Can someone check my math please?

[Maraya1969]

Last edited Fri Aug 7, 2015, 11:23 AM - Edit history (1)

The problem as I see it is tax breaks to the top .1% and 1% and maybe the top 10%. The top .1% owns 90% of this country's wealth! And you can't tell me that billionaires are going to hurt with an extra 1% on their taxes, (most have their money in funds that they do not have to pay taxes on. Mitt Romney only paid 15% on all his money in the year that he ran for president.)

If the 615 billionaires, (from Google), were taxes just an amount to equal 1 billion (1% or .01% I can't get the number from the calculator) the amount going to the government would be 615,000,000 million.

SNAP - Food Stamps benefits cost the government about 74 billion. And that leaves 541 billion left for the government to spend on roads, education, and a host of other things that we now do not have the money to spend on.

AND WHAT IS SO UNFAIR ABOUT THAT IS, Walmart pays its employees, (along with most of the other box stores) about $8/hour. They are the working poor and they have to get food stamps to eat!

[yeoman6987]

1. I think the problem is the small businesses that would be

Part of it or at least that is their excuse. I am terrible in math...i punt to a smarter DUer.

[Maraya1969]

2. But I am talking about small businesses. I'm talking about

people. I don't know how much a CEO would make in a company with a billion dollar profit.

Of course this does not take into account all the money hidden away in the Cayman Islands

[JayhawkSD]

3. You are talking about what they own, not income.

There is generally no tax on ownership in this country. Local governments tax real property, but a billionaire has a very small portion of his wealth in real property (homes and other real estate) and is paying tax on it at the seme rate that everyone else does. His wealth is in the form of stocks and other financial instruments, and there is no tax on merely holding those.

You are thinking that a billionaire has an income of a $1 billion/year on which he pays income tax, but his income is more likely to be $100 million or so.

[Maraya1969]

4. Thanks

[Oneironaut]

5. Because "They earned every cent of that money!"

Just picture a 5-year-old not letting the other kids near the blocks he hoarded and yelling, "Mine! Mine!" That's what it is.

[Igel]

6. There's a reason a lot of it is called "unearned income."

Note that it's hard to have negative earned income. Earned income is low risk. Often you go in with you and perhaps a small investment, and you take home net revenues. After paying for required expenses--which, oddly, are tax deductible--we have gross profit, then we invest or retain the profit. Some we keep in cash reserves. Others we provide as additional, taxable benefits.

I work. I bring home pay. I spend money on required things--food, shelter. I deduct taxes for a lot of that; "standard deduction," it's called. Other expenses can be deducted at times. Then I wind up with a net profit that gets taxed. I'm a little mini-business. Heck, I can even deduct investment in upgrading my skill set ("education tax credit&quot . What's hard is for me to start off the day and, because I work, lose money. That's not how it works. I may lose my job, but my employer's not going to charge me $300 this week for not doing my job correctly or "pass through" company debt. At most the employer's going to reduce my wages. (This doesn't always hold for those working on commission.)

It's very easy to have negative unearned income. My father saved up $200k one way or another over his 35 years of full-time shift work and invested it. He reinvested any dividends. Some years, later, he sold stocks or got dividends and made money. Other years he sold stocks and lost money or there were no dividends. In 2008/09 he lost a lot of wealth. It was a gamble, so the unearned income tax was less.

My parents had a large source of unearned income that was convenient. They built a house in '63 for $20k. In '96 they sold it for $240k. They moved across the country and bought a nicer house for less money. That particular unearned income wasn't taxable because too many people like having that source not taxed. It was responsible for a lot of their wealth, though. (Along with stock appreciation.)