It always puzzled me how tax-adverse some wealthy people are.

I'm not talking about the wealthy people that have 100% of their wealth tied up to company (stock) that they operate - but the wealthy people that are just asset-rich, with zero operational duties.

Their wealth is handled by wealth managers, they probably don't even know what they own. But minimizing taxes and hoarding wealth is priority number 1.

Why do you think that minimizing taxes becomes their #1 priority? What actually happens is that they tell the guy handling your finances to save them some money, and that's their problem. And given their fee structure, they'll go as far as they need to, even though the rich person in question doesn't really think about their taxes all that much.

This is the real multiplicative effect of being really rich: It's not knowing that you'll never be short of money, but how many things you don't even have to think about, because they are handled in your stead.

This is where I'd expect AI will change the world for consumers first: The tasks that now require either a lot of energy, or hiring an assistant or eight, becoming so cheap a good chunk of middle class will be able to afford it.

Nah I’ve met a fair number of mega-high wealth individuals. They would go so far as to pick a materially worse deal that allowed them to pay no taxes, over a higher payout that required some taxes paid. It is nuts.

> They would go so far as to pick a materially worse deal that allowed them to pay no taxes, over a higher payout that required some taxes paid.

I find that hard to believe.

I highly suspect that the "materially worse" deal you speak of is simply less liquid cash, but more retained wealth.

In this particular case that I had in mind when writing this comment, they were arguing for foregoing a tranch of money entirely because it would be taxed at income rates instead of long term capital gains, which would make their %age tax ratio go up, and massively increase the total tax paid.

They would have rather foregone that income entirely, then be forced to pay full income taxes on it. Of course they didn’t argue it this way, or else the idiocy would have been obvious even to them. They were arguing that plan B “results in less tax paid overall.”

That is what their metric was: which plan results in less taxes paid. Not which plan results in more take-home pay.

It's nuts that we treat LTCG and income differently. We should adjust LTCG for inflation and then charge the amortized taxes whenever folks realize gains.

"but then taxes would be too high!" yes, so we should also reduce income taxes when we do this.

Quit flogging the upper-middle class to pay for the technically unemployed rich.

It’s not nuts, it’s actually quite purposefully thought through. Profit gets taxed once at 15-20% in the form of corporate income tax, the taxed again at LTCG tax rates. The combined total is similar to the individual tax rate for high earners.

If you tax LTCG at income rates, then you will just start incentivizing other schemes to return profits to shareholders, which is going to be economically inefficient, harder to manage, lead to consolidated ownership structures, fewer liquidity events for small shareholders, greater inequality, and less prosperity.

Long term capital gains having lower tax rates isn’t feature, not a bug, for everyone not just wealth managers.

Take it a step further and just remove income tax and tax wealth at rest.

That would depend on your definition, but I think that's unlikely

Only taxing wealth "at rest" makes it avoidable for those who have the means to pay accountants to keep it moving in productive ways and thereby non-taxable. You then end up only taxing the people who can't afford that, which is the middle class.

If it's productive, it's contributing to society. If Alice's $100 goes to Bob's wages, which buys Charlie's shoeshine service, which pays for a week of TV dinners, I don't think those 100 dollars should be taxed more than David's 100 dollars that just sat in his bank account. But I do agree, we should prefer taxes that can't be avoided, LVT being the best option.

Given American anti tax sentiment, it isn’t surprising.

Plus there is a concerted effort to maintain the narrative that the government should be starved, because the government is the most wasteful body that can be.

Being rich isn’t just some sort of statistical metric - it’s also a clear cut option to have your principles and desires accommodated.

It’s not hard to believe.

To determine whether its 60-40 (tax avoidance - convenience optimization) would seem to be the question to pursue.

FWIW this person was Canadian.

Being wealthy unlocks the option to not be a rational actor with little or no real world consequences, enabling capricious urges and whim to be a significant factor in the decision making process. See: Elon musk.

I also think Elon has done great and important things for humanity, but to call him super- competent, ultra courageous, and heroic might be a pretty significant stretch.

He seems to me to be an analytical thinker with 1st percentile intelligence, who struggles with emotional intelligence and impulse moderation. Probably a pretty fun guy to hang out with, but also an asshole more often than he should be. Nobody is even nearly perfect, and hero worship tends towards the delusional in most cases, so I tend to steer clear of thinking too good or poorly of anyone.

As a poor person who doesn't fully own his own house but pays in taxes 60% of their income, and much of the rest in house loan interest and principal, I can see how that would play in my own case. If I were to come up onto a lump sum of money by, say, some creative endeavor of mine, and that money is going to be taxed at a 65% tax (such is the law in Sweden for income taxes), I might consider to do a number of things with that money that prevents that tax from being realized, including donating it to charities or investing it in hopeless enterprises. After all, if I can't enjoy the money myself, but I have a bit of agency over it, well the least I can do is enjoy that agency.

Sounds to me like Sweden is doing it right! If you want very extensive social programs you have to tax EVERYONE really really hard.

The fantassy that one can pay for wellfare by only taxing the rich more or by reducing their loopholes is a pipedream.

Or you could have a society with very low taxes and very low to none social programs, especially if your government doesn't love fighting expensive wars all the time.

Wars and wellfare programs are all very expensive. Even miserly wellfare programs like what the US got is creating some real debt default risk over there.

But would you just say “no thanks, I don’t want the money if it’s going to be taxed”? That’s what was going on here.

Maybe it's like the same irrational aversion that people have to shipping fees. Amazon effect for the rich?

I can confirm that I’ve seen the same.

I don’t think people have fully put together that the same personality type that was a slave owner prior to the 1900s is the same personality type of a venture founder, investor, venture, capitalist, banker, etc…

That is to say their goal in getting rich is to have a dictatorship, not necessarily simply to have a nice boat and a house and raise a family

The goal of the mega rich is the same as it always in history, which is to dominate enslave and basically shape the world to what they want it to look like without being intermediated by people with less power.

Further the more wealth people have, in my personal experience, the less they want to have any constraints by other organizations, specifically governments they disagree with.

If people haven’t, they should read about the “business plot”

> If people haven’t, they should read about the “business plot” This? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

Yes

I doubt that’s true. But, I’d be interested in an actual example, if you have one.

Rich folks tend to avoid taxation at all costs, since that tends to be one of the best ways to retain their wealth.

In democracies, the minority who own the bulk of wealth are lobbying to ensure they avoid paying taxes. That’s not cool.

Firstly - many developed countries have higher tax rates than America.

Secondly - the issue isn’t being rich. The issue is that tax avoidance for so many years has resulted in absurd levels of wealth capture.

Thirdly - no polity level discussion can happen effectively, because that wealth ensures productive discussion is mired in controversy by the time it reaches the voting public.

> Firstly - many developed countries have higher tax rates than America.

This is mostly not true. People are often confused into comparing US federal taxes to the totality of taxes in other countries, but US states levy taxes too. The total of state and federal taxes is often in excess of 50%, which is higher than the OECD average.

> The issue is that tax avoidance for so many years has resulted in absurd levels of wealth capture.

The primary cause of this is not tax avoidance, it's market concentration. If your company has 0.1% of the industry and is worth a billion dollars and you pay a 0% effective tax rate, you have a billion dollars. If your company has 50% of the industry and is worth $500 billion dollars and you pay a 70% effective tax rate, you still have $150 billion, i.e. 150 times as much. Also, effective tax rates have never actually been 70%.

> Thirdly - no polity level discussion can happen effectively, because that wealth ensures productive discussion is mired in controversy by the time it reaches the voting public.

The real problem is that the tax system is intentionally convoluted to conceal from the public who is paying what and where the money is going. This benefits the rich in many cases, but it mostly benefits Congress, who can lie to people about what's going on to get their votes even while screwing them in particular. This is not a partisan issue; both parties want more money and want it to go to their cronies, so neither of them wants to simplify the tax system into something sensible and harder to game, because it would interfere with the diversion of everyone's tax money to the politically connected.

>This is mostly not true.

I went to double check, and the best answer is that America collects less tax/GDP than its peers. Even accounting for state and federal taxation.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxe....

> Taxes on personal income and business profits made up 48 percent of total US tax revenue in 2021, a higher share than in most other OECD countries, where such taxes averaged 34 percent of the total (figure 2). Australia, Denmark, and New Zealand were the only OECD countries where over half of total revenue was generated from such taxes.

> In the United States, taxes on just the income and profits of individuals (not businesses) generated 42 percent of total tax revenue, compared with 27 percent for all other OECD countries combined.

So that clarification is warranted.

> Convoluted taxes

This … I mostly agree that simpler tax codes are beneficial, I am not sure its complexity is the core reason discussion is difficult.

Tax payment itself is made as painful as possible, so that it remains a focus of ire for citizens.

