Report shows how billionaires including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk pay little to no taxes

[sdms96825]

you do know that the value of a stock changes daliy right, if you buy 1 single stock for 1$ in 2018 and in 2021 it could be worth 10$. I only spent about 180k on all my stocks. I will lay out what I got if you. In 2018 my salary was around 65k a year and this year its 73k.

2012 shares of UBER with average of $32
1800 shares of SPCE with average of $17
1600 shares of CGC with average of $18
3110 shares of CCL with average of $21

if you want to you can do a little research to find out how much its worth. ohh I did take a personal loan to buy CCL last year daring the crash last year, still owe 10k on that might be paid off before December.

To buy $180K of stock over 3 years is NOT a few hundred a month -- it is $5K a month. You ain't middle class bro.

 

[dustin_ds3000]

To buy $180K of stock over 3 years is NOT a few hundred a month -- it is $5K a month. You ain't middle class bro.

never said I did a few hundred a month. I had 70k saved from my time in the Army. and middle class income is 40,100 to $120,400 for 2018 in a recent Pew study.

 

[hwertz]

I'm not sure why journalist try to write articles about this like it's a shock or even a bad thing. The rich invest a large amount of money into business which grows the economy. It makes sense to encourage them to do so by not over taxing them. Take any previous jobs you had. I'm sure you worked a job at some point where you made very little and had to budget according to your income. Once you got a better paying job you were able to spend more without concern for jeopardizing your financial security. Same applies to this on a much larger scale. They have more so they can spend more with less pressure about the decisions to do so.

So, to me you appear to have made an argument for exactly the opposite of your conclusion. If someone being lower paid has to watch every penny they spend (and they generally do), then that aruges towards lowering their tax rate to help ease their budgetary worries, and have more to spend pumping money into the economy in general. I can say, my first job, my taxes, social security, etc. was like 40%, and THIS caused most of my budgetary worries.) This argument also points towards going ahead and taxing the wealthy at a much higher rate than the couple percent the pay now, since (by your own argument) they don't have to budget to avoid blowing their financial security anyway.

The middle class is the backbone of America and should front the most tax.

In a sense, as they are the largest group in the US. But this in no way means the wealthy should be paying near-0 as they are now, or that the numerousness of the middle class means they are in any position to fairly support the gov't spending on their own. The wealthiest 1% hold 30% of the US wealth (that's a recent figure); as of 2016 the top 20% had 80% of the wealth (and the wealth inequality has been increasing in recent years so that's probably closer to 85% now.)

However, as stated in previous comments, the government spending is out of control. Politicians spend spend spend and they don't even use our taxes wisely with that spending. There are countless programs being funded by tax dollars that many would consider frivolous and not in the interest of the majority of Americans.

This part's true, agreed 100%. Both main parties support their pet projects, they both falsely claim it's the other main party's fault and claim they want to cut spending (they don't, they want to cut the other main parties pet projects, while spending more than that'd save on other pet projects of their own.) I'm not a "take it all down to zero" libertarian, but I am one in the sense that spending is out of control, and pressure should at least be put on both main parties to reign in the spending "just a tad".

That being said I don't care if the rich are not paying taxes because they create economic growth which strengthens the country.

I do. I work hard for my money, and it's absurd that I have to pay 30 or 40% into taxes, while someone making 100-1000x the income (I mean real income, I'm being fair and not counting the stock, but they get millions a year in actual pay too...) can pay $0.

 

[Phashar]

Well, that is what I keep saying: taxes also have to be paid on stock market transactions. Selling and re-selling stocks has to come at a higher price than it does now. Split-second transactions should have even more taxes on them. Anyway, I am in favour of actually including employees in stocks. They work for the companies, make sure that it runs smoothly and thus help the stock owners make a profit. So a fair share of the stocks should be available to the employees of the companies, at a discount, or even for free.