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Bernie is asking you. That's all hes got. Sorry guys, no one else can do it.
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Yeah, these figures are bullshit manipulation. The 1% "real tax rate" figure specifically comes from a fantasy where we imagine that Jeff Bezos's net worth is his income.
I still hope Bernie Sanders is better than this, but it doesn't look good.
As a concrete example of why this is wrong thinking, let's consider that you buy a very nice house with a lake from a small secluded neighborhood that seems to be dying for $500K. Then let's further imagine that you got so lucky that the house you bought was in the center of a new town that for some reason grows magnificently over the next ten years. Things like that happened all the time in the 1900s.
Your house now in worth $20M. Should you pay income tax for $19.5M even if you don't sell the house?
Being able to hide it in net worth is the bullshit loophole, regardless of it being straight income or not having that net worth affords him the ability to get monstrously expensive things no other person could ever even dream of and he's enjoying that life and everything in it while paying basically nothing in taxes
There probably should be an international wealth tax that's completely unavoidable. Perhaps. Economists seem to disagree on this, but to me it would feel like a correct thing to do.
But saying that Bezos's "real tax rate" is 1% is just manipulative lying.
Bernie: uses bullshit numbers that only applies to the incredibly wealthy
You: uses bullshit numbers that apply to nobody Bernie mentioned
Nobody is buying 500k houses and cashing in on 20m of gains in 10 years. Even if it was, you'd need to do that a few hundred times to be on Bernie's radar.
Effectively, your message is we can't tax only the wealthy because if they did it, everyone else would be destute.
Weird how not taxing the wealthy hasn't made everyone rich.
I assumed this was based on his income, which is probably protected using some borrowing scheme. And for the rest, capital gains taxes are lower than other income taxes.
Counting your primary residence and your ownership of a multi trillion dollar international corporation are different things entirely.
What's the real tax rate for the "have nots"? Is Jeff not the 1%. It's weird to argue he isn't, and given that he is Bernie's statement is true.
Why not tax purchases above a certain dollar amount at a higher rate then? E.g any purchase over 50M has an additional sales tax of 50%, so 75M total. Then you can't really argue that it being their real liquid assets vs more ethereal assets like homes or in Bezos's case stocks makes a difference. If you're buying something that costs $50,000,000, then you definitely have quite a lot of REAL purchasing power and money to spend, regardless of how or where you store it.
You complain about bullshit manipulation, then spread your own blatant disinformation to try support the billionaires??
The "real tax rate" isnt based on a stable net worth, it is based on the increase in net worth over X years (ie. Income), compared against the amount of tax paid over the X years.
If someones house increased in value at a rate of $1M per year, then they absolutely should be paying income tax on that $1M every year. Once it stops increasing in value, then it would no longer be contributing to income, and therefore would not be subject to income tax. It is pretty simple.
That would be a pretty messed up way to tax people. Like, a place becomes more desirable and suddenly all original inhabitants have to leave because they can't afford to pay their "income" taxes? What?
Obviously tax law would have to be more nuanced, if you only own a single house then you can't be expected to sell it just to pay the tax on it, but the tax could accumulate for when/if you do sell it. But someone who owns hundreds of properties which increase in value, could be expected to sell some to pay the tax. The point is to affect people who hide their actual income from taxes like this, just like Bezos does.
Because it is also a messed up way to tax people, to only require people who can't afford these tax evasion strategies to pay income tax.
That's already how tax works on selling a home (in the U.S.) It's called a Capital Gains Tax.
You can't just raise the taxes every year for what a home is worth to the market (I mean, you can, but then if someone has retired you're forcing them to pay more money every year as their home goes up in value). If you're just living off of social security, you don't have that kind of flexibility.