Hmm. I suppose in the spirit of simplicity, it would be ideal to have an automated tax generation form, and a simple tax code - making it easier for people to just pay their taxes and get on with their life.

And then have progressive taxes for people higher up the wealth ladder.

> Market concentration

Your point is that this is not the primary reasons for wealth disparity?

I dont know - we are well aware of the kind of steps firms take to avoid paying taxes, and instead move them to tax havens. The numbers indicate that firms tend to pay much lower taxes in America compared to their OECD peers.

Again - the point here is on “primary reasons” for wealth capture.

> I went to double check, and the best answer is that America collects less tax/GDP than its peers. Even accounting for state and federal taxation.

Again, this depends on the state, because all the states have different tax systems. You're also comparing by percent of GDP rather than something like tax dollars per capita, but that has two major problems. One, US GDP per capita is higher than the OECD average and so is the cost of living, so in the US the tax collected in real dollars per capita is higher and the percent of GDP that you could collect as tax without bankrupting ordinary people is lower.

And two (this is the big one), the US healthcare system represents 17% of US GDP and is mostly private insurance. In countries where the entire healthcare system is paid for out of taxes, tax rates are correspondingly higher, but in turn US citizens are paying in the form of insurance premiums. So to be comparing like with like you'd have to count those insurance premiums when comparing to countries that pay the premiums entirely out of taxes. Or to put it another way, you couldn't raise taxes in the US and spend the money on anything other than healthcare and regard that as equivalent.

> This … I mostly agree that simpler tax codes are beneficial, I am not sure its complexity is the core reason discussion is difficult.

It's the thing that enables tax avoidance.

There is a very simple way to do taxes: If a business sells a product or service in the US, they collect whatever the tax rate is and remit it, showing the customer what proportion of the purchase was tax so they can see how much they're paying. Let them advertise the pre-tax price; that should satisfy the people who want citizens to notice when they're paying taxes. The business can in turn deduct any tax paid on cost of goods sold from what they remit, like VAT.

Since this uses a single tax rate, there are no games to be played arbitraging the rate or fudging with transfer pricing, and you can get a progressive tax system by combining it with a UBI, which produces a progressive effective rate curve.

Then there's no practical way to avoid the tax. If you buy or sell something, the tax is remitted. When Apple sells an iPhone in the US they have to remit the tax regardless of where they made it or where their headquarters is or what country they stash the profit in. No more loopholes. No more pretending that the employer is paying half of FICA instead of it being a >15% regressive tax on the working class.

> Tax payment itself is made as painful as possible, so that it remains a focus of ire for citizens.

I feel like this is a talking point. Some tax reform guy says something like this and it's highly unsympathetic (Do you see? They want you to feel pain! On purpose!), so then the other side likes to point to it to deflect blame for the status quo onto their opponents. But that doesn't explain why FICA has an income cap, doesn't apply to investment income and hides half the amount being paid from the taxpayer. This is over $10,000/year in tax from the median household with half of it being hidden and all of it being collected transparently. If these "want you to feel it" people had the real power then that wouldn't be happening.

> And then have progressive taxes for people higher up the wealth ladder.

The naive legacy way we try to do progressive taxes is one of the avoidance mechanisms. People hire their kids or cousins who are in a lower tax bracket to move family business income to someone in a lower tax bracket etc. You can get the result you want from a system which is actually simpler.

We have a bunch of social programs like food stamps and housing assistance which have phase outs. The combined rates of the phase outs and ordinary taxes are higher than the effective rates imposed on the wealthy, whether now or historically. So convert the benefits to cash (UBI), eliminate the phase outs and use a flat tax system which effectively makes the phase outs implicit. The effective rates on lower income people are now low or negative. You at slightly below median income get a $12,000 UBI and "pay $10,000 in taxes" so really it's -$2000. A billionaire gets the same UBI but it doesn't make a dent in their tax burden so they're paying the full flat rate.

> I dont know - we are well aware of the kind of steps firms take to avoid paying taxes, and instead move them to tax havens. The numbers indicate that firms tend to pay much lower taxes in America compared to their OECD peers.

Companies avoid paying taxes because they can. The question is, is this the primary reason the companies are worth so much?

But it clearly isn't. Apple currently pays an effective tax rate of just under 16%, i.e. they keep 84%. If they paid three times that much (48%), they'd keep 52%. If we oversimplify and assume their valuation is proportional to how much profit they keep, this would reduce it from $3.5T to $2.2T. Which is still preposterous. A founder who owned a significant chunk of Apple would still have a million times more wealth than an ordinary person who owned the same proportion of a small business. Tripling their tax rate wouldn't even change the number of significant figures in their valuation -- because it's a percentage, so it's proportional to the base, which is the real thing out of all proportion.

Moreover, the company size is how they can pay executives such high salaries -- and those salaries are tax deductions to the corporation. A small business can't pay an individual employee tens of millions of dollars a year, they don't even have that much revenue. Concentration of wealth is caused by market concentration.

That sounds really, really cool to me. And it's an abuse of language to call it stealing.

It's not, it's literally what it is. Per default, accumulating wealth contains risks for the individual attempting to do so, and increasingly more and more of the wealth is stripped away while reducing none of the risk. Thats absolutely theft.

Fulfilling your obligation to a society that brought you riches, however much risk you took and however much hard work vs luck that was, is not theft. Fueling that society, so that it can persist for your well-being is your obligation as a citizen.

If you fully play out your argument, the least wealthy and least successful deserve it the most to have their remaining wealth taken because they are not assuming any risk in this society.

I think that is a very destructive world view.

> If you fully play out your argument, the least wealthy and least successful deserve it the most to have their remaining wealth taken because they are not assuming any risk in this society.

No, if you fully play out his argument then the least wealthy deserve not to have their wealth stolen. His argument is that theft is bad, it isn't a complex argument with unexpected implications.

Although it does seem a bit faulty regardless, the amount of risk someone is taking has no bearing on whether taking their stuff is theft.

The line of thinking we’re trying to get across to you here is best put like this I find; even if 99% of the village thinks it’s a good idea to march into the most productive individual’s house and rob it clean, it doesn’t become morally right to do so.

> 99% of the village thinks it’s a good idea to march into the most productive individual’s house and rob it clean

If this is what you believe raising taxes is like, I'm not surprised you're against it. But no wonder that you're struggling to get this point across, because it's outlandish in how far removed it is from what I perceive the instrument of taxation to be from concept to application to its morality... Forgive me for my own overblown comparison, but yours is a position I'd expect to hear in a comic from Scrooge McDuck.

Even if that individual moved into the village knowing perfectly well that this is the rule in this village?

It is not unreasonable to me that you have to pitch in for common goods if you live in a village, and should you refuse to take part in this you might find yourself in a situation where you have to either move out of the village or forfeit your share.

I don't think "you should just escape the oppression" is good advice per se. I think it's victim blaming, in today's terminology.

Flouting laws does not a victim make. A more suitable modern expression is probably "play stupid games, win stupid prizes".

I like Ayn Rand as much as the next HN consumer, but let’s be a bit more judicious in how we apply her ideals.

If you earned your wealth through driving on public roads, after receiving a public education, without it actually being blatantly stolen due to a public police force, etc etc etc.

Then it is also your responsibility to pay for these items so that they dan continue to be used for future generation.

If you're in eternal debt to the society you were fortunate or unfortunate enough to be born into since before you were lucid, when exactly is the cycle going to be broken?

Public roads can be taxed by use. Public education should be paid by people who participate.

You apply an "if" conditional here in a manner that's morally correct in my opinion. It's just that even if you didn't partake in those activities, you're forced to pay for them all the same. That's the issue.

You can move out of the country of course and find one that's more politically suitable, but the bottom line in my mind is that people in most societies are so different from each other that democracy just doesn't work at the scale it's trying to be applied. Sure, deciding what your society should collectively strive for at a neighborhood level might be possible. City level is reaching, and state or country level is ludicrous.

I think the only responsibility at the federal level should be watching the borders, and I can't convince myself otherwise no matter what material I read.

> If you're in eternal debt to the society you were fortunate or unfortunate enough to be born into since before you were lucid, when exactly is the cycle going to be broken?

Never. No human being has ever thrived in total isolation, and no one’s accomplishments are solely their own. You may not like it, but you are unavoidably part of a society (even if you move into the wilderness and never interact with another person again, you were still raised in one). You wouldn’t have been able to gather whatever resources you’ve managed to amass without that society, and in return it requires you to share the burden of helping everyone else thrive as well.

Theft is illegally taking something. Taxes are part of the legal system. Literally not theft.

Ethically is it right to increase the risk to accumulate wealth? That depends on what you buy with that risk. It’s well-established that people will take risks for fun, and they’ll take significantly more risk when security for themselves and their family is on the line.

Folks with hundreds of millions or billions in assets or millions in income have vastly higher levels of security compared to folks with $100 in the bank and a $15/hr job with no benefits.

