Related: Robert Reich posted earlier today that Tesla paid ZERO taxes on $5 billion in sales (earnings?), so that’s just fucking great.
You must log in or # to comment.
Income is the worst way to make money.
Which is why these rich clowns don’t make (relatively) much money. All of it is capital gains and loans. Taxed far less and not at all, especially when it’s routed through all sorts of expenses and shell companies.
Well how else are they going to subsidize the losses of the rich if not with your dollars?
That’s because Bezos’s net worth is in imaginary money. His actual income from Amazon was only like $80k a year.
Unrealized gains shouldn’t be taxed unless they’re being used as collateral to get real money.
Dude, I’m on 80k a year. Pretty sure I couldn’t afford a gazillion-dollar wedding in Venice
And? My point is the real money he got from Amazon that can actually be taxed is not the same as his estimated net worth.
Bezos doesn’t have a checking account with billions sitting in it. His wealth is in the unrealized gains on non-liquid assets. It’s imaginary money until it’s used as collateral for loans, at which point it should be taxed as a realized gain.
That would be the “unless it’s used as collateral to get real money.” part
How about a wealth tax on this imaginary money?
What amount will be taxed? The assets change value every second the market is open. If you have a hard capture date, then the wealthy will tank their stocks right before.
The best way to tax it is to treat the use of the asset as collateral as a realized gain and tax it as such.
So funny!
Pro tips:
Many jurisdictions don’t require you to have a business license if your revenue is under a certain threshold and the work you do is unregulated. Basically, you can just decide you own a business at any time without filling out any paperwork.
Housecleaning, auto mechanic, and IT consulting businesses aren’t regulated and can be used to justify 90% of common purchases. A YouTube channel is a business and can be used to write off anything you make a video about.
Any major purchases you made throughout the year can be declared as an asset of your business. If you say you only use it for business 50% of the time, it’s practically impossible for anyone to disprove.
Also, 50% of the money you spend on those major purchases can be declared as a business loss, which further reduces your tax obligation.
So, let’s say you bought a PC and a 3D printer this year. You can decalre both as assets belonging 50% to your business, declare half the cost as a business expense, and declare no income from the business. You can also declare half of your gas purchases as being for your business. You’ll get a credit for the asset, and a credit for the “business loss.”
Basically, you can create a company that has your home address as its HQ, say it didn’t earn any money, but you invested in it. Then, declare ordinary purchases as assets and investments into the company by saying you use them for business 50% of the time.
There’s no requirement to have a business license before telling the IRS you have a business. There’s no requirement to run a business “well” and there’s no penalty for running a business badly. Receipts aren’t required to declare assets or losses, but you may need them if you’re audited. You’re unlikely to be audited due to the 50% declaration. If you are audited and you have receipts, you’re covered.
Disclaimer: I’m not a tax professional and this isn’t advice.
shit I should have claimed my laptop
(I’m not a professional and this is not tax advice)
However, I have a home business pulling in a few thousand a year.
About business losses, I think you’re partially right. The IRS has a tile that you need to show that you’re trying to make a profit, despite losses. One of the ways they do that is showing a profit over the course of a few years. (Maybe 3 out of 5 years? My memory is foggy.) But if you don’t seem like a business, then you are only allowed to deduct up to the amount that you earn.
But yeah, year one of a business, you can definitely take a loss. And why not? The IRS is short-staffed so fewer audits.
I feel like this is all well and good until you need insurance. If you damage something and get sued without insurance/LLC, they’re suing you directly instead. Dicey territory depending on what you’re being sued for.
I do programming as a hobby, and it’s not out of the question that some day I’ll make something that will be sold. Can I claim my gaming PC and my homelab as business expenses? As well as my electricity and intenet?
I’m not an expert on tax, but I can tell you from personal experience that for the company that I run, with me being the only employee, I claim anything related to the business. The grey area is what percentage it’s used for the business, I’m not sure on that part. I have a separate laptop I use for the business and when I purchased it I claimed it 100 percent. Like stated though keep your receipts to cover your ass.
The 2025 Big Beautiful Bill lets you write off 100% of the expense on the year you purchase it, instead of depreciating it over several years. Make big purchases, pay less tax dollars to this government.
Disclaimer: I am not an accountant or financial advisor, do your own homework to see what qualifies in your situation.
I fell like the disclaimer should really be at the top. Specially because it is very geographically dependant and this is the internet.
