Why not just up the cap on FICA? Over ~$160k people only have to chip in for Medicare and not Social Security.
ILITS are such a fucking joke. Here’s a $5m tax free death benefit outside of my estate!
stop raising taxes on the middle class and make billionaires pay taxes instead imho
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What if it was as simple as this??? (It’s as simple as this)
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AZ is north of $5b
GRATs, ILITs, IDGTs, NING Trusts, Dynasty Trusts - all complete and utter bullshit.
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The billionaires have won the propaganda campaign against the IRS though. So even if (big if) you can get around the headwind that the Dems also depend on money from billionaires so they are not naturally inclined to act against their interests, you run into the problem of this predictable sequence of events:
- Policy to tax billionaires
- Requirement to staff up the IRS bigly to win the ensuing battle with billionaires and their lawyers
- Full court media press attacking the government for increasing the budget of the IRS and telling middle class people that Big Government is coming after them with evil IRS auditors
- Broad popular resistance to staffing the IRS causes cowardly politicians to back peddle
- The new policy is toothless because the billionaires will happily spend millions on legal fees to defend 10s of millions of tax liabilities, and the IRS doesn’t have the forces to combat them.
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Counterpoint: There was $80 billion of extra IRS funding in the Inflation Reduction Act, and billionaires got super mad about it, but it got so little traction that everyone forgot it happened.
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Stonks are up because retail sales are down. Ok!
Republicans really think they have something with “87,000 NEW AGENTS” but anyone not consuming right wing media is just confused by it all
My retail company reported “better than expected” shitty earnings on tuesday. Stonk up 1%. Then stonk drops 3% yesterday. Today back up 2%. Because reasons.
I’m feeling particularly beat down by capitalism today. … We all know that “if you can’t spot the fish” quote. Starting to realize I’m the fish.
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God I feel that
Everyone hates the IRS because Taxes Are Bad, It Is Known, but it’s a bit tone deaf to harp on the TAX MAN against the backdrop of what has been happening in the US since 2020. A global pandemic and inflation and the threat of nuclear war with Russian and Nazis marching proudly in the streets of America were all pretty inconceivable as recently as, like, 2016. The country is spiraling into some kind of dystopian nightmare that the persistent mythology of America can’t overcome. Bleating on about TAXATION IS THEFT stuff is going to get some single issue Republicans excited, but it’s not in the top 5 concerns of most Americans.
Silicon Valley Bank (assets somehow $200B) might go BUSTO, for a number of reasons but mainly because they used deposits to buy long dated treasuries. Which seems like a transparently insane thing for a bank to do!
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Better bail them out government!
Ro Khanna is on it.
I think all financial institutions probably hold some long dated treasuries but if their overall composition of capital was mismatched to their liabilities then yeah that’s a big risk. Bank capital requirements are supposed to mitigate that risk but who knows.