So, how much is it ethical to take from the rich to ensure that the poor have decent odds to improve their situation and have a basic level of security? In America, it’s been as much as 60% in income taxes for the highly-paid. A wealth tax of 40% upon death still exists, even if the rich have found a way around that. It sounds like America has already established that 40% taxed to the benefit of all is ethically okay.

So we should probably be killing the buy, borrow, die strategy of tax avoidance, especially on transfer taxes should be collected. But could we take more from the wealthiest and have that be ethically okay?

Let’s say we have someone with $300M in assets and those appreciate 8% annually on average. Those assets will be worth $600M in 10 years. Assuming a spend of $10M per year, they’d still be worth $400M by the end of 10 years. So we’ve had at least $100M generated compared to where we started just for existing and living a lavish life. But we could have taxed that $100M at 40% and put 40M into public services, infrastructure, or entrepreneurial grants to provide tens of thousands of people with more security without materially affecting our asset-owning individual. Even just distributing $40M to supplement incomes for low-security folks would translate to 2500+ people getting a chance to improve their situations.

So, is it ethical to tax the excess asset appreciation that the individual didn’t use for anything? It’s not that it didn’t grow, it’s that it grew a little less fast. And we were able to impact thousands based on that. I’d argue yes, and I struggle to understand how “make life no different for the individual vs make life better for thousands of people” comes down on the side of the individual. It’s not until taxes grow higher than appreciation that I start to think it might be unethical.

But as you approach taxes equaling appreciation, I can see how it could be counterproductive. I think that’s not the argument though. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to tax assets based on appreciation above their highest appraisal, with appraisal triggering taxes being owed. Certainly no more complicated than our current taxes assets and the loopholes that lead to buy, borrow, die.

Theft/stealing is a concept that predates the idea of law and legal systems. The very first legal system talk about “stealing” and punishment for thieves without having to define the word.

I disagree with the guy upthread, but it’s a bit dense to say that taxes being theft is oxymoronic when you clearly understand what he meant.

The irony of claiming that "taxation is LITERALLY theft" is literally the ONLY serious position.

Reality doesn't care about your feelings.

> In democracies, the massive bulk of people are voting to steal the money of the rich. That’s not cool.

Lol, yes, steal. Hi Elon!

They’re also voting for the policies that enable safe wealth accumulation and preservation, so “steal” seems like the wrong word—though there may well be some wealthy people who feel stolen from inasmuchas they’d rather live in a less secure society where they could try to be the winning warlord. Most capitalists see the value of a stable consumer class, though, backed up by a legal system and economic policy that injects money to prevent the collapse of their income-drivers.

The longer people will call it communist plot and insist on not paying taxes, the higher is the probability of having the actual communist plot and being exiled to the Moon by a popular vote.

It’s a shame it seems to come to that about once every hundred years. We’ve won the war against the communists before though, and we’ll do it again.

Maybe if we don't strip poor people of any chance of getting out of poverty they won't turn to communism. If you chase an animal in the corner, it will fight back. You can shoot it and win but don't be surprised if the situation repeats.

The problem is that communism (as it is practiced) forces everyone into poverty, except for the tiny fraction of the population who comprise the elite of the politburo.

Yes, communism is horrible, I totally agree. What I am alluding to is that some form of social democracy can bring long term stability, thus minimizing the risk of people radicalizing.

Why does this puzzle you? It seems like completely expected behavior to me. Most people try to minimize taxes. Who do you know that gladly pays more than they legally have to pay?

More then possible legal minimum for them? Approximately everyone - finding ways to minimize your taxes carries opportunity cost that may as well be bigger than the savings, though again, most people will evaluate this in terms of frustration and risk of getting it wrong. The exception are people who can outsource this to professionals - doing that is very low in terms of opportunity cost, frustration and risk, but it's an option available to the few.

So perhaps that's why wealthy people seem so tax-averse - they may be as averse as everyone, but for them the aversion is much cheaper and easier to do.

(This reflects a more general principle I summarize as: the only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men are separated from it by enough layers of abstraction.)

At some point in my life I took a step back to look at my life and how I’m doing and how much I pay for that life. Maybe I’m just incredibly lucky.

My conservative expectation is that we all have to start contributing a lot more over the next few decades if we want to maintain our standard of living, otherwise it will just gradually get worse. I hope I’m wrong.

What would the government spend the additional tax revenue on, in your conservative expection?

Healthcare, school lunches, diversion programs, research grants

(conts) infrastructure upkeep, managing various natural resources, emergency management, weather reporting/forecasting/research, economic reporting/research...

There are so many valuable services provided by the US federal government. People just take it all for granted.

I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things. I would be much happier to pay taxes if they went to funding schools, infrastructure, NASA, emergency management, poverty relief and other useful things instead of putting undocumented immigrants who could be productive members of society in concentration camps or bombing brown people. Furthermore, I am happy to fund particular defense initiatives like supporting Ukraine, but I want a line item veto on unproductive or morally repugnant things the government does.

I’ve gotten to see some of that at a local level and… I just don’t know. We barely managed to pass a local school levy to recoup from a major accounting error that would have meant massive layoffs for the district. It’s a pretty good district academically, and I was shocked at how many empty nesters (new ones, too) were vocal about voting no just because “no new taxes“, despite all of their kids consuming that very system with great benefit for the past 18 years.

A few counties away, the library district said without a tax increase, they’ll have to shut down. “No new taxes” carried the day. Library shut down. Now folks are howling. And again it’s the non-voting kids that suffer.

If this is the behavior of folks about issues affecting their neighbors, in their own town, I’m not too optimistic what sort of support we could see for any kind of longer-term issue, especially if it isn’t atop the media cycle.

The way I (not the previous poster) envision this working is not that you can opt out of taxes, but you can skip certain items.

So I don't pay Israel's defense budget, but that money is reallocated evenly to everything else.

I find it hard to believe a meaningful number of people would opt out of libraries and schools assuming their overall tax burden is unchanged.

This sounds like a good way to accidentally create an industry of reverse lobbyists where the government contracts them to convince tax payers to allocate money to their department.

I might be too pessimistic though, I tend towards liking the idea but I'm concerned about the changes it could cause.

That already happens. Why else would Northrop advertise a stealth jet at the superbowl.

if they vote against a tax levy for a school they will most definitely vote to send the money elsewhere.

Empty nesters or childless people will funnel their tax money to things like parks, fire trucks, and other things.

Hypothecated taxes are an anti-pattern, for precisely this reason. Setting the budget and setting the taxes should be somewhat separated (but not too separated!)

> I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things.

Obviously, this was supposed to be the job of the person you elected.

But in 2024 we definitely have the technology to let people vote on smaller units of issues that they care about.

I would be completely in support of people self-allocating their taxes as long as (1) the distribution still had to add up to 100% so you can’t under contribute and (2) government offices capped their income and redistributed excess to the general funds instead of letting some feel-good departments waste money they didn’t need but were allocated.

The caps must be high enough that departments are in competition for funds. Presumably the outcome is then that the department for fluffy bunnies is funded up to its cap, taking money away from the department for unblocking drains.

> I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things.

Members of Congress often propose things like this because it sounds good but in practice it's meaningless.

Suppose that Democrats don't want to pay for bombs and Republicans don't want to pay for makework jobs, so they both say they don't want their tax money to be used for this. Then the government takes the money from Democrats they didn't spend on bombs and uses it to make up the shortfall in the makework jobs programs and takes the money Republicans didn't spend on makework jobs and uses it to make up the shortfall in the military, and nothing changes at all.

The only way it could actually do something is if you got the money back you didn't want spent on that thing, instead of letting the government spend it on something else. But then most people would do that with large chunks of government spending because they'd rather the money than the programs.

That always sounds nice until you see how it plays out in universities and other charities. The directed donations don't get sent to where they are most needed; they end up funding large vanity projects.

The US already spends more on healthcare than just about every other country and the inefficiency of that spending is an obvious problem that should probably be addressed before throwing any more money into the fire. But if it was addressed then the amount of spending needed would go down rather than up.

That other stuff doesn't even cost a significant amount of money by comparison and could be well-funded from the savings.

The government doesn't lack for revenue, it lacks for efficiency.

Our healthcare is horribly wasteful and inefficient. But since the US government isn't in charge of it for most people, you can't blame them here. Our ultra-capitalist healthcare "system" achieved this spectacular waste all by itself.

The US does not have an "ultra-capitalist" healthcare system. Its healthcare system is heavily regulated and subsidized and many of those regulations are bought and paid for by the incumbents to prevent competition, i.e. the thing that allows private systems to be efficient. You can't just call something "capitalism" while regulating it into market concentration and expect that to work.

You're making a "no true Scotsman" argument. This is, in fact, how capitalism works whenever you fail to regulate it. Rent-seeking and regulatory capture is a feature, not a bug.

