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Musk Secretly Used Starlink to Foil Ukrainian Drone Attack on Russian Ships
(www.thedailybeast.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Is that just liquid assets, or do you also want to tax them on stock they own in companies?
Honestly I don't know. It's really more the sentiment that I'm expressing. I'm aware that the wealthy are very good at playing shell games. No measures would catch everything.
You can definitely tax the hell out of dividends and sales. They are free to hold as many imaginary value tokens as they like, but the second they try to convert those tokens into actual currency, that should be heavily taxed. This goes for stock as well as cryptocurrency/NFTs.
They use loans currently to get cash against their assets.
Where do they get the money to pay off those loans?
There are lots of ways to sell assets in specific scenarios to reduce tax burden or eliminate the tax rate to 0%. For example, a billionaire can take a loan and pay the interest only for years. Then in a year with losses on investments then can sell some assets to pay off the loan and pay no taxes.
Except if the money they are using to pay the interest and the money received from the sale of those assets is taxed appropriately. Interest on business loans should not be deductible, nor should investment losses. The government is not responsible for their poor business decisions. Of course, there can be delineations for investment loss write-offs based on total gross income from all sources. A small business owner or an individual that holds an investment account with an AGI under $1million or so would reasonably still have access to such write-offs or deductions, but anything over that $1million per year is free game, losses or not.
I agree with your assessment.