IRS records reveal how the wealthiest avoid income tax

Re:IRS records reveal how the wealthiest avoid income tax by jameshart on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @09:01AM (#27434570)

They explicitly calculate it based on increase in wealth, rather than total wealth, which seems like a reasonable substitution.

If you look at Scrooge McDuck's giant pit full of gold coins, and even though the pipe flowing into the room marked 'income' doesn't have any coins rolling down it into the pile, but the pipe heading out marked 'expenses' seems to be steadily draining coins... and yet the pile of coins is somehow still getting bigger...

.... maybe you have to accept that just looking at what's going on in that income pipe isn't giving you the whole picture.

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Re:IRS records reveal how the wealthiest avoid income tax by Kalium on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @09:38AM (#27435012)

You're completely right on both counts. That's precisely what they do. Income is definitely not the whole picture.

I don't disagree with anything you've written here. I just think that conflating growth in value of assets and liquid cash is misleading, and using a snappy sloganeered idiom to do so compounds the error. That this is done in pursuit of illustrating an absolutely critical and nuanced political point about finances makes it, in my opinion, all the more important to be clear.

I recognize that this is a position with which reasonable people might differ.

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