Climate crisis alone will make maintaining our infrastructure much more expensive in a lot of places.

Pretty matter-of-fact tone for a subject of complete mystery to us.

Sandberms, floodgates, concrete disease.

Please note - this is a more modern belief. Something that solidified in the zeitgeist post 2008.

If you go to early Reddit, you will see it a staunchly pro market, anti tax stronghold - as was HN.

For eons, “competition” was the mantra along with “greed is good”. Many people who own wealth reached there with that ethos.

No one has to “contribute more”. That’s the opportunity for whichever bright eye person decides to take advantage of the gap in the market.

If you want a counter to this dogma -

1) Yes. Market inefficiencies should be open as opportunities to the industrious

2) No. Not all market inefficiencies are the same. for example, Public goods (police, military) are not better off with multiple companies. Insurance is similar.

3) Lobbying for convenient rules, lobbying for weakened regulators has given far more advantage to firms, which then use that wealth to become rent seekers. They dont need to innovate, because they can litigate.

4) “more regulation means higher compliance costs” was a new one I saw. Guess what - if your firm uses contracts, that’s a compliance cost. Why not just do it by a hand shake? Save your lawyer fees.

Compliance costs ensure fair play between entities of unequal strength. You can trade on your competitive advantage, not on the tertiary strengths, such as a firms ability to pay for a better legal team.

Edit: Soap box - This is about Personal Responsibility.

The place where most people agree today, is the desire for a fair fight.

How can I reasonably defend the idea of personal responsibility, in something like the sale of NINJA loans.

If firms field trained, resourced, networked sales people to sell loans to people who have a negligible chance of even understanding what they are getting into, then how do I reasonably bring up personal responsibility ?

Can people reasonably be expected to read all the contracts they have signed? ( Netflix, Uber, gmail, phone, etc.)

Algorithmic ads are fine tuned to grab your attention and keep you online. There is more money spent on UI UX research than the GDP of some global south countries.

Forget America for a second - imagine how regulators in smaller economies handle these things. Heck, that’s if they even have time to worry about these things.

> Lobbying for convenient rules, lobbying for weakened regulators has given far more advantage to firms, which then use that wealth to become rent seekers. They dont need to innovate, because they can litigate.

One of the big problems here, and the lobbyists do this on purpose, is that they promote the false notion that the issue is the quantity of regulations and not their substance. Quantity can be an issue when the number of regulations becomes excessive and their sheer number thwarts competition by creating high barriers to entry, but "incumbents want fewer regulations" is not only misleading but typically the opposite of what really happens.

Incumbents want to get rid of regulations that protect competition and add regulations that inhibit it. What we need, of course, is the opposite. Which isn't as simple as "make number of regulations go up/down", it matters very much which ones and what they do.

> Compliance costs ensure fair play between entities of unequal strength.

This is completely the opposite. Compliance costs are generally fixed costs, i.e. every entity has to hire a lawyer and pay them $250,000. For a megacorp this is negligible and they don't even notice, for a small business they're now out of the market because that amount of expense would bankrupt them. The more rules you have, the higher that number gets. This is the sense in which the absolute number of rules matters.

But it still depends what they are. Even if you only have a couple of rules, the incumbents will want rules that only they can comply with. Conversely, you can hypothetically have a lot of rules and still have them easy to comply with, though this is certainly easier said than done. What you really want is to have a small number of rules, but the right rules -- the ones the incumbents don't want and their smaller competitors do.

> “incumbents want fewer regulations”

Just to be clear, you are quoting typical lobbyist talking points here? I definitely disagree with such a simplification.

I agree with the fact that incumbents want to make it easier to make money.

> This is completely the opposite …

Yes, I am in firm agreement that the content, quality and enforceability of the regulation matters.

That said, I used contracts as an example, specifically to combat this common reduction: “Compliance cost price smaller businesses out of the market, so they are bad for competition and the little guy.”

Writing up a contract is more expensive than trusting someone’s word, it is fair to say that having no contracts would enable more small businesses to flourish (lower costs).

Many things reduce costs, however firms / businesses having to bear compliance costs is not bad for the polity.

> Writing up a contract is more expensive than trusting someone’s word, it is fair to say that having no contracts would enable more small businesses to flourish (lower costs).

But now we're back to "what the regulation is matters more than how many there are". There can exist rules that benefit small companies, obviously. But if the rules every company has to comply with can fill three shelves at the library, this is not going to benefit small companies because they will be unable to operate.

> Many things reduce costs, however firms / businesses having to bear compliance costs is not bad for the polity.

It depends what they are.

One of most insidious is regulations that are ostensibly neutral, i.e. there is a societal benefit of approximately $100 per company on average and to get it the rule is going to impose costs of approximately $100 on the average company. The books are full of these because they provide some ostensible benefit and the cost isn't even being calculated. Nobody fights against them too hard because they're approximately breakeven.

Except that each of them adds $100 in compliance costs to every company, and there are ten thousand of them, so now every company in that industry has a million dollars in compliance costs, which small companies can't sustain. So the rules on their own provide neither benefit nor cost to society, but impair competition, and that has a societal cost.

> we're back to "what the regulation is matters more than how many there are

you and me are back to this.

Most arguments dont get this far, unless these answers are first furnished. Which was the spirit and intent of my parent comment.

And I agree, good regulation is better than absurd regulation.

> ostensibly neutral… small companies can’t sustain

Sure.

> otherwise it will just gradually get worse.

The austerity policies of the neoliberal turn has already caused standards of living among the less fortunate to drop over the last few decades already. The 2008 crisis is when it started to impact the middle class and we're still feeling the impacts 16+ years later.

Now factor in the effects of climate change on many communities over the next decades. Maintaining our infrastructure i.e. lifestyle is going to be much much more expensive.

Minor correction: maintaining the lifestyle of billionaire coastal developers and their clientele will be much much more expensive. The poors will continue to be encouraged to eat shit and die as per usual.

The cute thing there being they outnumber the big fish by something like 400,000 to 1 in the US and without them there is literally no economy and no billionaire class.

Your take is as profound as claiming there’s no life without oxygen, but it serves very little actual utility in observing the world.

There has been no austerity: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

I'm not saying you're wrong, but that graph doesn't show anything with regards to whether or not middle-class folks have been hit with austerity.

Federal outlays are not granular enough and increasing Federal outlays is pretty meaningless.

Austerity in the context of government means spending cuts. "We diverted the tax money to cronies instead of anything that benefits you and spending actually went up" is not austerity, it's corruption.

Austerity for thee, but not for me.

Do you really think the explosion in government spending is the result of austerity?

Guess it's easy to talk this way as someone who isn't that rich, but if I'm at the point where I have 8 figures accessible, or 7 figures liquid and own all the important assets (house, car, kids' college funds in 523, etc), I don't particularly care what part of my income is being taxed past that point.

My goal isn't to make money for money's sake. Nor even leaving oodles of money to my kids. I'd metaphorically just spend my days strumming a guitar for the rest of my days. The economy is just a distraction from what I really care about.

> Guess it's easy to talk this way as someone who isn't that rich, but if I'm at the point where I have 8 figures accessible, or 7 figures liquid and own all the important assets (house, car, kids' college funds in 523, etc), I don't particularly care what part of my income is being taxed past that point.

The issue here is that it depends what you're trying to do. If you have eight figures then you have all the housing and vehicles you need and more money is not going to make a big difference in that regard.

But that's not what people use it for at that point. Mostly what money past that is used for is business. You own a company and you want to get into the auto industry? You're going to need to pay designers to design the cars well before you make any revenue, and then you're going to need factories and raw materials etc. Suddenly a million bucks is chump change and if you want to make it work you need a lot more.

People always talk like this from the outside and yet when placed in the actual situation essentially everyone acts differently. "If I were in battle I wouldn't be scared" vs in actual battle essentially every soldier is scared. "If I were rich then I wouldn't worry about taxes" vs after becoming rich, essentially everyone worries about taxes.

Is there a word for this phenomenon? What makes everyone believe they're a special case?

>"If I were rich then I wouldn't worry about taxes" vs after becoming rich, essentially everyone worries about taxes.

Consider that the type of people who are more inclined to accumulate wealth are the ones faced with this choice.

The people who'd rather strum guitars don't often find themselves in that position. So your observation is painfully anecdotal and not really useful.

The point is that if people get +5 utils from earning something, they get -6 utils if that things is taken away. People resent losses more than they enjoy wins.

What makes you believe that “after becoming rich, essentially everyone worries about taxes”?

Yeah, probably. That's why I left a footnote.

I have some "relative" taste of it in that I'm a lot better off than the past 3 generations of my family minimum. But I was still far from what I consider "wealthy" even within the tech community, let alone to the country at large. I didn't feel it fundamentally changed how I approached finances outside of being more willing to splurge on some tech (something I've always wanted to do) after I put away 20% for savings.

