How are we going to pay for all this shit?

Tariffs will pay for it all...........lol...if not Mexico Originally Posted by matchingmole

and the Wall as well


Liberal fascists with no fiannciql sense

and the Wall as well


Liberal fascists with no fiannciql sense Originally Posted by oeb11

How? Print money, like Obama and Trump encouraged...until the world stops using the US Greenback as the de facto reserve currency (which has started to happen). Hyper-inflation, here we come.

SE - you are exactly correct.

The example is teh hyperinflation of teh weimar Republic in germany in the 1930's.



But - liberals like mm don't believe in history - it is labelled with the 'r.....' word because it contradicts their narrative views. . and rather than post reasoned debate - all the intellectually bankrupt DPST/fascists have to post is foolish memes.

so Sad that the teacher's Unions have inflicted such criminal mis-education/indoctrination upon the fools who are incapable of comprehending their own slavish devotion to their and America's destruction.

.

You probably saw the ProPublica piece that came out a couple of months ago, noting that a few uber-billionaires have paid little in the way of income and capital gains tax in recent years. Originally Posted by CaptainMidnight

What ProPublica and the media fail to note is that the businesses founded and largely owned by these uber billionaires pay huge amounts of taxes. I gave some examples in another post. One was Mark Zuckerberg, whose share of taxes paid by Facebook over the last 12 months was $1.5 billion.

Of course, a lot has been written about the Sanders/Warren "wealth tax" idea, although there's wide disagreement on whether the plan would even be likely to pass constitutional muster.

As if on cue, along come left-wing professors Saez and Zucman, pushing a plan they suggest would be easier to implement while not risking any serious constitutional challenges.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlo...-billionaires/ Originally Posted by CaptainMidnight

As you probably know, this is not an original idea. Ron Wyden and other Democratic politicians have been promoting it for years. The fact that Wyden is Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee means you have to take it seriously.

I love this excerpt:

"Economically, a tax on the stock of unrealized capital gains is an ideal tax, because it doesn’t distort behavior. The gains, after all, have already been made: Billionaires cannot go back in time and try to become less wealthy. Therefore, the traditional argument that taxation discourages effort and innovation becomes moot."

[End of excerpt]

Wouldn't distort behavior? Seriously?

Sure, they have a point about past behavior. But what about entrepreneurs' and investors' future plans?

When thinking about policy proposals, I sometimes wonder how the great classical liberal thinkers of days gone by might view stuff. Originally Posted by CaptainMidnight

No shit Sherlock. Your comments later in your post about the ability of taxpayers to reduce taxable income by moving investments to private equity and the like is a double edged sword. Yes, maybe you can misrepresent the actual value of businesses, real estate, and PE and VC investments. But the Democratic Politicians also have a master plan to audit people who will pay the mark-to-market tax every three years. Since the IRS can go back and audit three years of returns (more if there's alleged fraud), that means that some taxpayers will have every return audited. An even bigger consideration is the time and cost and hair pulling to comply with the tax. Taxpayers will have to come up with valuations of everything they own every year. As described in this thread, I had to do that for a relative, once, and it was a nightmare.

And what happens after you've paid tax on large mark-to-market gains on a business or investment that subsequently goes bust? Is the government going to pay you back for the taxes you paid? Probably not. Right now they won't even let you deduct any more than $3,000 per year from a carried forward capital loss against ordinary income. Think about the example of Elon Musk that Saez and Zucman provided in your link. Musk has borrowed a lot of money against his business assets. If those get marked down by the banks someday to anywhere close to book value he'll go bankrupt, but under a mark-to-market regime the federal government will make out like a bandit. Which is what it is anyway. A bandit.

If I were subject to a mark-to-market tax on capital gains, I would choose one of three options,

Option 1. Sell or liquidate several very small businesses I own, and don't start up any more. Sell my real estate investments. I do that and I don't have to go through a valuation nightmare every year, to estimate my mark-to-market taxable income. Then I'd sell my publicly listed stocks too. Would I invest in a hedge fund where the manager got to take 43.4% of the fund's increase in value (56% if I were a resident of New York City) every year? Hell no, that's a good way to go broke. Well, substitute "government" for "hedge fund manager", and that's what you've got under the Wyden/Saez/Zucman plan.

Then what I'd do would be to invest every dime in tax free municipal bonds, so the bastards in Washington couldn't take a penny of my earnings. And maybe I'd become a member of Patriotic Millionaires, or a U.S. Senator like John Kerry who did exactly what I described above, and bitch about people who don't like to pay taxes.

2. Expatriate

3. Commit suicide

In the long term, the government loses, in terms of revenues it will realize from me, for every one of the options above -- confirmation of what Bastiat had to say:

, for example.

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Bastiat.html

He wrote that we must always consider the unseen as well as the seen. Originally Posted by CaptainMidnight

The anti-free trade crowd here should read your link about Bastiat btw.

