Some Rich Americans Are Getting Stimulus ‘Checks’ Averaging $1.7M
forbes.com
forbes.com
However, this will only occur if they took losses, so it is really a discount of ~35% on negative income. This would also apply to someone who is not rich, i.e. a software dev sole proprietor who cashed out big losses in March in the stock market and then applied those losses against their normal income to end up reporting 64k in income instead of 100k (normally 36k in losses would have to be stretched over 12 years of tax returns).
I understand this doesn't fit the narrative, but please comment if it is incorrect instead of downvoting.
I try to up vote at least twice as much as I down vote. If I down vote a a low quality comment, I try to at least up vote 2 quality ones to offset it.
(Edit: something like slashdots categories could work but you’d need some incentive to be truthful rather than trust them to separate a “troll” from a “disagree”.)
Plus, if anything, I’d say it’s more common for there to be a bias against downvoting relative to upvoting.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Edit: I took a look at your account's recent comments because often we just remove rate limits when the problem has been corrected. Unfortunately, in this case the opposite is true. Would you please stop using HN primarily for political and ideological battle? It destroys the curious conversation that HN is intended for, so we have to ban accounts that do it.
You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The guidelines also, for several good reasons, ask you not to post about "brigading" and the like. These perceptions are nearly always imaginary, as the current example illustrates. Everyone sees something they don't like and says "aha! brigading!". Nobody sees it change to the opposite and then says "oh! guess I was wrong about that." I've looked at the data on this closely for years, and the conclusion is that with rare exceptions (and I do mean rare) it is all cognitive bias of the purest form. Cognitive bias plus randomness equals narrative. It also equals noise in HN threads—and it evokes worse from others who have the opposite bias and take it as flamebait against their side.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I know a CPA and they have noted that there have been calls from wealthy clients looking for loopholes to save money on taxes, based on the stimulus.
Money not payed in taxes isn't quite the same as getting it back, but in the end its a fair amount of money kept by an idividua and not being sent to the government . Seems kinda shady to me, to put something like this in a bill that's trying to help lower to moderate income individuals financial survive a pandemic.. But I'm old and cynical.
The fundamental way our tax code is broken is not loopholes, but the actual publicly known tax bracket rates. They should be higher for capital gains, the progressive rate graduation should be steeper, and 500k shouldn't be the highest tax bracket when there are people who make 10,000 times that in a year. It's unbelievable that this isn't the focus of the issue and people are instead harping on wealth taxes and loopholes.
edit: should also note that capitalism expects wealth concentration, but it's not a pre-condition.
If your company has $100k to play with, paying $200k salary to take $100k loss is not a good move.
Say your pass-through entities has 100k in revenue. You could pay yourself 140k and mark down 40k of losses but that's financially disadvantageous because you're tax rate on the income will be higher than the tax rate on the losses. You're paying 13k in extra taxes to avoid paying 8k, donating an extra 5k to the IRS.
Most companies try to shift revenue from income to profits because it will reduce your total tax burden.
Don't forget the previous tax break also ;)
because of additional language that applies the policy retroactively “so losses in 2018 and 2019 can be ‘carried back’ against the past five years.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/14/coronavir...
Damn, must be nice.
Could go to healthcare for all, fixing my roads and access to education, creating a strong resilient nation for all of us.
But this is so much better.
Everywhere a candidate’s name is printed.
it is already called "Republican".
And arguably, had we done that then we wouldn't be dealing with this now.
Why is that surprising? The people that pay the most tax have the most benefit from a tax break.
It's no different than saying a family making $30,000 per year don't benefit from tax breaks, but leaving out the fact they don't pay any tax anyways.
It seems like the whole world is chomping at the bit to enact more socialism but do you think it's homeless people and cashiers that are defining the rules of the system and legislation? Of course not, it's lawyers and politicians. So are you really naive enough to believe that they write perfectly fair legislation that doesn't favor their interests at all?
Friedrich Hayek nailed this on the head almost 100 years ago. The problem with socialism isn't that its not an admirable goal, it's that even if you want it, by nature you aren't going to get the version of it that you wanted, you are going to get the version of it the a bunch of politically connected insiders design and while they may not be totally self serving, they are usually going to figure out how to be on the winning end of the game.
Crass said it well: "But no one ever changed the church by pulling down a steeple
And you'll never change the system by bombing number ten
Systems just aren't made of bricks they're mostly made of people"
The systems you get are the ones the people who design them make. Thinking otherwise is foolish. The people who should be the most scared of redistribution systems like this are the ones who want to look out for the interests of the little guys.
Looking at the 10 years following the great recession it looks like this is what happened (although those redistributions were more explicitly directed towards the top of the pyramid upfront) but look at at how inequality statistics have moved since that event. It certainly doesn't seem to have favored those who are financially disenfranchised in our society.
The problem is the nature of society permanatly skews these events in the favor of the the people who have the most existing resources to figure out how to game the system.
If you want a much more in depth breakdown of how that happens structurally, read Hayeks the road to serfdom as I mentioned above.
The more complicated systems that are created, the more there is to gamify.
I'm advocating for more limited government. A simple clear rule set is much harder to gamify. This is an equalizer, not the reverse in my opinion.
2. Are we better off by optimizing for minimal political manipulation over anything else? For hyperbolic examples: in complete anarchy, we'd have zero system manipulation, and yet I would unhappily die in The Purge. Likewise, in some Roaring '20s capitalistic caricature, I might have my small business destroyed by a monopoly, or die a child laboring away in unsafe conditions. Optimizing for being manipulatable seems far less palatable than living in modern day Denmark or something.
