Tag: tax avoidance

The billionaire tax proposal that’s driving Silicon Valley to support Trump

Posted on by Lone Candle

“When you buy something for one price, and later sell it for a higher price, that’s called a “capital gain.” In tax lingo, you “realize” a capital gain when you ultimately sell the asset. If the asset gains in value without you selling it (e.g., a stock you own rises in price), those gains are “unrealized.”
The capital gains tax in the US has a “realization requirement”: You have to actually sell the asset to be taxed. This creates an easy way for rich people to avoid taxes, by simply waiting to sell.

Imagine a 20-something who starts an internet company called FriendCo with his college roommates. Let’s call him Mark. (While I’m obviously basing Mark on somebody real, I’m going to simplify the real numbers a lot to make it easier to follow.)

At FriendCo’s founding in 2004, Mark and his four roommates each took 10 percent of the company, with the other half to be sold to investors. At the start, their shares were worth $0. But their website took off fast and soon had 1 billion users. The company went public in 2012, at a market value of $100 billion. Mark and his roommates’ shares were worth $10 billion each.

At this point, the company stands still and remains worth $100 billion forevermore (I told you I was going to simplify).

If Mark sells all his shares in 2012 after the company goes public, he’d pay taxes on the amount that the shares increased. They were worth $0 at first, and are now worth $10 billion. The top rate on capital gains in the US is 23.8 percent, so he’d pay $2.38 billion in taxes.

Suppose, instead, Mark decides to keep all his shares until he retires 40 years later, in 2052. Assuming the tax code doesn’t change, he’d still pay $2.38 billion. That, right there, is the problem.

Being able to pay a tax bill decades in the future, instead of right now, is a huge benefit. If I told my landlord that I would prefer to pay my rent 40 years from now, she would not find that very amusing. At the very least she would demand that I pay a lot of interest for paying so late. Other big purchases, like houses and cars, usually do involve paying a ton of interest in exchange for later payments. Capital gains taxes don’t.

The “realization requirement” of the capital gains tax thus functions like a massive, zero-interest government loan to people who’ve gained money on their investments. They’re able to save huge sums in taxes merely by waiting to sell their assets, and not paying any interest while they wait.

This is unfair; if you can afford to wait and not sell, you get a big tax break, but if you can’t afford that, you don’t. But the rule can also cause serious economic harm. By pushing people to hold onto investments longer than they normally would, it keeps them from moving their money to newer investments. That makes it harder for startups and other innovative firms to get the money they need to grow, leading to less innovation and slower economic growth.

The problem is compounded by other aspects of the US tax code. If Mark were to never sell his shares and instead pass them along to his children, they would not have to pay capital gains tax on the gain. In fact, if they were to later sell the shares, they would only pay tax on the difference between the value of the shares when they sell, and the value when they inherited them. (This is called “step-up in basis” or, more evocatively, the “angel of death loophole.”) So if the shares remain at $10 billion, the children can sell them and not pay a dime in capital gains tax. The rich are talented at evading the estate tax, too, so it’s very possible that Mark’s fortune will be completely untaxed.”

…

“The Biden proposal is meant to make the ultra-rich pay more. The strategy is simple: get rid of the realization rule.

For people with over $100 million in assets, the proposal would put in place a new tax regime. For easily sold assets with clear prices, like stocks and bonds and crypto, gains in value would be taxed during the year they happen, whether or not the assets are actually sold. Taxpayers would be able to get refunds if the assets later fell in value.

Andreessen, Horowitz, and other Silicon Valley types fret about what this would mean for startup founders whose companies haven’t gone public yet. These founders may be billionaires on paper but do not have any actual cash with which to pay taxes.

If these VCs had read the fine print of the plan, they’d see that someone in this situation would not have to pay taxes yet. If more than 80 percent of a person’s net worth is in “illiquid assets” like private company shares, they would not have to pay annual tax on those assets. If they sold the assets, they’d pay the tax plus a “deferral charge,” a kind of interest for paying the tax years after they gained the money. Should the company go public or be acquired, the situation would change — but also the newly minted billionaire would suddenly have liquid assets with which to pay their tax bill.

This is all somewhat academic, though, after the Supreme Court’s June 20 ruling in Moore v. United States. While the decision itself concerned a minor provision in the Trump tax cuts, one justice, Amy Coney Barrett, wrote a concurring opinion arguing that realization is required for a capital gains tax to be constitutional. As my colleague Ian Millhiser notes, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion hinted pretty strongly that he’d side with Barrett on the matter, while deferring on a ruling for now.