But that's only one magnitude. Who knows, money corrupts for a reason.

People who acquire money simply reset the goalposts.

ESPN recently did a movie on what happened to poor people who suddenly became multi-millionaires when they joined a pro sports team.

TLDR: they quickly spent it all and wound up with nothing. It turns out to be amazingly easy to burn through a million dollars.

I can't refute that. while I arguably (by my family line's standard) came into "life changing money" I also did have a bunch of upbringing from family, education, and second hand experience to take steps to avoid that. But I agree that words are cheap, and 6 to 7 figures is yet another magnitude of life changing.

On a similar note, I do understand the peer pressure that comes with being on a team like that. "tradition" where you buy your entire team dinner for a night on the order of high 5 figures as a start. I can start to sympathize with how that spirals when the environment itself pressures you. More reason to make a financial planning class mandatory in school. Won't save everyone, but it'll at least bring awareness.

I've often thought that public schools need to have a course in basic financial accounting. It isn't very hard, and is just adding and subtracting.

After all, we live in a market society, shouldn't students be at least able to read a simple P&L statement and balance sheet?

I always wanted to start a business, so on summer break I took a course in basic accounting from the local community college, and it has served me very well ever since.

Will Smith is another cautionary tale. As a teen, he made it big with his Fresh Prince rap songs. He blew all the money on partying. Then the IRS came knocking. It had never occurred to him he had to pay income tax on his millions, which no longer existed. He made a deal with the IRS. On his show "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air", all his earnings other than an allowance went to the IRS.

It’s more than tax minimization. It’s buying politicians and distorting society so they pay less.

> It’s buying politicians and distorting society so they pay less.

If you had the time and resources, wouldn't you try to affect change in government? It's not fundamentally any different than showing up to your city council meeting to get housing developments approved/blocked, for instance. Moreover, most people don't think of themselves as bad people, so they probably legitimately think they're doing the Right Thing™, rather than being some sort of cartoonishly evil villain trying to ruin society by starving government of funding.

> If you had the time and resources, wouldn't you try to affect change in government?

This is going to be hard for the politically inclined to understand, but no, it's simply not the case that everyone everywhere is preoccupied with finding/creating legal ways to push their will/preferences onto other people.

That choice does come with the consequence of having to abide by the agendas of people who are trying to push their will onto other people though.

It's only a viable option if you trust your political system to function when your back is turned.

If we're assuming the kind of time/resources that it requires to affect political change, then no, you don't really have to abide by anything.

You can either opt out, or you can wade into a corrupt system and start finally enjoying your ability to join in on all the corruption. In the 2nd case, what's the plan moving forward for an ethical actor really? Using money to bribe politicians into stop accepting bribes? Should we bribe citizens to stop electing politicians that accept bribes? If you don't want money involved in politics then I don't know how you start to fix that with money.

This is going to be hard for the ideologically blind to understand, but not every rich person everywhere keeps politicians in their back pockets. Some don't even have their own PAC!

I'm not making any comment on whether rich people are more or less likely to be politically inclined than average people, draw your own conclusions.

I'm also not sure who you're suggesting is ideologically blind. All I'm saying is that given resources like a huge pile of money, many would not wish to use that money to coerce others or otherwise change their local political situation to better suit them. Instead they'd use those resources to increase their own resilience, i.e. simply choosing to leave the neighborhood or situation that was bothering them instead of trying to change it and assuming their own interests are the best and most appropriate ones for everyone.

As the parent is pointing out, everyone thinks they are doing TheRightThing(tm) when they collect/use power to force their views on others. Instead you could have power/wealth and just choose to not fuck with other people. That's not being ideologically blind, it's just an ideology that says, you know what, even my strongly held opinions could be wrongheaded, and maybe I shouldn't be using my arbitrarily acquired wealth/power to steer anything besides my own life.

If only corporations weren't (technically) people, or at least stayed in their lane instead of capturing regulators and buying politicians.

> If you had the time and resources, wouldn't you try to affect change in government?

Not for my own benefit, no. Just like I don't base my votes in elections particularly on my own benefit, and never have.

whether you intentionally or accidentally put a kink in my garden hose the end result is I can't water my lawn until the kink's out.

Definitely not.

Me? No. My goals are fairly simple. Rent is just a distraction from that goal.

How the proposed schema distorts the society? Sure, the federal government will have a little less money, but they still have trillions and are not exactly frugal with it. Between two worlds, one having that tax loophole and one not having it, I can't identify any societal difference that could be attributable to that loophole. Can you name one?

> Most people try to minimize taxes

No, most people don't care about their tax the way wealthy people do. I ended up in a wealthy family through marriage and I can tell you nobody I my original social circle spent even a fraction of the effort the wealthy do when it comes to taxes.

Mostly because there's really no way for them to. When I was young and poor, I didn't have much way to pay less taxes (not that I paid that much - but if I wanted to pay less, I couldn't) - I just had my salary, and whatever is deducted from it was it, I had no realistic way to change it. Even such things as charity donations wouldn't change it because to get out of standard deductions etc. I'd have to donate way more than I could afford.

When I got a bit more money, mortgage, stock options, investments, etc. then I started to have options - do I pay this way or that way? Do I invest in this account or that account? Does HDHP/HSA make sense for me or not? Should I sell the certain investment to harvest the tax loss or keep it? Etc. etc. then my asset structure is more varied, so are the opportunities to pay more or less tax. I imagine for really wealthy people (definitely not me, still) there are even more options how to pay less taxes, and they are doing right serious considering them (or paying people to seriously consider them) - if I ever get rich, that's what I'd do.

Right but why go so far? Until you become like Buffett, surprised to pay less than ones secretary.

> surprised to pay less than ones secretary.

I don't think this is actually true. It's a nice rhetorical soundbite, but if you count properly (e.g. all taxes all assets owned by Buffett actually pay) there's no way he pays less unless his secretary is extremely exceptional for some reason. It is true that her tax structure is probably different from Buffett's, so if you creatively form your query so that taxes that Buffett predominantly pays are excluded and taxes that the secretary predominantly pays are included, you could probably find a way to justify it, but that would not be a valuable insight.

And of course the whole "pays less", as formulated, is a bit deceptive - his rate of one of the taxes is lower as a percentage, but he actually pays vastly more in actual money (Berkshire Hathaway alone, in which he holds a substantial share, pays billions in taxes every year).

I don't think the quote is meant in absolute dollars, but rather the percentage of her income and assets.

If you only count one specific tax among dozens, maybe. But again, that's just a pointless soundbite, which completely dissolves under a proper inquiry.

Generally, tax planning & preparation is going to be far more complicated for wealthy individuals, especially business owners with diverse investments.

What you see as "minimizing taxes" could be a necessary responsibility. If you're on the outside looking in, you may be uninformed about their circumstances and responsibilities. Its definitely a 1% of the 1st world problem, but its still a responsibility that has to be managed; Unless you're familiar their THEIR circumstances, its easy to incorrectly assume motivations.

Be glad you live in a country where you have this problem to complain about.

That's probably because your original social circle largely already had the government minimize their taxes for them, in the form of a standard deduction that exceeds what they could hope for with an itemized deduction.

In that regard, most people minimize their taxes by doing nothing. The wealthy have to put effort in to get the same effect.

Not quite - even among those people who take the standard deduction, contributing to a tax advantaged account would reduce taxes for most of them. And a significant proportion of low income people don’t even file a tax return, so by doing nothing they literally give away money.

https://dailyyonder.com/low-income-families-risk-losing-thou...

Did it ever occur to you that perhaps that could be part of why they are in fact wealthy?

It may be a horshoe (the poor need to manage every peeny, the hyper rich distort society to minmax their riches), but the American Dream died decades ago. You can't just follow some financial wellness workshop to "save money" when you can't barely pay rent as is. Hard works correlation with wealth has decreased dramatically, very quickly

> Is it not entirely logical that a cohort that actually pays attention to where 20%, 30%, 40% of their money is going ends up wealthier than one that doesn't?

Many if not most rich never got rich, they happened to be born rich. In the situation I'm talking about, the said family has been wealthy for two centuries. And my in-laws are significantly less well-off than the generation before. Their ancestors may have been gifted in some way that got them rich in the first place, but there have definitely be some regression to average since then and their management of their wealth has been much less efficient than the one of my parents for instance (who aren't wealthy today, but are still clearly better than their own parents).

In fact I suspect that these people are obsessed about taxes because they know their fortune is ever going downhill because they lack the thing that made their ancestors successful so they spend their efforts trying to salvage their wealth instead of making one of their own.

It seems that you agree that they are wealthier than they would otherwise be because they try to minimise taxes.

The rest of your comment seems to be a political commentary on whether inheritance is legitimate. You're entitled to your opinion, but it comes across a bit like sour grapes to me.

> It seems that you agree that they are wealthier than they would otherwise be because they try to minimise taxes.

