can I do that with the State? No, I would be enjailed.
The state will not ask you. Simply like that. Factual and true.
By the same token, you could move to another country, no? The problem with this logic is that having a choice of jobs is often a privilege of having money in the first place (just like relocating to another nation). You probably can't turn down work, no matter how bad the "deal", if you need that money for food and shelter. So for many (most?) people the supposed free choice of employment is illusory.
This gets even worse when you consider how competition tends to drive companies to all be shitty to employees in similar ways. It's now really common for shifts to be scheduled algorithmically and on short-notice in fast food. If you're just entering the job market or have little experience, how do you "choose" to work for a company that won't schedule you for last-minute 2 hr shifts or have you "clopen" at the behest of some scheduling algorithm?
Do not work in fast food. But if you have to, in part it is because you cannot work elsewhere. Which takes me to... bsd choices? But even if u did it... My grandparents were raised without welfare. They were not rich.
They saved money and reinvested parts in a house for many years and other things. This is a mindset. It is not about being rich or not.
That is how you usually get out of poverty. As for working in fast food, probably is a consequence of not studying or having chosen studies with little demand. It is the crude truth. We cannot blame those on others.
I understand how hard it is. But the reality is that there are even socialist experiments about removing prices in cooperatives in Russia for making I believe it was screws and nails.
Two cooperatives provided with the same number of employees, same resources. One made better pieces than the others. Which ones do you think people wanted? And that without prices, some pieces were more valuable. What this shows is that no matter how much u try to equal things, they will naturally shift away by themselves. Jobs, faster vs slower, skilled vs unskilled. Fighting that permanently... I do not see it as a good thing.
There are ~15 countries that don't have income taxes. Some of them are even quite nice. I suggest you move if taxes offend you so much.
It's not like taxes go into a black whole. They pay for schools, roads, police, military protection, and a host of other services. We can certainly debate the relative allocation of funds, but going tax free isn't something most large nations can do. The nations that are tax free tend to be extremely wealthy on oil money (Bahrain) OR borderline anarchy (Somalia).
Yes I have been actively looking for reasonable countries. Not because I think I cannot pay but because I am convinced we should NOT unless we authorize someone to do it. Of course you would lose the services you do not pay for.
I do not need 0% taxes. But you know what? I do not need 54% income tax + 21% VAT plus many others that amount to 70% of my earnings and they laugh at us in our faces. I really do not need that. Here I talk about Spain. Let us leave USA apart bc I do not know enough. Just know that they are sailing in the same direction so if I were you guys, I would be a bit careful.
In the real world I do not need a 0% taxes country either. Of course.
I am spanish (54% over 60,000 euros in my "State"). But I see the US going in the same stupid direction of taxing and overregulation and it catches my eye.
Seriously, do not break it. I admire the founders of USA more than any other people worldwide.
The ideas of real freedom were born there, even if there are, like everywhere else, dark episodes.
