If I have significant sums of equities, I can sell half on Dec 31 and half on Jan 1 to avoid a new bracket. I try to avoid speaking much about my situation, but my tax advisors and I use every trick in the book to play all the games available, of which this is but one.
My issue is not that I have dedicated a lot of time and money to avoid taxes, but really that the tax rules are so arbitrary and stupid to begin with.
A wealth tax! Even France tried and abandoned that! Do you have any idea the side effects that would cause? Suddenly I would be a pauper, how simple this would be.
We have wealth taxes. They are called property taxes in the US. I have to pay a percentage of the value of my house. And I can't sell a tiny piece of my house to cover it. I have to use my other funds to pay for it. That seems so unfair, the poor weak billionaires of the world say. When My house goes up in value, my tax will go up, and down works the other way too.
Billionaires cry and moan about the impossibility of paying a wealth tax on their billions in stock. They can manage to do it, just like all the rest of us. The wealth tax is claimed to be this exotic impossible thing. Yet most every home owner in the us is paying, us 100 million plus people. Surely the rich, those who have millions or billions can do the same. The reason they don't is they have captured the legislature, their fox new advertising is very successful, no one wants to tax the very wealthy because surely they will be wealthy one day.
Out of all the possible ways you can tax me, a wealth tax is easily the dumbest and easiest to avoid. I wish the US would do it just to show the world why this is so absurd. I don’t even want to get into it, just that the folly would be enormous and my laughter very loud.
This doesn’t really address my question, or any of my other comments, and I haven’t really said anything about being rich or not — just that we should be able to make decisions as a society. That seems to disagree with you? So, uh, good luck with whatever weird tax scheme you have going on, I guess.
I guess if you have no position then your commenting makes no sense and probably you should not bother.
If what it seems is that you want society to vote on how much to steal from me, my point is a flat income tax is the most fair and straightforwards, and eliminate as many exceptions as you can.
But given my knowledge of this situation that’s impossible and it won’t happen, so good luck with your wealth taxes.
You mock leftists as having futile aspirations, thanks to your tax dodging abilities. But we do have progressive taxation as a rather strongly entrenched policy in the United States and most of the rest of the world, so in that sense, you are the one with a futile task ahead of you, in your aspiration to eliminate it. Good luck!
It’s like looking into a crystal ball that changes as you twist it.
On one end, yes, progressive taxation is the goal of laws at the high level.
But on the other, the implementation of such a policy is impossible, so if you have 3 degrees of separation between the goal and individuals trying to act in their own self interest, the folly becomes obvious.
Human behavior is unchanging, and so is the nature of those in power. The elite leftists will pass any amount of nonsense policies but will violate it themselves at will and protect their own elites.
I can’t really explain it other than you need to view the system properly and shake the crystal ball.
Put yourself in my shoes - pay millions in taxes, or pay a firm $100k and sign a bunch of documents to save millions in taxes. I’m not a sucker.
You are trying hard not to address the reasonable questions. This is not really the place to convince people of anything by says "view the system and shake the crystal ball".
I have an accountant and ask him how to do things to reduce taxes. But I'm not against paying taxes. I like to live in a safe place, with services, a city that is functional, a state that is working. I don't see it as a chump thing to pay taxes. I'm pretty fortunate as a software engineer. I feel sorry for you, with your inability to address the question and just calling people chumps and suckers for having different ideas.
If I have significant sums of equities, I can sell half on Dec 31 and half on Jan 1 to avoid a new bracket. I try to avoid speaking much about my situation, but my tax advisors and I use every trick in the book to play all the games available, of which this is but one.
My issue is not that I have dedicated a lot of time and money to avoid taxes, but really that the tax rules are so arbitrary and stupid to begin with.