The U.S. economy depends a great deal on liquid equity markets which benefit not only entrepreneurs in search of capital, but individual investors who have the opportunity to earn excellent returns in their 401(k) and other accounts -- greatly improving their prospects for a comfortable retirement. Originally Posted by CaptainMidnight

This is why countries like New Zealand and Belgium don't levy a capital gains tax. Capital is allocated more efficiently when there's not a penalty for moving it from one business or investment to another.

In 1990, when pressed to accede to tax increases, George H. W. Bush famously said that when the big spenders started talking about taxing "the rich," it might a good idea for middle-class Americans to hang onto their wallets. (One of those taxes was the so-called "luxury tax," which backfired in embarrassing fashion and was deep-sixed by the Clinton administration in 1993.)

The senior Bush had a pretty good point.

. Originally Posted by CaptainMidnight

The minimum and alternative minimum tax is a good illustration of Bush's point. The impetus for the tax was that 155 Americans in 1966 realized over $200,000 in annual income and paid no tax. The first year the minimum tax was levied, 20,000 people paid it. In 2017, 5.1 million people paid the alternative minimum tax.

Tiny - thank you for a good discussion.

Of note - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/p...-tax-proposals


Saez/Zucman are economic advisors to lizzie warren/bernie sanders - and both embrace wealth taxes to achieve 'equity' and pay for the enormous spending of teh DPST/fascists.



Hollande and his socialist party policies - similar to lizzie/bernie/deranged DPST/fascist dreams - were soundly rejected by French voters after a disastrous economic downturn in France due to Hollande. It was the end of teh French socialist party.

https://www.dw.com/en/after-hollande...nce/a-38501535



If it were not so damaging - I would almost sit back and let the socialist wealth grabbing DPST/fascists go right on ahead and shoot themselves in the foot with their policies - but the damage to america would be too great.


Perhaps that is their real goal - to damage america such that a marxist overthrow becomes possible.

They would not admit it - but their radical AOC /sanders wing certainly smacks of marxist rhetoric and policies. Bernie is an avowed marxist /communist who spent his honeymoon in Russia studying marxist revolution - and has become a capitalist multimillionaire selling his marxist Socialism to foolish americans karens.


my bottom line on the preachings of Saez/Zucman : an illustration for teh DPST/fascists to better comprehend.

Hollande and his socialist party policies - similar to lizzie/bernie/deranged DPST/fascist dreams - were soundly rejected by French voters after a disastrous economic downturn in France due to Hollande. It was the end of teh French socialist party. Originally Posted by oeb11

That's what I don't get Oeb. The Hollande government wasn't nearly as radical as what the Saez/Zucman/Piketty contingent (progressive French economists) propose. But he had to back off when the rich started leaving France. Elizabeth Warren, Saez and Zucman have a solution though -- in addition to the exit tax on expatriates, also take 40% of everything a person owns if he chooses to leave the USA. This highlights the belief of some progressive politicians that they are the masters and the taxpayers are their slaves. Apologies in advance to Blackman et al for exaggerating. Slightly.

in addition to the exit tax on expatriates, also take 40% of everything a person owns if he chooses to leave the USA.

Is that true?

Edit: It is. That twat is out of her mind.

Tiny's post is accurate - Lizzie proposes exactly as Tiny wrote.
the 'progressives' are entirely on board with wealth confiscation to feed the government maw.

Yes - DPST/fascists do see americans as their slaves - and they are the nomenklatura masters.



all in the name of equity - read Communism. - lizzie and bernie at the top of the nomenklatura heap.

and - they will do it to us if they are not stopped!

Is that true?

Edit: It is. That twat is out of her mind. Originally Posted by Jacuzzme

who's the twat?

Is that true?

Edit: It is. That twat is out of her mind. Originally Posted by Jacuzzme

who's the twat? Originally Posted by dilbert firestorm

oh that lizzie.

Yup feed the guberment machine ( the Fed is the largest employer in the world Hmm )

I stopped in today to get a high plains burger at a local burger joint. It was a little deserted because of the holiday. The owner started bending my ear about his labor problems. He says the unemployment and other welfare benefits are so generous because of COVID that he can't get or keep good employees any more. He talked about a woman who'd been with him for years who figured out it just didn't pay to work right now. He said she's not lazy and didn't dislike the job, it was just an economic decision. She could make more money and spend more time with her kids by not working.

That's only true for shit ass minimum wage jobs, who don't provide a living wage to begin with.

Just a bullshit job that pays like shit and offers nothing but shit, and somehow it's successful.

That's only true for shit ass minimum wage jobs, who don't provide a living wage to begin with.

Just a bullshit job that pays like shit and offers nothing but shit, and somehow it's successful. Originally Posted by Strokey_McDingDong

There must be some kind of a win-win-win situation where the employer, the employee and the taxpayer all come out better. Wages go up benefitting the employee; employer is able to get the help he needs because he's paying more than the government's paying people to stay home; taxpayer's off the hook. As much as it may be against my Libertarian principles, maybe a higher minimum wage, preferably set by local people instead of in Washington, combined with reduced incentives not to work when when work is available, might help.