I am also not an accountant, but in my country even a failed business project is still a business project. E.g you run an IT consultancy and suddenly decide you need to do something with AI. Wellll now that gaming PC with a really over the top GPU is actually a business purchase because you NEED that VRAM. AI project didn’t do all that well? Oh well, shit happens. Keep the PC tho, maybe you’ll need it for another project soon.
Home office is another fun one. In my country, you have to decide what % of different purchases are for business vs living use, for tax-free expense compensations. But the interesting thing is, you can go really in depth with that. 20-40% of your toilet paper could be business usage reasonably, depending on what percent of awake time is spent working vs not working.
There’s a joke on a Family Guy episode where Peter starts a business, then later on he’s like “Lois we need to immediately put a desk in every room in this house”. It’s a good joke but I wondered how many people would get it.
I declare my self an IT consultant. Now what?
Can you fix my printer?
Sure! bodily throws it out the window
Do you really need to print? That will be $500.
Now you get pay the employer half of your social security tax!
Bold of you to assume I have the charisma to convince someone to pay me.
Pro tip: if you are actually making side income like this and reporting it to the IRS then in many situations you can deduct the costs of the things you needed to buy in the course of generating that income.
This does not work on W2 income, though, as much as it would be nice to deduct the costs of driving to an office etc
That only matters when the value of those deductions exceeds the standard deduction though, isn’t that right?
No, deductions for business expenses happen “above the line” so they reduce your taxable income. The standard deduction happens “below the line” and is applied to your taxable income after business expenses etc
Yes and for the purposes of reducing taxable income, not the overall tax burden.
An example in a vacuum: If you report $10,000 and itemize a $2000 deduction for an expense, you’d be taxed as if you made $8000.
Some take it to believe the $2000 deduction means they deduct $2000 from what they owe in taxes and then feel cheated and blindsided when they still owe.
The standard deduction is just under $16,000. So if we round things out: the tax bracket for the first $10,000 of taxable income is a 10% rate. If you made $26,000 you’d owe $1000 with the standard. (26k minus 16k, leaving 10% of 10k.)
In this same scenario if you could itemize $26,000 in deductions on $26,000 of income, you’d owe $0. No one self employed or any worker can actually do this reasonably. But large businesses can, and do.
This is how billionaires pay no taxes. They use their business expenses, loans, and losses to deduct the entire amount of their taxable income to eliminate any possible tax burden.
deleted by creator
Above the line deductions reduce your taxable income, from there you take the standard deduction or itemize. You are conflating two separate events
deleted by creator
Yes, that’s how I always understood it
The real question is how many billions in welfare government bailouts and credits did Tesla get?
Republicans are so worried about poor people on welfare, but Tesla would literally be closed without welfare money. Rules for thee.
Walmart
I’m all for corporations and the wealthy paying their fair share of taxes, which they often don’t.
However, revenue is not income and gains on investments are unrealized gains until you sell your shares and withdraw the cash.
If I’m reading Tesla’s income statement correctly, they expect to pay something like $1.4B in taxes on $5.2B in income for 2025. Figures calculated using fuzzy pre-coffee math in my head and may not reflect any reasonable accounting standards
I think people are upset about that loophole. Businesses buy yachts, trips around the world and bribing politicians for their owners and the common person is just trying to not die.
And we still have to play the guessing game where we try to estimate the number that the government already knows, but won’t divulge to us, like some sort of fucked up psychological game.
This shit is so fucked. I’m awaiting the collapse.
This is when daddy marx reels you into his pleasure house by telling you about how he predicted all this shit in 1848 and had advocated for the dictatorship by the proletiariat (the working class is in power, no conflictions between power and politics by allowing lobbyism), capitalism has always been doomed and the reagan bullshit about the trinkle down economics has always been known by econimists as nothing more than a self-contradicting distraction whilst we robbed foreign nations to sustain an unsustainable system.
“We have a finite environment - the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist”. ~ Sir David Attenborough
Couldn’t they also be a mathematician? The Pointcarré recurrence theorem is a good example of infinite rate in a fixed dimensional space. Also, that quote really oversimplifies environmental engineering, the ozone layer has been fixed by the kyoto convention because every person with the simplest understanding of the carbon cycle can understand why the earth has been able to sustain ressource consumption for all animals and can still do so for a very long time still, infinitely or not.