1) Yes this could be true in some cases but a lot of the way in which the "haves" exploit these kind of systems is by throwing man hours of attorneys and accountants at them because the rules are super verbose and complicated and so you hire profesional loop hole finders. If I simple piece of legislation is obviously exploitable, that will be more obvious from the get go and will less heavily favor the peoe who can pay the loophole finders.
Also you cant exploit things that don't exist.
2) no, I agree you have to draw your line in the sand somewhere. I'm not an anarchist. I could take your argument in the same direction to absurdity as well. If redistribution solves all problems, let's create comittees to redistribute on a person to person basis until we reach a fair utopia.
We don't do that because we acknowledge that the cost benefit of doing that gets hyperbolically negative at a certain point. What I'm advocating is that the line where that happens is actually much earlier, and that the last 10 years have shown that we are already on the wrong side of that line and that our approach to legislating away complex issues can at best handout money to certain interest in a fairly dumb way, and those groups are always going to be the ones that have a say in the legislation process via lobbying or direct involvement.
So no, I'm not arguing against child labor laws, I'm arguing against complicated redistribution programs. Nothing less, nothing more
Do that often enough and you’ll find people quite willing to give this “socialism” thing a chance.
Second, I think you're being unfair to anm89 in another way as well. His post I could just as easily take as saying that this is an illustration of how it goes when you try to reform the system (such as, say, introduce socialism).
Now, you could argue that socialism isn't relevant at all to the article. And you'd be right. Why socialism as opposed to labor reform, or UBI, or tax reform, or whatever? But the reason to pick socialism out of that list is the current relevance. Bernie Sanders was explicitly socialist, and he came rather close to the Democratic nomination.
You're reading into my words to say things that simply aren't there.
At any rate, this has always been my issue as well. People decry the capitalist system and when you ask why, they point to humans behaving badly. Well, no matter what economic system we have, we'll have that problem. There is no lack of corruption and self-dealing in non-capitalist systems.
But not all politicians and lawyers are serving the financial elites, whenever there's a stereotype or claim made I would like to see how this compares to Nordic countries.
In addition almost every major first would country has a socialist healthcare system, just not the US.
I assume he's confusing it with evictions being put on hold.
> You still owe all of that rent.
Indeed.
Without interest?
Right! And that, too, is illegal under rent control in many places (NY and California).
But right now we want them to not kick out people who can't pay. We want them to provide free housing to tenants who need it. Those are the landlords we want to bail out. Asking them to just take that as a loss is shitty.
(I assume that the landlords who don't forgive rent don't get to claim this loss on their taxes.)
And now we're seeing article after article just proving me right.
Many conservatives view income as "earned" and then taxes as appropriation ("taken away"). Under such a perspective it is only a return of what was originally theirs in the first place.
This country is run on deficits/debt so 1.7M less from rich people is not marginally 1.7M less to poor people.
Someone who was going to pay a million in taxes and now has 1 mil less is not going to put their money into the economy the same what that 1000 people with moderate income, like say restaurant workers getting $1,700 would. Those people poorer will spend all that money. I'm fortunate to be a well compensated software engineer, and I pay a huge amount of taxes. I'm not out there begging for more money (via tax reductions) and then claiming it was already my money, not a gift. That's a dishonest argument.
Wealthier people spend or invest all of their money. Only drug dealers hoard cash, and that's only because they have difficulty laundering it.
I agree, but it doesn't make any sense. Investing is literally putting money to work. Storing it in a mattress is not putting it to work.
For example, what happens to the money when people buy real estate? The seller of that real estate gets the money. They don't hoard it, they also spend/invest it.
What happens to the money you put in your bank account? The bank loans it out to people who spend/invest it. (Banks don't make money hoarding cash, they make money loaning it out.)
Think about it another way. Wealthy people in general are not stupid with money, if they were they wouldn't be wealthy very long. They put it to work. That means spending it or investing it to people who spend it.
All of my well-paying tech jobs have been funded by VC money from rich people and/or IPO money from rich people. Same goes (indirectly and partially) for all the people who have been selling me goods and services over those same years.
> Same goes ... for all the people who have been selling me goods and services over those same years.
No, it doesn't. Unless you only buy services from VC-financed startups?
I buy things using my salary which trickled down from the VCs and shareholders.
And then where does the money go that was spent on the investment?
Consider that a high ROI means the money is used for something useful. For example, investing into a financial vehicle that loans money to people buying a house.
Let's say the rich person buys a yacht. The yacht construction employs a large number of people. The money goes into the pockets of the people who made the yacht.
> Giving money to the rich does not trickle down to people.
For this to be true, it would follow that if all the rich people were made not-rich, it would have no material effect on the rest of the people. But that isn't how historical examples played out. Getting rid of rich people made everyone else worse off. Every time.
That’s such a naïve statement. Those financial vehicles actually do things: provide capital for other businesses. Provide market liquidity so that capital can flow to the areas that are in demand. Grandma saving money under the mattress does a lot less than a “rich” person investing in REITs.
So when I pay 35% tax and keep 65% of what remains, did the gov't give me that 65%?
There is nothing special about current tax rates that say any reduction in taxes is "giving people money". In reality, you're "just taking less money from them".
If so - lol for now.
If not, why is this mental gymnastics?