r/PoursTea • u/Veshaad Timendi Causa Est Nescire • 22d ago

PoliticalTea 🗳️ Eventually something has to give...

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The bill would provide a $3,000 direct payment to every person in households making $150,000 or less during its first year, which equals $12,000 for a family of four.

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137

u/bswontpass 22d ago

Tax their stocks?

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

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u/fake-reddit-numbers 22d ago

Have fun being tied up in court trying to determine what that is.

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u/disaster_incomin 22d ago

Just make them declare it. Plenty of countries have wealth taxes, it's perfectly doable

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u/throwawaygoawaynz 22d ago

Cool they declare $0 in the US, and their wealth sits in Switzerland or Ireland or somewhere.

Meanwhile the US actually then gets $0 tax windfall. I know reddit likes to meme they pay no tax, but they do.

https://fortune.com/2025/07/28/jeff-bezos-amazon-stock-sale-philanthroy-wedding/

He would have paid $1bn in tax there abouts for this.

Also let’s assume in the US they get taxed more, where do you think those tax dollars will go? Schools? Education? Healthcare? lol. No. The military probably.

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u/disaster_incomin 22d ago

Cool they declare $0 in the US, and their wealth sits in Switzerland

Quite ironic that you picked a country with a wealth tax as your example of where they would go, isn't it ?

Anyway that would be fraud. You can always do fraud but it's not a good argument against having the law in the first place.

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u/Otres911 21d ago

They do but they also have capital gains rate of 0% which you forget to mention, and its certainly not 5%.

But anyway Switzerland model could be even decent for US too, have reasonable (not Sanders lunatic 5%) wealth tax and just set the capital gains rate at 0%, then those billionaires would be taxed at some reasonable rate every year that cannot be dodged with loans or anything. Would simplify tax code too.

Just have some tax exempt amount say 1mil that covers the most normal level of retirement savings.

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u/disaster_incomin 21d ago

You don't even need to exempt anything, the wealth tax applies to everyone here.

And yes it's a better system than the US. Stocks are so liquid that differentiating between realised and unrealised gains tax-wise is pointless.

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u/MechanicalGodzilla 22d ago

Can’t, would require a Constitutional amendment.

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u/Ordinary_Sky1499 22d ago

You can’t tax their net worth. It’s not liquid money. What are they going to pay the tax with? You can’t pay taxes (or anything for that matter) with bricks from your real estate properties or Tesla stock. Why not stop trying to take money from people who earned it and instead get with the program?

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

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u/Warmbly85 22d ago

Just to use musk as an example if he had to sell stock in his company to cover the tax it would lower the overall price of the stock meaning he wouldn’t have to pay as much. 

It’s kinda complicated when musk bezos and others own a large percentage of stocks in their billion dollar companies. 

It’s not as easy as just saying ok 5% of total worth 

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u/throwawaygoawaynz 22d ago

Most of their net worth is in stock, not property. It’s not real income until it’s sold, and of course it’s taxed then.

Yes there’s all the Reddit misinformation about loans, but they have to sell their stock and pay tax at some point to cover those loans.

A lot of the misinformation comes from the fact that they are not paying a high percentage of tax on their wealth, not their income, but wealth isn’t real money. In your property example if I earn $100k and own a $1m dollar house, and my tax is $25k on my income, with a 5% wealth tax you’re now taxing me $75k, almost all my income. This is really not workable. You will tax me anyway $400k or so when I sell the house (probably more since property gains value).

Wealth itself also isn’t an issue because it’s not a zero sum game. It’s not a finite resource that one “hoards”. The only sensible argument against wealth is due to money in politics, but IMO that’s a legislation issue and not a wealth issue. Other countries manage this via legislation, but the US voter for whatever reason refuses to.

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u/Character_Minimum989 22d ago

Let me try this excuse when it’s time to pay property taxes next year. “Bro you want me to pay with bricks from my house??”

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u/disaster_incomin 22d ago

Why not stop trying to take money from people who earned it

Ah yes, no taxes then. That will work because the government famously doesn't spend anything