I've written the opposite actually. They would be much better off if they tried doing something else with their time rather than spending it avoiding taxes. The amount of effort (and money actually, tax attorney aren't cheap) would be much better invested elsewhere.

Edit, a fun fact I thought about: they are donating to charity so that 66% of the donation could be deduced from taxes. And yes, their main motivation is tax exemption not the charity cause (which is a nice side effect). Which means they are willing to pay a 50% premium to give money to somebody else than the state. Now talk about rationality and how it makes them richer.

> Most people try to minimize taxes.

I don’t think this is true. Most people pay more in taxes, and receive the pleasure of a refund check come April.

I think "minimize taxes" is short for "minimize tax liability" and refunds due to overpayment have absolutely nothing to do with that once you've paid enough to avoid penalties and interest (which is only ~90% of your liability).

My point is they’re not doing any sort of planning to minimize their liability. They’re not doing sound tax planning of any sort.

Ah, ok. It sounded like one or the other (i.e., people who inflate their refund aren't planning well) but personally I find that adding withholding at an amount that often leads to an inflated refund is a good low-effort way of minimizing risk of underpayment penalties (and it eliminates the need to think about estimated payments) for those good years where substantial gains unexpectedly occur. Of course it's like giving a free loan, which isn't great, but it's miniscule relative to the time I get back by thinking less. And I definitely minimize my liability -- loss harvesting, avoid short term gains, etc. -- so I am squarely in both camps.

A tax that is refunded isn't really a tax liability, it's an asset making 0% gain or interest, and will be converted to a cash asset within a 18 months or less.

Regardless, most people don't like tax, and there's not much they can do about it if they are W-2 wage earners short of opening a side business or maxing out retirement investments (which isn't helpful to someone trying to buy a house before they are 65).

Even these people try to minimize their taxes so the refund is larger.

By doing what? Letting their tax preparer select the EITC? Calling that a “Try” is stretching it.

Contributing to an IRA or HSA.

Most people do not do those things.

And if they do, they’re likely not doing it with tax reasons in mind.

I think this is an argument against how taxes are organized, at least in the US

Rather than add a bunch of subsidies in the form of tax breaks, the government could just spend money on programs that accomplish the aim they want. By making this complicated system whereby subsidies are accomplished by negating taxes you would otherwise owe, this means these benefits are more likely to help people who are otherwise going to be paying more taxes, and the fact that these require legwork to opt into without being at risk of the government thinking you're defrauding them, it seems kind of inevitable that it would devolve into a subsidy mostly for wealthier people who are good at navigating the bureaucracy of it, or rather, who can pay someone in what has become a cottage industry of tax (evasion) specialists who ply the trade of doing so in service of people who can afford them

Like, yeah, given that the game is set up this way, the obvious objective of it from the standpoint of any taxpayer engaging with it is to pay as little as possible. But if the aim of the tax breaks are something besides creating said incentive (and the industry around it), it seems like bad mechanism design to have it work this way in the first place

I don't know if that's really true. The government tends to be inefficient, and I sometimes wonder if having more tax money available just allows them to be even more inefficient.

The rule of Bureaucracy: grow to absorb all available resources

Ah yes, Parkinson's Law.

  (defun parkinsons-law (k m p n)
    (/ (+ (* 2 (expt k m))
          p)
       n))
 
  Where:
  The retval is the number of new employees to be hired annually
  k is the number of employees who want to be promoted by hiring new employees
  m is the number of working hours per person for the preparation of internal memoranda (micropolitics)
  p is the difference between the age at hiring and the age at retirement
  n is the number of administrative files actually completed

The rule of Capitalism?

The rule of monopoly?

The rule of feudalism?

Greed isn't exclusive to to systems of government.

You're just listing different kinds of bureaucracies. The principal difference with capitalism is that there isn't supposed to be any constraint on everyone trying to do it, and then competition prevents any one entity from absorbing all the resources.

This, of course, doesn't work if the incumbents capture the government and pass regulations that constrain the competition which is supposed to be keeping them in check.

Indeed, so capitalism in its purest, unbridled form has the same flaw: it becomes all consuming. Hence the need for regulation, another form of bureaucracy.

The question is how to constrain that bureaucracy to upholding competition without allowing it to be captured by private interests or, itself, expand to consume excessive resources.

If everyone thought this way the government would be bankrupt.

or $35T due.

"Bankrupt" doesn't makes sense as a concept when when you can print the currency of your debt

The government is already bankrupt and has been for years, you haven't been paying attention as it seems. It's called "deficit budget", and not only they do it every single year, they regularly raise the ceiling they set for themselves of how much debt they are willing to take. They dug a $35T hole and they keep digging, faster every year.

It is extremely disingenuous to put this conundrum at my feet, as if my actions, with my puny tax which I am too lazy to even calculate how much it would be in percents, but it's sure to have quite a bunch of zeros in front, had even the tiniest influence on those decisions. It never did and never will. Maybe Buffett's decisions may, but not mine. So stop trying to shame me for things that have nothing to do with me and never could have anything to do with me.

I feel like if I were a billionaire or even a multi millionaire, I'd have better things to spend my time doing than worrying about taxes.

I assume they don't do the work themselves, they pay a tax expert. If I was a rich businessman I wouldn't want to spend any more time than necessary thinking about taxes

You wouldn't spend any time. You would pay a CPA $300K per year to save you millions in tax liability and never even think about it.

Or decades ago you'd face a 70-90% tax rate, stop fighting it, and be happy with an upper middle-class life. Unless you're a certain washed up actor turned governor.

Plus complaining about "billions of taxes" (absolute, big and scary sounding numbers) and never mentioning the actual tax rate as a percentage of their gains (probably in the low single digits).

It’s unfortunate that your thinking has been reduced to this by democratic rhetoric. No, the country isn’t “the rich paying their fair share” away from thriving, here or anywhere else in the world.

I don't think it's that unfathomable when you look at how governments spend the money. E.g. a public Czech university spent 80k euros to change their logo from this:

https://cdn.xsd.cz/resize/21404adf37a83977870fe87fe0eb4ea6_r...

to this:

https://www.em.muni.cz/cache-thumbs/logo_muni_web-1580x790-2...

Why does a public university, one of the most popular in the country, need a new logo? And if it needs a new logo, why don't they assign it as a project to the students of arts/marketing faculty?

80K euro might sound like a lot until you realise it is around the combined annual salary for two mid-level employees in Western Europe, and for about a team of four to five in Eastern Europe.

To ask a team of designers to do brand and marketing research and design a new logo for a big organisation that will use said logo everywhere is not a 1K euro freelancer job.

To be fair, the new logo is a bit crap, but in the grand scheme of things, 80K is not a lot at all.

You assume that the salary is what it costs for the company to have an employee. You need to at least double that.

There is overhead for the person itself (employer subsidized healthcare, office space, equipment) and there is overhead within the organization. Like a secretary and accounting departments who cannot be billed to a client. And management layers of course…

Most likely the 80k are enough to cover one person-year for a consulting agency in Eastern Europe.

That said, the new logo is atrocious.

Oh without a doubt I was underestimating how much a single employee costs a company (and therefore their clients too).

But I believe my point stands regardless—80K is very little money indeed from a group perspective.

Universities, cities, regions and countries do have PR departments.

Arguably the public image of a university is its most important asset. Because that attracts the best students, researchers and third party funding (public and private).

We rest easy knowing the wealthy are using their money more wisely: https://sfstandard.com/2024/08/18/zuckerberg-sculpture-prisc...

I personally despise it, but at least it's a cute gesture of love (I hope...) for a billionaire living in SF. Probably one of the more human gestures from Zuck.

80k Euros is not even a rounding error in the budget of the Czech government. The last thing you want is them micromanaging that kind of decision because it would end up costing a lot more and make everyone's life terrible.

>why don't they assign it as a project to the students

Damn straight, and they should do the same thing with their website. And while we are at it, they could use the students to design and engineer their buildings and do their accounting and lawyering and administration.

Hell, while we are at it, why not get them to do the teaching as well?

> Hell, while we are at it, why not get them to do the teaching as well?

They already do. They’re called TAs and grad students.

Two wrongs don't make a right

There may be problems in the implementation details depending on the university, but the general idea of TAs is a good one, for two primary reasons.

One, in many fields, the more advanced you are, the harder it becomes to remember or even understand why or how one may struggle with understanding the basic material of the field. TAs are still closer to the experience of having learned the basics themselves.

Two, teaching material is a great way to deepen one's understanding of the material.

It also happens to provide a nice balance of giving students a way to earn some money while working in the subject, while still being quite cheap for the university. (That last part does have a smell especially in US universities with their insanely high tuition fees. But that feels like a larger and largely separate issue.)