Animals don’t grow infinitely. If their population surpasses capacity, they have a mass die-off
I don’t know why you bring in the ozone layer here. That was not a problem that had anything to do with reaource consumption.
Ozone was fixed because the cost of shifting to a different gas was economically viable for largely Western countries.
The Montreal protocol was still impressive though as something that many countries could agree on without it becoming political. Ah, simpler times.
IMHO mathematicians go into the madman category.
Obligatory
During the previous administration, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $80 billion for IRS to hire more people to go after the rich. The CBO estimated that it would collect $200 billion in the next decade, but there were other predictions of $560 billion.
Trump reversed all of that. Elon Musk and DOGE fired 1/3 of the IRS work force.
But you know, both sides are the same, right?
Correct. Their donors allowed only a temporary, token gesture they knew could be immediately undone.
Dems get to look like they did something, Rs get to look like they did something, no actual progress is made, and the march of tyranny continues.
Yeah it’s called capitalism not poorism.
it’s almost like the rich are the ones actually running the country
just fucking stop. everyone, all of you, together. just stop.
We can’t. Taxes are deducted automatically by employers. Tax season is really just “donation season” for the tax preparation industry
Isn’t there something with exemptions you can do to you don’t send them money ahead of time?
Yes there is. You can claim however many you need to make sure nothing is automatically removed. Most people can’t budget though so it’s a bad idea in general when they get that huge bill once a year.
However talking about not paying anymore? Yep, go for it. I’m tempted to just pay my local and property taxes and say fuck federal taxes until shit improves.
Not unless you had a $0 tax liability the previous year.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
How do I stop paying taxes? They are automatically deducted from my paychecks before I see any money myself. Also stores will refuse to sell to me if I don’t pay sales tax.
Assuming you’re on a W2, add deductions until your tax per paycheck is 0. You’ll get a bill for the full amount next time you file. You’re free to not pay it, get charged huge fines, and possibly end up in federal prison like Nico198x apparently wants you to.
They can also just empty your bank account, and then possibly send you to federal prison. No big deal
Good point, I forgot about garnishment
Isn’t there something with exemptions you can do so you don’t send them money ahead of time?
And yeah, only income tax do you have any control over.
Yes, v you can adjust your w4 withholding deductions with your employer. But there’s a penalty for underpaying to specifically prevent you from doing this. And unlike for rich people, w2 worker audits can be done basically automatically without any human input because it’s super easy to calculate, as your employer tells the IRS how much you earned that year
So you have an option.
None of this is ever going to be easy.
Yes, you have the option of going to prison for tax evasion.
Don‘t elect pro capital governments, then.
Which one of the 2 parties is that?
The issue afaik is that Jeff bezos’s $200B is in assets like stocks, and the buy borrow die strategy of getting loans using assets as collateral lets rich people spend money without actually cashing in said assets which would trigger capital gains taxes. Idk how to stop this prevalent strategy but between that and the corporate tax system ignoring money that goes back into the company letting corporations invest their profits to ignore taxes that’s why so few taxes are collected on those groups. Feel free to correct anything inaccurate.
I think an easy solution could be to start seizing anything over something like 100 million total value, with the value updating once every few years (otherwise people dumping their houses and stock would trigger devaluation enabling them to keep more than they should)
Seems pretty simple to me. Tax the collateral loans as income. And don’t allow the interest repaid to be tax deductible.
Be better to ban loans on financial assets. These are loans against stocks/bonds etc that they commonly use. In order to get a loan it has to be against a physical asset. Also set firm limits to how much any physical asset can be leveraged.
You’re kind of suggesting two different things there. Should loans on financial assets be banned, or should the amount able to be leveraged be limited?
Either would have massive unintended consequences. Mortgages on homes as well as secured car loans would have to be either discharged and re-applied or the terms redrawn. They could also be forgiven, but then every financial institution would go bust or the government would have to step in and shell out insane amounts of money. It would at least cause another GFC, if not a global depression, if done quickly.
I’m not discounting the idea necessarily, but it’s always important to consider the unintended consequences of a simple idea.
Tax wealth the same way it’s already taxed with estate and inheritance taxes. If the person doesn’t have enough liquidity, they can sell the assets, like regular people already have to do often to pay the estate taxes.
It’s called fiduciary duty
Wait what?
Oprah was a web dev back in her hippy days, and now her ex (Pope of her sect) wants her to man up and do her job.
