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Google cofounder Sergey Brin has spent $102 million to fight California’s proposed billionaire tax—he could owe $13 billion if he loses (fortune.com)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/politics@lemmy.world
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Proposition 40, which will be on the ballot in November, would impose a one-time, 5% tax on California’s 200 billionaires,

These fucks will do anything to avoid paying taxes...

with 90% of the revenue from the proposed measure going toward the state’s health care program and 10% going toward education, food assistance, and administration. Brin, with a net worth of nearly $260 billion, could owe about $13 billion as a result of the tax.

Can't be contributing to "socialism" I guess? Get some of that $260 billion liquid and pay up, dickhead.

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[–] 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

The problem is that no one actually paid that, during that same time period tax avoidance was stupidly easy. The average tax rate for the highest earners (over 200k) rarely paid over 45%. Still higher than the average of today, but nowhere near what most people claim about the time.

Plus, before 1986 a lot of the really rich people who could afford to lobby politicians used to be able to create "riffle-shot provisions" basically highly personalized tax carve outs created for them by individual politicians.

The most famous individual tax carveout in American history occurred in the Revenue Act of 1951. Louis B. Mayer, the mega-wealthy head of Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), wanted to retire and cash out his massive share of the studio's future profits. Under normal rules, this lump sum would be taxed as personal income at a whopping 91% rate. Mayer hired a powerful Washington lobbyist who worked with standard-setting politicians to write a highly specific amendment. The law stated that a taxpayer could treat a retirement payout as a lower-taxed capital gains distribution (taxed at only 25%), but only if: • The taxpayer had been employed by the company for more than 20 years. • They had held a contractual right to a share of future profits for at least 12 years. • They had been entitled to these rights for at least 5 years after termination of employment. • The entire payout occurred in a single block in one tax year. The criteria were so incredibly specific that Louis B. Mayer and one other MGM executive were the only two people in the United States who qualified. It saved Mayer an estimated $2 million ($23+ million in today's money).

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago (1 child)

    The average tax rate for the highest earners (over 200k) rarely paid over 45%. Still higher than the average of today, but nowhere near what most people claim about the time.

    This sounds to me like people misunderstanding of the concept of tax brackets, not a deliberate deception. Yes, most people making over $200k in 1955 paid less than 91% of their income in taxes, because of course they did. In fact, they all did. It's mathematically impossible for them to be required to pay 91% of their income as taxes because the income below $200k (again, $2.5M equivalent today) is taxed at a lower rate, and with a smaller wealth divide, fewer people were making vast sums above that amount.

    Sure, there may be a handful of stable geniuses out there, the types of people who would turn down a raise because it would put them in a higher tax bracket, who could misinterpret "the marginal tax rate was 91%" as "91% of their total income was taxed", but we dont need to cater every statistic to those people.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago

    This sounds to me like people misunderstanding of the concept of tax brackets, not a deliberate deception.

    Yes, there is a difference between an effective tax rate and marginalized tax rate. However, my point was that no one ever paid the marginalized income tax rate of 91% for income over 200k. In fact the 1% of their day had an average effective income tax rate that was lower than the lowest marginalized bracket available which was 17.4%

    How could it be that the tax code of the 1950s had a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent, but resulted in an effective tax rate of only 42 percent on the wealthiest taxpayers? In fact, the situation is even stranger. The 42.0 percent tax rate on the top 1 percent takes into account all taxes levied by federal, state, and local governments, including: income, payroll, corporate, excise, property, and estate taxes. When we look at income taxes specifically, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average effective rate of only 16.9 percent in income taxes during the 1950s

    There were just a lot more loopholes back in the day that catered to the super wealthy. They still had things like capital gains, but they also had the oil depletion allowance, accelerated real estate depreciation allowance, collapsible corporations, and the ability to daisy chain their reported income across a number of years. The ultra wealthy who could afford to lobby members of Congress also had the ability to pay politicians to create specified tax carve outs personalized to their specific needs.

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