What about loans against assets like houses? I wouldn’t consider simple house owners necessarily rich and they should be able to get a mortgage without penalty.
Exclude a mortgage for your primary residence, capped at the median house price or something… And only exclude it IF it is paid back in full over a max period.
This is the case in the Netherlands… paid back in full after max 30 years… No cap in how much. This was because the interest on the mortgage are tax deductible. So some bankers figured… we keep the loan maxed, and put your paybacks in a special fund… and at the end of the 30 years the fund pays back the mortgage. That way we get max interests and you get max tax break. In the end the banks made a lot of public funds private this way.
You know, you can just do things. Like, laws don’t need to be applied unilaterally. You can, at the same time, tax a 100,000,000 dollar loan, and not tax a 1,000,000 dollar loan.
Kind of like how generally, low income people do not pay much or any income taxes, or how certain products are subject to additional sales taxes.
There were tax evasion schemes in the UK where wealthy people could take loans from an offshore entity they contributed to and never pay the loans back. But this was shutdown fairly quickly by HMRC (British IRS) and a bunch of people were fined / went to jail. Don’t know if the same is true in America?
So then you just have frequency, which is easily gamed by getting fewer larger loans. Maybe one every three to five years? At that point it really is just a mortgage with stock as collateral rather than a house.
Like, you’re not wrong in your intuition that the system is problematic. Mine (and others) point is that the devil is in the details, and they’re not trivial.
But then the value goes WAAY up. Let’s assume you live in a very good house, and mortgage it you’re able to get 5 million out of it. Do you think someone like Jeff Bezos could live for 5 years with that?. You can do it fairly straightforward, everytime you take a loan, the full amount of that loan gets added, after a period of 5 years that value disappears, if at any point that value goes above 10 million, you start paying taxes on it. And the higher it goes the more tax you pay on it, just like how income tax has brackets, and just like how up to certain values are exempt.
For you or me if we were ever loan 10 million over 5 years we wouldn’t have a way to pay it back. For an Uber wealthy they do that fairly quickly, Bezos mention costs 600k a month, so he’ll get into the first bracket from just that in a year and a half.
People need to realize just how big the gap is, there are plenty of ways to tax extremely rich people without affecting the middle class by just putting the bracket so high up that it’s impossible for a middle class to reach it.
While the ultra wealthy don’t have billions on hand, they do take loans against their assets, which we could tax more.
Should. They should be taxed extremely heavily to try and stop that loop hole and abuse of power.
What about loans against assets like houses? I wouldn’t consider simple house owners necessarily rich and they should be able to get a mortgage without penalty.
Exclude a mortgage for your primary residence, capped at the median house price or something… And only exclude it IF it is paid back in full over a max period.
This is the case in the Netherlands… paid back in full after max 30 years… No cap in how much. This was because the interest on the mortgage are tax deductible. So some bankers figured… we keep the loan maxed, and put your paybacks in a special fund… and at the end of the 30 years the fund pays back the mortgage. That way we get max interests and you get max tax break. In the end the banks made a lot of public funds private this way.
You know, you can just do things. Like, laws don’t need to be applied unilaterally. You can, at the same time, tax a 100,000,000 dollar loan, and not tax a 1,000,000 dollar loan.
Kind of like how generally, low income people do not pay much or any income taxes, or how certain products are subject to additional sales taxes.
Why? Are any loans ever taxed?
There were tax evasion schemes in the UK where wealthy people could take loans from an offshore entity they contributed to and never pay the loans back. But this was shutdown fairly quickly by HMRC (British IRS) and a bunch of people were fined / went to jail. Don’t know if the same is true in America?
If a loan is acting as income (like it does for the ultra wealthy) then it should be treated like income and taxed accordingly.
And what exactly is the difference between a loan and a loan acting as income?
Those loans are often several times more than the yearly income and done more frequently.
How do you establish that a loan is or isn’t “acting as income”?
Those loans are often several times more than the yearly income and done more frequently.
My mortgage was many times my yearly income.
So then you just have frequency, which is easily gamed by getting fewer larger loans. Maybe one every three to five years? At that point it really is just a mortgage with stock as collateral rather than a house.
Like, you’re not wrong in your intuition that the system is problematic. Mine (and others) point is that the devil is in the details, and they’re not trivial.
But then the value goes WAAY up. Let’s assume you live in a very good house, and mortgage it you’re able to get 5 million out of it. Do you think someone like Jeff Bezos could live for 5 years with that?. You can do it fairly straightforward, everytime you take a loan, the full amount of that loan gets added, after a period of 5 years that value disappears, if at any point that value goes above 10 million, you start paying taxes on it. And the higher it goes the more tax you pay on it, just like how income tax has brackets, and just like how up to certain values are exempt.
For you or me if we were ever loan 10 million over 5 years we wouldn’t have a way to pay it back. For an Uber wealthy they do that fairly quickly, Bezos mention costs 600k a month, so he’ll get into the first bracket from just that in a year and a half.
People need to realize just how big the gap is, there are plenty of ways to tax extremely rich people without affecting the middle class by just putting the bracket so high up that it’s impossible for a middle class to reach it.