2212
Massachusetts passed a 4% millionaire's tax last year. Now every public school student is going to get free lunch
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
2212 points (98.7% liked)
News
22839 readers
4560 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Don't let anyone tell you high income earners don't pay tax. I'm a CPA (tax) and most of my individual clients are high and ultra high net worth.
One of my biggest clients is a group of four hedge fund managers in NYC for example. They earned about $50 million each in the last few years. Idk what their net worths are but I'd imagine it's at least a few hundred million each. They pay at least 37% federal, plus investment income tax (Obamacare), plus 10% to the state of NY plus NYC. It's a lot and winds up being over $25 million a year. I don't shed any tears for them because they are left with $25 million to play with (each, per year), which they should be able to scrape by on.
You can certainly argue it should be higher or lower or whatever but there's this idea out there that wealthy people don't pay tax and it's just absurd. Also frankly it makes my job harder because people think I'm a magic anti tax wizard that just makes it go away, I'm just sitting here like you made a fuckton of money and owe a fuckton of tax, what's the question? ¯\(ツ)/¯
Do you ever get a sense of whether your clients 'get' just how disproportionate there income is compared to the median?
According to this $50 million puts them comfortably in top 1%, receiving median annual US income in just under two hours (if my math is good:
(40*52)*(46,001/50000000) = 1.91?).Yeah it's really hard to see that in the context of kids literally starving.
Regarding your question, it's a mix. I would say many if not most understand they are extremely successful and fortunate. The variance is how out of touch they are. Some are incredibly generous, while others are grumpy or miserable. Some actually want higher taxes, some are Scrooge types.
I once had an UHNW individual who consistently donated so much to charity that he exceeded deduction limits. I had to research ways to optimize his giving, which was refreshing.
Then there was a trust fund beneficiary worth at least $100 million, a really nice guy who lived modestly, bought the whole office lunch and dressed casually. Very down to earth. We were in the process of setting up a charity trust for him before I left that firm.
Other end of the spectrum, I had a paranoid and unstable client who repeatedly pushed us to do unethical and illegal things, making everyone uncomfortable. We fired him even though he was a ~100k/yr client for us. Easy decision.
All kinds really.
Thanks for the answer to my question! I did not really look into this for a few years. And those that I did were when I really got into US politics. Thankfully I did 180 on that, but my knowledge from that time is untrustworthy to say the least.
Your answer really clarified and added a lot rather than repeating what others said, along with it being from a professional, which is well appreciated. So again, thank you and the others for taking the time to answer my question.
The issue is more likely that taxes aren't being used in ways that benefit the public, like they are in other countries. But also many Americans don't want that because grrr filthy socialism