I keep hearing people say "tax the rich" but how do the rich not pay taxes? (sorry for the dumb question, I don't know much about this)

@ChipmunkErnie What are the loopholes tho?

@Fishy Many things, I guess. Declaring the cost of a yacht as a business expense, perhaps? I'm not rich enough to make use of those loopholes. But if you make say, $500,000,000 and pay no income taxes, I'd say the tax laws need changing. The upper tax rate has gone down steadily since the 1950s, too.

@Fishy One of the big ones is buy, borrow, die. Purchase a shit ton of stocks, use the stocks as collateral to take out a big-ass loan, live off the loan, and eventually die. The capital gains (the money you made from holding the stock) isn't taxed upon death, so whoever you willed your money off to will get lots of cash too.

@BlueVeins Yeah I remember hearing something about that a while ago, but ngl, that still confuses the heck out of me 😂

@Fishy Is it anything in particular?

@BlueVeins I never really understood the whole living of the loan they take out or "good debt" thing that I've heard rich people talk about

I mean, how is that different from the not-rich being in debt?
And how can debt ever be good? debt sucks 😖

@Fishy Rich people pay much less for their debt for completely legitimate reasons, believe it or not. A rich fuck like Bezos is very unlikely to default on their debt because their money is managed carefully, they have more diverse streams of income, they have a ton of resources at their disposal, and they have that collateral if all else fails. For someone like you and me, we might default on our debt if we lose our jobs or get hit by a car.

Thus, it's a lot harder to persuade people to lend to us than to Elon Musk, and we accomplish this by offering said lender more money -- AKA interest.

@BlueVeins yeah, I guess that makes a little more sense...

Still got a lot of learning to do in this area tho

I'm total noob lol 😂