Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe that the super rich actually have a high conventional income normally. Most of their wealth would be from investments and stock.
A neat trick with that is that they can take out loans against their stock to buy superyachts, governments, and other toys and that’s not only not income, the interest is tax deductible. Plus there are other tricks like S Corps to shield them. So, this isn’t as useful as it would suggest (not that we shouldn’t tax >100m at 99% or something just to make the point.)
It’s called “Buy, Borrow, Die”, and that’s exactly what they do. They buy or inherit assets, hold them indefinitely, because they have no monetary value until sold, and take out loans using those assets as collateral. Then they just pay the interest on the loans, and then play with the money. Southern slave owners were doing a similar thing before Emancipation. The lax rules of Southern banking even allowed them to take out multiple loans on a single slave.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe that the super rich actually have a high conventional income normally. Most of their wealth would be from investments and stock.
A neat trick with that is that they can take out loans against their stock to buy superyachts, governments, and other toys and that’s not only not income, the interest is tax deductible. Plus there are other tricks like S Corps to shield them. So, this isn’t as useful as it would suggest (not that we shouldn’t tax >100m at 99% or something just to make the point.)
It’s called “Buy, Borrow, Die”, and that’s exactly what they do. They buy or inherit assets, hold them indefinitely, because they have no monetary value until sold, and take out loans using those assets as collateral. Then they just pay the interest on the loans, and then play with the money. Southern slave owners were doing a similar thing before Emancipation. The lax rules of Southern banking even allowed them to take out multiple loans on a single slave.
You’re not wrong.
But keep cutting their taxes and they can have more conventional income in addition to everything else.