I'm not sure if you've ever seen how much it costs a corporation of the same size to change logos, but you'll see similar expenses

And frequently equally bad results, such as picking a logo almost exactly the same as another company in the same sector. For instance, the NBC TV network in 1975 hired consultants to make a logo almost exactly the same as Nebraska Educational Television:

http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2011/09/one-of-nbcs-great-blun...

I worked as a webdev for the Cornell University Library (more than 70 web sites) at the time when Cornell changed their logo from a nice little square that looked like the J.C. Penny logo except it said "Cornell" on it and then they made everybody doing any kind of visual communication change their logo including hiring a friend of mine as a consultant for almost two years to change all the letterheads and similar things for suborganizations that didn't have graphic design talent in house.

We got this thing instead

https://brand.cornell.edu/logos/

which I think is OK graphically on its own but unlike the square it is demanding on the environment that it is in and might force you to change things around it to look good whereas I liked the square because you could just put the square near an edge or a corner and it always looked OK.

Branding is important and should be done by professionals. It makes my eyes hurt to look at the original logo - the 80K was money well spent.

My eyes hurt from the second logo

This doesn't seem to be a large spend on branding and everyone that does spend on that thinks rightly or wrongly that they are going to get their money back and more due to attracting additional customers.

Also this is pure after the fact justification with no meaning. Most people who are rich became and remained so by maximizing their monetary position and needs to excuse nor reason to actually continue doing so. They do so because it perceptibly makes them more rich and more successful even if ultimately is just points on a score board with no real meaning for their life.

Nobody minimizes their taxes in order to ensure their money is better spent. They spend the excess on themselves like everyone else. On bigger and better castles to demonstrate their wealth, on planes, on another bigger boat.

Thats dreadful, but 80k is a blip in terms of the billions collected per year. As mentioned, this would barely be 2 full time salaries, and more likely it's a small team spending part of their time redesigning it.

Sad part is the US would have spent millions on a "consultant" who would barely do any work and instead be a yes man to accept accountability for some admin who just wanted to play political theater for a promotion in another campus. That's where Atlus shrugs.

That top logo is horrible and childish looking. The new logo will look dated soon, but at least it looks professional.

And 80k for a logo is incredibly cheap.

Who cares how professional it looks. Nobody decides “eh, I was going to go to MIT but the logo was bad”.

The marketing for the school is the success of the students and the research.

I don't know if this video will display for everyone as someone tagged it as private though I can see it not being logged in. I think David Mitchell has the best take on tax avoidance vs evasion. [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc8epam4NyY [video][3 mins]

David Mitchell on Tax Avoidance from The Last Leg

I think that categorising it as hoarding is a bit of a loaded stance.

I own a home and I have assets that I use to pay my daily expenses. I am, by your definition, asset rich. I don't need to "do" anything other than maintain the investments. (I also do work, but that's besides the point).

On an intellectual level I realise that if we are to have a public sector it needs to be paid for, and that I'm never going to be the arbiter of exactly how the money is spent.

But at the end of the day, I sit here and think, how much do the police, military, and the other basic functions really cost, and is the right way to do that really to say -

Hey, you bought something, give me 20% of that!

Hey, you earned something, give me 20,40,45% of that!

Hey, you sold something, give me 20,28% of that!

Hey, you died? Give me some of that!

etc. etc. If you minimise nothing and just do the "golden path", then you end up paying well over 50% when you stack it, and it feels more like theft than a "trade for civilization" as some like to put it, because I know that it doesn't cost that much.

In my country taxation functions less like "we need this to run the Government", and more like "it's politically popular for us to redistribute". Which is logically how democracy is always going to function, but it doesn't mean that I have to agree.

I prefer to pay for things that I derive benefit from and I think my family, community, country etc benefit from, I prefer not to pay for things that don't, it's honestly no different to me than say, I'll buy a TV if I want one, I won't buy a 100 inch TV because I think that's unnecessary.

>and it feels more like theft than a "trade for civilization" as some like to put it, because I know that it doesn't cost that much.

And ironically enough, it costs money to figure out how to optimize budgets and labor. So your tax minimization is just ensuring that the government always performs the greedy algorithm instead of focusing on a proper traversal of the problem. It's a death spiral.

Also, we can never really say how much something costs. Most funds for taxes go to welfare. Guess what the classic conservative economic administration always targets...

Considering how governments spend the money nowadays, especially the US and a few others on military stuff and promoting death, I think avoiding tax is a favor to society.

Only if you use the savings to change the government to be more humane.

I'm not in favor of telling people what to do, in general. As long as what they're doing doesn't cause undue harm to others, it's better than what most governments do nowadays.

We have very different definitions of what is "a favor to society".

Apparently. I see individual freedom as a fundamental basis of a stable society. A society that values that is a "favorable" society, in my view.

For some, it's an ethical imperative. The government is at best wasteful, often what it does with resources is harmful. If you can make sure resources are kept in private hands and used for further capital accumulation then we'll all be better off.

Loss aversion is a major factor in behavioural economics that explains why people act this way.

Seems to be an instinct.

A lawyer told me, this is how you scam people. Mainly Medical Doctors. Pitch an investment to them. They don't bite. Then mention, that they will save taxes with this investment, and they will say: Where do I have to sign?

It puzzles you in spite of knowing that wealthy people are taxed more by default due to progressive tax rates etc?

Usually, wealthy people pay capital gains tax not income tax. People who pay higher rate income tax are just normal people with a larger salary. Not every country works like this however.

The net tax rate after subsidies is essentially zero% for the bottom 50% in income terms.

Basically: if you're in the middle, you're lunch.

How is it puzzling to avoid taxes? This is the rational thing to in terms of maximizing one's utility.

Only if the government provides you (and society) no services.

Even assuming a perfectly efficient government with good intentions, you should not expect to benefit from more than a fraction of your tax money if you are above median income.

Thankfully the government doesn't only serve me, but rather all of society and its diverse fundamental needs.

I think most extremely wealthy people have a concentrated holding in a business they created or inherited.

The bill gates example where someone has 100 billion in sp500 is rare. You don't get insanely rich through diversification

Dont know about the US but in India, you pay sales tax on EVERYTHING you buy. Doesn't matter you are rich or poor. You pay this tax.

Want to buy an expensive car? Prepare to pay upwards of 100% car value in taxes.

Same for cigarettes. Around 200% tax just to give 2 examples.

Now, you "can" save your income tax by sleights of hand, by showing more expenses than actual or by misreporting things but still, you dont always get to pay 0 tax. That never happens.

Sales tax impacts poor people more than it does rich people, though. Sure, everyone is paying it, but if all the money you make each month is spent on food and living, than ALL of that money was taxed. Whereas a rich person might only spend 10% of what they make each month, and so only 10% is taxed.

It's literally my biggest annual expense. So if I spend any brain power to optimize expenses, this is the biggest easiest target.

I’d imagine that for some wealthy people it’s an unavoidable outcome of hiring wealth managers simply because they need someone to manage their wealth. The managers, in turn, have a professional obligation to minimize costs, including taxes - so they cook up these tax schemes.

Greed is hard to imagine for me, I don’t know what motivates those people.

It’s so strange that this behaviour seems to be worshipped by so many people.

Why would we do that as a society? Do we need people that hord anything for profit, do they add value to your group?

Could be they don't feel especially compelled to be a member of your group/society.

Is the real issue greed, or your perception of others?

If I were a billionaire I would avoid as much tax as possible and invest an equivalent amount in things like food banks and natural space conservation because the government is absolute shit at those things.

You can do that to a degree as charitable contributions are a tax write off.

Owning productive assets is a tortured use of the word hoarding.

edit: Hoarding is buying assets that could be used productively and storing them somewhere instead of using them. People with a political axe to grind like taking words with negative connotations and applying them to things that don't make sense to manipulate you.

If you think about it for more than two seconds you will understand we already have a word that describes someone with a lot of assets, "wealthy" or "rich". So hoarding as a term only makes sense when used in the context of someone stockpiling something that could be used by people in need. "Hoarding" shares in a company does not make sense for example.

I’ll bite. Of every dollar you contributed to your 401k last paycheck, how many cents of them do you think you’ll actually spend in retirement, on a risk-adjusted basis?

For me, the answer is certainly not 100 and not 0, let’s say it’s 80 cents. Speaking for myself, I think that marginal 20 cents is by definition hoarding because the marginal utility of money to me at that point is negligible.

Sure it could benefit my kids or get me a nicer retirement home. But there are kids that are homeless, and our public education system is crumbling. I personally would much rather those 20¢ be redistributed to people who need it. Just speaking for myself.

It's not about personally using the money or marginal utility. By investing the money in the stock market, you are increasing the pool of money that is going into funding businesses (directly and indirectly).

Think of it this way:

Angel investors and venture capitalists are directly funding the creation of new productive businesses with the expectation of a future return / reward. This future reward is only possible with secondary markets such as the public stock exchange. Additionally, employees at these companies are typically rewarded with shares to align incentives. These stock based grants motivate them to work harder and produce more and this is only possible because they can then go and sell their shares on the public market.

