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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
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A European here. Aside from going in the right direction, I have a question: Don't the rich already pay most of their earnings as taxes? So the problem is not that they are not getting taxed, but rather that they avoid paying them through loopholes? Or is that a billionaire problem?
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.