They're Coming After Everything BUT Gold This Time

This is why I am stockpiling belly-button lint !

 

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Very few paid those tax rates, though, esp. with all the deductions.

The biggest users of tax shelters ? Not businessmen...not Wall Street types...but Hollywood stars !! THEY were the big earners back before the 1970's. The tax shelter sellers said that they practically lived out in Bel Air, Beverly Hills, etc....that's who bought most of their shelters.

Johnny Carson was deferring over 90% of his gross paycheck for tax purposes. I think his accountant must be working for Shohei Ohtani today !!

 

Retail must be buying gold and silver the last few years otherwise I don't think we'd all be seing all those TV commericals plugging them this entire time....U.S. Gold...Roslyn Capital...plus the 1/2 hour infomercials on the weekends.

 

Since discovering (through TV) that a re-modeled walk-in shower is Nirvana, I no longer watch TV.

 

The answer is simple give everything to your kids before you die !

 

Finally! I am glad we have a thread where we can discuss this! Back in the "good ole days" when the "rich" paid 90% income taxes, they forgot to mention tax loopholes big enough to drive 18 wheelers 5 wide through the tax code with zero taxation, which were closed many years ago. And that's all I gots to say about that.

 

End thread/ lol...........nailed it!

 

Well, it's certainly a good thing that tax loopholes have been abolished, leaving all high earners paying their fair share of taxes at the top bracket rate.

 

Ironically, if it weren't for all of those bad guys, there would be little tax receipts in the coffers to begin with.

 

Bob Hope, Barbara Stanywick, and lots of other high-earners (male and female) had to have the shelters.

Otherwise, they'd keep maybe 20% tops of their $$$. Stanywick was the highest-earning woman (or actor, male or female) a few years running making $500,000 a year.

 

Believe it or not, if you go over the IRS data, they are.

In the 1960's, the Top 50% of wage earners paid about 85% of the income taxes (bottom 50% paid about 15%).

Today, the Top 50% pays about 97% and the Bottom 50% about 3%.

 

There is a push in California now to tax the value of your net worth. The politicians claim that they are only going after billionaires, but history has told us how that works. They get their foot in the door with the tax, and they start lowering the threshold until it gets to middle class people.

Let’s say you own a house and have some gold and retirement portfolio of stocks and bonds. If gold and the stock market is up, you could get hit with this new tax. What if the stock market and gold goes down, the next year. The government is not going to re-imburse you for that. If fact if you are over the threshold, you could get taxed again, in addition to what you are already paying in income, sales and FICA taxes.

And, yes, here in Florida, it does not take much to have a house that is said to be worth $500,000. One of the big problems is that the builders are not constructing houses that are worth a few hundred thousand any more. It makes it tough for young, first time home buyers.

 

It's time for a major readjustment of how we look at home prices and home equity. At this point, you have to be relatively well off to buy a house in many markets - or, conversely, if you "own" a house, you're relatively well off, whether or not you know how you're going to pay for your next load of groceries.

As for "net worth taxes", I recall that my wife's parents had been considering retiring to North Carolina, but were put off by the state's "intangibles tax", a tax on stock holdings inversely proportional to the company's exposure to NC taxation. (In other words, if the company didn't pay taxes in NC, stock in that company would be taxed.) This was a tax on holdings, not on earnings. It was ruled unconstitutional and repealed before my wife and I moved here.

If you want to look at that as an example of "driving wealthier people out of state", I won't stop you, although my in-laws' "wealth" was certainly not extravagant.

 

Florida had one of those taxes before I moved down here. It was repealed because many retirees have stocks and it was hitting them.

 

I think the constitutionality argument was based on the Commerce Clause. The tax was enacted in 1976, and not fully repealed until 1995 if I'm reading things correctly. I'm a bit surprised that it took that long; seems like it would have most strongly affected the folks with the loudest political voices.

 

We used to have intangibles taxes in Florida many moons ago. It was mostly an administrative nuisance tax unless you owned millions of dollars of securities. It was repealed many years ago, as well as tangible inventory taxes. All of it was stupid, just a way to fleece small businesses.

 

Kathy Hochul, governor of NYS, pleading with wealthy ex-NY'ers to return to NYS to help fund her entitlement programs after chasing them out by taxing them to death. I guess she learned that she does need those she so flippantly dismissed a few years ago.

https://x.com/MattWhitlock/status/2...kathy-hochul-wealthy-come-back-to-ny-n2673055

 

That's unreal....taxes need to be simple and efficient and a tax like that is almost comical in going out of it's way to be the opposite.

A tax like that might have been around for decades when NOBODY (directly) owned stocks or bonds. But today, 60% of the country directly owns them...and if you add indirectly (pensions, 401Ks) it's up to 90% or more.