Subject: Re: Biden's billionaire tax rate fact checked
For lots of reasons, we do (and perhaps should) exclude unrealized asset gains from a formal definition of income subject to taxation - but an informal understanding of how much of billionaire's "earnings" are actually paid in taxes doesn't require us to pretend that massive increases in personal wealth in unrealized holdings don't exist.

First of all, the "estate tax" eventually taxes everything (over $11 Million, so essentially everything for a billionaire) at 40% when the billionaire dies. You can think of it this way:

When a billionaire dies,
1) for tax purposes, all unrealized gains are realized, write down that number and hand over 40% of it for estate taxes
2) Heck, while we're catching up on your deferred tax liability from having unrealized gains, write down all the rest of your wealth that you already paid taxes on, and hand over 40% of THAT TOO as estate taxes.

So dynastic wealth above $11 Million (approximate exemption level from estate taxes) meets a mighty headwind. Not as mighty as a communist revolution where excess wealth is confiscated and you usually wind up with famines killing millions of people because it turns out the people who owned the farmland actually knew a thing or three about farming it. But MORE mighty by far than the income tax, which limits itself to only taxing your income once, and then you can keep whats left over forever. Or actually not forever, as it comes up for re-taxation when you die under the estate tax.

But no, we have AI now which will know how to farm and we won't have to pay it (once we have confiscated it from OpenAI, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tesla, etc etc etc, which we might should do under "capitalism" anyway). So suppose you are a neocommunist who believes that the good reasons you have for wanting to confiscate the wealth of people who are SO OBVIOUSLY more productive than you are will not result in bad consequences because you are a Good Person who, even though you can't figure out how to turn $10,000 into $10,001 with any reliability, will still be competent to chime in on how the population should feed, clothe, and shelter itself.

We still have all the foregone income from not leaving the money in the billionaires hands until they die!

Suppose we had incredibly fair rules that, more or less, prevented the accumulation of more than $10 million or so. Then when a young Elon Musk got paid out for selling Paypal, he would have continued buying McLaren's to play with rather than investing in Tesla.

So what, so a proto-billionaire doesn't invest in Tesla. Well first of all, Musk paid over $11 BILLION in federal taxes in 2021 after realizing SOME of his wealth in order to buy Twitter. If Musk had lived in a fair and just America, he never could have made the wealth that would enable him to pay $11 BILLION in taxes. That is money the federal government would not have to pay out as pork barrel payments to a bunch of necocommunists on welfare.

Thats right. By leaving incredible levels of wealth in the hands of the very tiny minority of people who can turn 10 million into 100, 100million into 1Billion, 1Billion into 10Billion, and 10Billion into 100Billion, the federal government reaps FAR MORE in tax income than if they interrupted that chain of wealth creation in the interests of fairness and justice.

I don't know about you, but I would rather have $2million wealth in an unfair system when Musk is worth 100,000X as much as I am, than to have $20,000 plus a social security check in a fair system where Musk (and Jobs and Brin and Page and Gates and Buffett and Bezos and that Facebook guy) were unable to amass unfair amounts of which allowed them to create ungodly amounts of wealth on which their employees have paid absolute tons of income tax and their customers who had their productivity enhanced by their products have paid another ungodly amount of income tax.

The thing nobody is talking about is that if you have a 40% estate tax, then you WANT the people who can turn 200Billion into 1Trillion to do so, because the amount you eventually harvest from them will be so insanely much higher than the amount you would harvest in a "fair" system that, well, if you could do math or weren't poisoned by envy you would never ever want to limit the growth of human produtivity and its consequent extension of our lifespans and elimination of povery.

Yeah, let Musk and Bezos and the other usual suspects manage the government's money for higher income while they are alive. They will do a MUCH BETTER JOB of that than would the government itself investing in Solyndra and hydrogen fuel cells.

Incoherently yours,
R:)