An example of hoarding would be like someone buying a bunch of property to park their wealth with low risk but not renting out any of the homes or apartments they purchased because it's too much effort.

I’d argue it’s still about marginal utility, but you’re talking about second order marginal utility. That is, by increasing the amount of wealth that’s locked up in equities, you’re “funding progress”.

I would still posit that the second order marginal utility of those 20 cents is higher in hands of somebody who needs it. In the same way you talk about how that 20 cents impacts the derivative of “progress”, think about how those 20 cents would impact the derivative of the people it’s redistributed to.

It’s my opinion that there’s no better ROI than investment in early childhood education, for example. Because it’s an investment that pays compounding dividends integrated over an entire human lifetime.

And again, we’re not talking about removing the whole dollar from the market, just 20 cents. An amount, by the way, that is around what would be taxed if you were investing in a non-tax-advantaged account. There’s some irony in there.

> I would still posit that the second order marginal utility of those 20 cents is higher in hands of somebody who needs it. In the same way you talk about how that 20 cents impacts the derivative of “progress”, think about how those 20 cents would impact the derivative of the people it’s redistributed to.

The innovation that happens because people build companies and technologies that they go on to sell in public markets impacts every single human going forward as long as there is not a disaster. Meanwhile, the 20 cents of marginal utility is used once and according to the recent study on how people used a universal basic income, not to great effect.

You only need one transistor, vaccine, airplane, refrigeration level invention every few decades to justify how much more impactful it is.

> The 20 cents of marginal utility is used once and [...] not to great effect.

I made no reference to UBI. I don't think UBI is a solution to the system of poverty. But we don't need to go there.

There are ways to redistribute wealth that are less direct than SNAP and UBI. The public education system, our transportation infrastructure, the funding of basic research (which contributed to the transistor, modern vaccines, and modern passenger air travel).

There is a whole spectrum of investment between "give a man a fish" and "fund the construction of a competitive industry of privately-owned fish farms to feed people fish"; and it's worth understanding why we're often presented with the false choice between them, instead of the options in between. It's not because the one on the right is most efficient.

I mean, some people do in fact do that.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/economy/houses-are-getting-...

>If you think about it for more than two seconds you will understand we already have a word that describes someone with a lot of assets, "wealthy" or "rich".

Semantics? I think your first metaphor for productivity was better. Are you simply buying a yatch you use twice in your life ever, or are you living your dreams of sailing the deep blue in a flashy way? Or in the gray area; do you turn it into a business to have other rich people pay to ride?

How you use your assets or liquidity matters a lot more than what medium you store it as. =

If this is accurate, it finally explains something I've been asking about for years: The loan is paid back after the step-up in basis. That's the loophole. If the loan was paid back before step-up, the estate would still have to pay capital gains tax.

The step-up in cost basis on death is the original sin that underpins the entire debate over unrealized gains.

It's disheartening to see so much thought and deliberation going into an obviously toxic idea (taxing unrealized gains) when the obvious solution (removing the cost basis step-up when assets change hands) is being ignored.

Inherited wealth is the least earned, so it should be politically palatable to change this. But presumably because such a change would acutely affect the people who make laws in the country specifically, it is never seriously considered.

Maybe there's just no good solution here, but I think the original inspiration for this sort of law was about family homes. It's one thing to inherit stocks and have to sell some of them off, but it's much more complex to try to pass down a property that can't be arbitrarily subdivided. There are various options obviously, but I think enough people had to sell their beloved childhood home because of the tax obligation that came with the inheritance that someone thought there ought to be a law. Maybe your idea plus a carve out for a primary residence could work, but it doesn't seem politically feasible to me.

First of all, the estate/gift tax does not kick in until 13 M$, so that already covers that case.

Second, it is irrelevant. The capital gains tax that would be due on a normal step-up in basis during life is independent of the estate tax.

Assume there was no exemption and you bought stocks 20 years ago for 100 K$ that are now worth 1 M$. If you die, then your estate would need to pay estate taxes on 1 M$.

However, if instead you sold it the day before you died, you would need to pay capital gains on 900 K$. Then you pass away with N $ = (1 M$ - taxes) in cash. Your estate would then additionally need to pay estate tax on N $.

The step-up in basis is the difference between these cases. Your inheritors get your capital gains (step-up in basis) tax-free, but you still need to pay the estate tax.

Family homes rarely exceed $13M but farms and ranches can get up there. Seems like it should be easy to exclude agricultural land, but there's second-order consequences.

If farms and ranches are the best place to hide family wealth, then family wealth will pour into agricultural land. That inflates values and pushes out the actual ranchers and farmers. If farming is just a byproduct of your tax-avoidance strategy then you are unlikely to try too hard at it. We actually need farms, and nobody wants them to become tax-avoidance shells.

Yeah, I was thinking that despite the fact that the ultra wealthy use TFA's loophole, people who don't (i.e. net worth < $300M as the author explains) have a situation where:

A - In a universe with cost basis step-up on death, they die with gains taxed at 0% and then pay 40% estate tax on everything.

B - In a world without cost basis step-up on death, they die with gains taxed at the 20% long term rate and then pay 40% estate tax on what remains.

Thus:

The step-up causes less tax revenue by percentage from the >$300M crowd who use the BBD strategy, but it causes more tax revenue by percentage from the $13M<crowd<$300M who do not use the BBD strategy. The latter pay more tax with option A! 20% on a chunk and 40% on the remaining chunk is less government revenue than just 40% unchunked, especially if the capital gains being realized on death are a majority of the net worth.

I wonder which crowd has more worth-at-death in aggregate (in the absence of BBD and the like -- if estate tax were to be paid by all, no loopholes), given that the less wealthy crowd is a much larger population.

No, that is not how the math works.

N is your cost basis. M is the gain. E is the estate tax. G is the gains tax.

((N + M) * E) is tax on the automatic step-up, option A.

(M * G) + (N + M - (M * G)) * E is the tax on the non-automatic step-up, option B.

Reorganized to ((N + M) * E) + (M * G) * (1 - E), it is clear that option B is strictly more taxes for any estate tax less than 100%.

:slaps_forehead:

Of course, it would be long term (20%) and estate (40% but on slightly less), not one or the other. Mea culpa.

This is just a guess, but I think it might be more about the government not wanting to put valuations on complex assets. Let’s say I own a network of dry cleaners in Los Angeles. It’s a private business with no public business to compare it against. Cash flow is X, but is the business worth 10 million, 20m? How is the government supposed to determine what it’s worth? Now, let’s imagine your business is Koch Industries. We know it’s worth many billions but there’s a VERY broad range of what it might be. Without taking the stock public, its basically impossible even for top investors to value (investment bankers who value businesses for a living get it wrong all the time), let alone the government.

Even public businesses are not trivial to value for very large shareholders who don’t have the ability to easily sell all shares at once without moving the market quite a bit. But in any case, removing this loophole would just encourage the ultra wealthy to put their money into opaque businesses and then try to “value” them as low as possible. So it’s not so easy to fix.

Nah, the original inspiration wasn't about family homes. It was introduced in 1921, 5 years after income taxes became a thing, and was an attempt by Congress to remove a kind of double taxation that could (at that time) happen with estate taxes.

You would pay an estate tax (on the total value of something, regardless of its cost). And then you'd still (when you eventually sold it) owe capital gains tax.

Regardless of whether you think that particular reasoning makes sense, it definitely doesn't make sense if there's no estate tax (which there effectively isn't for most due to the multi-million dollar exclusion) since there's no risk of double taxation.

Step up basis was actually repealed in 1976. But there was immense pushback at the time around record keeping and Congress eventually agreed and retroactively cancelled the new law.

Whether the answer would be different today in this age of computerised record keeping .... ?

Isn‘t this a false dichotomy? Removing the cost basis step-up doesn‘t automatically mean any taxes are due on the inheitance - you could just keep the low cost basis and pay the tax once you actually realize your gains.

Exactly, today people get both: they inherit the assets with a stepped up basis, and also don’t pay tax

Don't you need money to pay the estate tax?

Oh, good point. For that, you could allow people to pay off estate taxes over multiple years, if the tax is higher than the available liquid assets.

Make an exemption for a primary residence. Everything else can go. Stop letting people hoard wealth like dragons.

There is already a 13.something million dollar exception. If the house is worth more than that it should be taxed anyway.

Without a cap, overpriced 8- or 9-figure residences will themselves become the vehicle of wealth transfer, rather than irrevocable trusts.

Make a cap on the value of house. What do people need $100 million stupid ugly houses for anyway. None of these billionaires have good taste anyway.

No. People have a right to their property, including wealth.

We're talking about what happens when someone dies. The estate tax already exists. Is that a violation of the right?