Twitter today was full of responses to the soldier call stuff with “What about Hillary and Uranium, why you keep ignoring it.”


lol

I reckon that makes sense. I don't know if MS's P/E ratio or dividends or w/e really justify the stock price, but even if not there is surely a lot of money around that would seek the stock as fast as it could be sold if it were much below the price when the selling started.

You would think since a bunch of the dumb **** he does is filmed and tweeted they would be a little skeptical that he is not doing dumb **** all the time.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/18/politi...nse/index.html

McCain: Administration not being up front about Niger attack

Nigergate? Nigerazi?

Last week I had a Trumpkin at work tell me that Trump making fun of the disabled reporter has been debunked as fake over and over. When I showed him the video, he said I had obviously doctored it and it just proved how the story is fake. I don't think they care about the truth.

Fine. Perhaps it's a messaging and a policy issue. My point is that the left and/or anyone with a genuine interest in public policy should come up with a policy and a narrative frame that like explicitly targets multi-billionaires. I recognize this is entirely a fantasy since we'll just be threatened that poor aggrieved mega billionaires are functionally global citizens and will all just start sea steading if we threaten their piles of wealth with confiscation so I recognize none of this is happening.

It's not even that hard to come up with a policy. 95% estate tax on amounts over $20 million for example. Like all policies it would create avoidance problems and unintended consequences, but at least it wouldn't immediately be read as a tax increase on family farms.

You're just making things up.

I agree the "the left have substantial tax increases for some guy making 500k" is typical max hyperventilating and humble-bragging about himself, not really worth responding to.

But I think there's a valid-ish point in there that the left and our orthodox, standard policies that have been coming out of our think tanks and make their way into popular print and media -- at least the ones touted by alot of elites and Democrats who perhaps we more liberal or centrist -- they ARE leaving a lot of the Bezos / Gates wealth piles largely untaxed, and we talk a lot about the truly mega wealthy without naming names despite the fact we're really talking about like a few hundred sorta well-known people.

It's of course a political risk to have the narrative frames start naming these people and pointing out their enormous wealth stores -- the fact that dozen or so people with 25 billion dollars or more have wealth exceeding like literally all of black America -- since the right, their media machine, and soft-allies like max/ecruiture will get the vapors and declare it all communism and say we're all mini Pol Pots or whatever.

And I do think the professional Democratic class is anxious that if you stir too much populist ire about mega billionaires, you will send Bezos and Gates and Zuck and that class directly to the GOP. Turns out deregulation, allowing huge monopoly powers, and low tax environments allowed for a small group of insanely wealthy, powerful people that everyone has to cower in fear about and constitutes an enormous public risk; who knew? Who could have predicted?

Anyway, the left only really bothers pointing out say the Kochs and only in the context of their destructive right-wing political activities -- rather than making a simpler, almost less partisan, more populist point that a few dozen people control insane amounts of wealth and resources, there's precious little moral justification for it, it's likely quite popular to advocate a huge confiscatory tax. I'm not saying it's inherently a good thing to be less partisan and more populist, but we would reach more people in that way if we communicated in that fashion about this thing: don't focus on the Bad Billionaires but All Billionaires. But we never really do it. Mostly for the reasons I point out above. But probably partly because professional Democrats and a lot of the rank-and-file left don't think about it in those terms. They've been cowed by a lot of the good press and frankly probably good intentions behind things like the Gates Foundation and they'll eventually give it all away we guess, and Bezos is bankrolling the WaPo which is still pretty decent or whatever, and Zuckerberg might be a Democrat we think, and Bloomberg seems pretty centrist, and Sergey and Larry Page run a hip company, so these guys aren't that bad and don't call them out, those mega billionaires are alright, focus on the Kochs and Adelson, MAYBE the Waltons and their inherited money. But wealth piles controlled by OK people, don't talk too much about that, keep it a little more vague. The policies seem to continue to be focused on taxing income, not capital. Don't be seen as too threatening about inheritance. Don't go after offshore tax havens or loophole trusts or offshore cash, etc. I think it's probably changing some in the last few years as the party has moved a little to the left but I think it's still slow and haphazard and there's still too much deference given to the Nice Mega Billionaires to let them have theirs.

Don't forget that for some people it's also just fun and exciting to be a high profile politician advancing progressive causes but also getting to rub shoulders with certain super rich people and their celebrity friends and you don't need to feel guilty about it because it's all part of fundraising to advance those progressive causes. Behavior is just as likely (more likely?) to be explained by good old fashioned personal interest and lack of self awareness, rather than a political calculation. I don't think Dem leadership is necessarily regretfully taking all the money from the rich people on their side.

Maybe this should be moved to the tax thread (or is already there), but I don't think taxing unrealized capital gains is the right approach no matter how rich the holder happens to be

6 hours later.....



https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/...72261032648705

It’s not even legal.

The 16th amendment allowed for an “income” tax. A tax on unrealized capital gains is a wealth tax.

DVault is also naturally correct again in regards to fundraising. In the end the Democrats also rely on mega wealth. Dems can only go so far with taxes before they kill their golden goose.

Ikes ain't dead, y'all.

Would you care to discuss if you think my interpretation of the 16th amendment is wrong?

The reason why the federal estate tax is legal is because it's a transfer of money -- income from a decedent -- to the heir.

Eisner v. Macomber, 252 U.S. 189 (1920)

Was a tax case before the United States Supreme Court. It is notable for the following holdings:
a pro rata stock dividend, where a shareholder received no actual cash or other property, and retained the same proportionate share of ownership of the corporation as was held prior to the dividend, was not taxable income to the shareholder within the meaning of the Sixteenth Amendment
An income tax imposed by the Revenue Act of 1916 on such dividend was unconstitutional, even where the dividend indirectly represented accrued earnings of the corporation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisner_v._Macomber

Why doesn't love a little SCOTUS tax law in the AM

I don't necessarily agree with your interpretation of the 16th amendment but I agree FWIW that it would be far simpler, legally, if Democrats advocated for a much more robust estate tax and it would probably be very popular. And it would address some of what I want, which is take vast stores of wealth and redistribute it downward. As mosdef said, it would create avoidance problems, unintended consequences and perhaps a small number of people unfairly burdened, but whatever, start there and adjust.

So the USA has no capital gains tax?

And it's not very hard to carve out a "family farm" exemption.

Exemption:
No estate tax shall be levied on the transfer of a farm -- defined in section 1.653.567 -- to a child, grandchild, aunt, uncle, mother, father owned prior to January 1 2017.

Like I'm sure literally zero "family farms" are taxed under the estate tax, but just make them all exempt to avoid that issue.

There's really no real argument to the estate tax. I mean the threshold is $5.5M per person ($11M per couple)

The fake Melania memes are getting good imo

Yes we do.

We were talking about 'unrealized' capital gains.

For example:
Realized capital gain
I buy APPL at 105$ a share. I bought 50 shares. Cost $5250
I sold APPL at 160$ a share. I sell all 50 shares. Proceeds $8000 in cash.
Net gain: $2750. I am taxed on $2750. I have the cash to pay taxes because I have $8000 in proceeds from the sale of the stock.

Unrealized capital gain
I buy APPL at 105$ a share. I bought 50 shares. Cost $5250
On Dec 31 2017 APPL is at $160 a share. I do nothing. Value $8000
Some people want to tax the $2750 in "paper gain".

While such a tax is unconstitutional, even a basic understanding of the stock market would make one realize that you'd be asking for a fire sale of the stock market in Dec/Jan/Feb to sell shares to get money to pay for the tax on the unrealized gains.