If the Barrett view has at least five supporters on the Supreme Court, then the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax is dead in the water.”

…

“I do not know of a single honest defense of the angel of death loophole, but unfortunately there are many deeply dishonest defenses. Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) spent much of 2021 claiming that realization at death would obliterate family farms in the Plains, for which she offered literally zero evidence. Alas, the gambit worked.

In theory, though, a future Congress could still close the loophole. They could go further still and pass law professors Edward Fox and Zachary Liscow’s plan to tax the loans billionaires currently use to generate tax-free cash. The most ambitious option would be to add deferral charges to the capital gains tax, so the rich have to pay the government interest when they defer taxes by not selling their assets.”

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/362399/billionaire-minimum-tax-andreessen-biden

The ultrarich are getting cozy in America’s tax havens at everyone else’s expense

Posted on by Lone Candle

“One of the revelations of the Pandora Papers leaked in 2021 was the proliferation of tax havens inside the US. They’re used not just by wealthy Americans but by foreign politicians, business leaders, and criminals as well. South Dakota in particular has become a destination for the wealthy to stash their riches, and it currently hosts more than $512 billion in trusts, according to the IPS report. The ultrarich have parked trillions of dollars in secretive trusts within US tax haven states.
“It’s not just South Dakota, it’s not just Delaware,” said Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies and one of the authors of the tax haven report. “A bunch of states are in the chase.”

The benefit for states is attracting businesses and jobs, but there’s little evidence that becoming a trust-friendly tax haven boosts job growth for states. Populous states like Texas and Florida are getting in on the game, too. It could accelerate what Collins calls a “race to the bottom,” in which more states change laws to attract the trust industry.

A trust is a contract that stipulates what assets one person wants to pass on to another. When assets are put into a trust, the original wealth-holder technically no longer owns them. A third-party entity, known as a trustee, manages the assets for a named beneficiary until the terms of the trust are fulfilled — for example, a parent establishes a trust for their child that will transfer assets to them when they turn 25 or upon the parent’s death. A trust is supposed to end at some point, and ownership of assets is supposed to pass to the beneficiary; it’s a way station for wealth, not the final destination.

Except that a growing number of trusts don’t end. None of the 13 tax haven states has a strict life span limit on trusts. Several states have abolished a rule limiting the life span of trusts altogether. Others set the limit somewhere between 300 and 1,000 years. By carefully setting up a dynasty trust that lasts generations, a wealthy family can avoid paying inheritance or estate taxes for millennia. These trusts often obfuscate who really owns the assets, so they can continue using them — assets like real estate or yachts — or take out “loans” from the trust without triggering gift taxes. The secrecy and confusing ownership structures of trusts are big problems. The government can’t tax something that legally doesn’t belong to a person anymore, and it certainly can’t tax assets that it doesn’t even know exist.”

Here’s why defunding the IRS is the House GOP’s first priority

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The House GOP’s first bill out of the gate doesn’t address inflation or gas prices or immigration, but instead zeroes in on the Internal Revenue Service.
The bill set to be voted on Monday evening — barring a stalemate over approving the rules for the 118th Congress — would reverse much of the $80 billion in extra funding set aside for the agency by 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act.

While it has little chance of being enacted with Democrats in control of the Senate, the prominence of the issue shows just how much the IRS has become a target of Republicans even though experts say the funds in question would go toward more prosaic concerns like helping the agency chase down tax cheats and refresh its shockingly outdated technology.”

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“The claim from McCarthy, which has been echoed by many Republicans, is that the influx of money will lead to a flood of 87,000 new IRS agents who will then harass everyday Americans. Some critics of the agency go even further and claim these new agents will be armed.

But fact-checkers have repeatedly debunked the claims, and the agency itself pushed back in a Yahoo Finance op-ed from then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig in August.

The viral claims are “absolutely false,” Rettig wrote at the time, adding his agency “is often perceived as an easy target for mischaracterizations,” but he promised the new money will not lead to increased audit scrutiny on households making under $400,000.

The plan is instead for much of the money to go toward wealthy tax cheats. IRS estimates of the so-called “tax gap” — the difference between what taxes are owed to the government and what is actually paid — is hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Much of the $80 billion will be focused on taking a bite out of the gap, focusing on wealthy tax payers. The investment is projected to pay for itself and then bring in over $100 billion in increased tax revenue over the coming decade.

In addition, a May 2021 report by the Department of Treasury estimated that more IRS funding could lead to 86,852 new employees, but many of those new employees would not be agents. Many would work in other areas like information technology.

And nearly all new agents would be unarmed.”