All I’m saying, is that I wouldn’t divorce you for $27,000… a million maybe, but not 27K.
My husband, in regards to a couple who divorced to save $27K a year due to the new tax laws. (via thakate)
I believe I said “I wouldn’t divorce you to save $27,000.” This was in regards to a couple in the news last evening who each make $400k (so, $800k joint income) and they are getting divorced (but staying together) to file as individuals to save themselves $27k on their joint tax bill.
Sorry, but that’s fucking ridiculous.
As I said, I’d consider the move if we could actually save a million dollars on our taxes. This was an obviously easy promise to make, since we’re about a million miles away from being able to save a million dollars in taxes.
But, yes… xo.
Ben Stein goes on Fox News, and in 2 minutes eviscerates the entire GOP platform regarding taxation and spending. Every single talking point the hosts bring up is immediately shot down and then the segment is abruptly ended.
Wow.
WOW.
What Business Is Wall Street In?
The only people who know what business Wall Street is in are the high frequency and automated traders. They know what business Wall Street is in better than everyone else. To traders, whether day traders or high frequency or somewhere in between, Wall Street has nothing to do with creating capital for businesses, its original goal. Wall Street is a platform. It’s a platform to be exploited by every technological and intellectual means possible.
The best analogy for traders? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, high frequency traders do the same thing. A hacker wants to jump in front of your shopping cart and grab your credit card and then sell it. A high frequency trader wants to jump in front of your trade and then sell that stock to you. A hacker will tell you that they are serving a purpose by identifying the weak links in your system. A trader will tell you they deserve the pennies they are making on the trade or the rebate they are getting from the exchange because they provide liquidity to the market.
I recognize that one is illegal, the other is not. That isn’t the important issue.
The important issue is recognizing that Wall Street is no longer serving the purpose that it was designed to. Wall Street was designed to be a market to which companies provide securities (stocks/bonds), from which they received capital that would help them start/grow/sell businesses. Investors made their money by recognizing value where others did not, or by simply committing to a company and growing with it as a shareholder, receiving dividends or appreciation in their holdings. What percentage of the market is driven by investors these days?
What the GOP’s single largest donor would save under Mitt Romney’s tax plan
- Romney’s tax plan would personally save Sheldon Adelson a total $2.3 billion in taxes.
- It saves Adelson approximately $1.5 million in tax cuts on his CEO salary.
- In one year, Adelson could more than earn back his $100 million in political donations, since Romney will save him $120 million on dividend taxes.
- His casino company would get $1.2 billion in tax cuts.
- By eliminating the estate tax, Adelson would get a $8.9 billion windfall for his heirs.
I’m not really into the whole classwarfare-richpeoplesuck game that lots of people seem to enjoy playing every four years… but, um, wow.
Can we stand back and pause a short minute to take in the spectacle of a man who wants to be President of The United States, who wants us to seriously regard him as a paragon of the American civic ideal, declaiming proudly and in public that he has paid his taxes at a third of the rate normally associated with gentlemen of his economic benefit.
David Simon - creator, The Wire
Mitt Romney paid taxes at a rate of at least 13 percent. And he’s proud to say so.
Source: davidsimon.com
The Romney tax returns are a prime example of our increasingly two-tiered bureaucratic system, in which there is one set of rules for poor and middle-class people, and another set of rules for people like Mitt Romney. The most common method of giving preferential treatment to the rich is through semantics. The old classic was that you called a rich kid blowing coke in his dorm room one thing, and you called a black street kid smoking crack something else, and the two got different penalties for the same crime – cocaine use. Or, and this one is still true in some states, the rich white kid who uses a fake ID to get into a club gets hit with a misdemeanor and a fine, while an immigrant who uses a fake ID to get a job at a chicken plant gets dragged in for a felony and can get up to 15 years in jail. Both offenses are simple forgery, but one is also called felony fraud and you get real prison time for it. In Mitt’s case, the money you and I make to support ourselves is called income and is taxed up to 35 percent, but the money Mitt makes raiding companies with borrowed money and extracting draconian management fees from captive companies that have no choice but to pay them is called “Carried Interest,” and taxed at a top rate of 15%.
If you are a so-called job creator in the country, even if the jobs you create are in India or China, you are legally entitled to wonderful things like offshore tax havens…or $77,000 in business deductions for dressage horse competition expenses. Yeah $77,000 tax break to send your horse to the fucking prom. Here’s what Romney doesn’t get. Nobody cares that Mitt Romney is rich. It’s Romney’s inability to understand the institutional advantage that he gains from the government’s tax code largesse, that’s a little offensive to people, especially considering Romney’s view on anyone else who looks to the government for things like, I don’t know, food and medicine.
At the beginning of the last decade, the wealthiest Americans received a huge tax cut in 2001 and another huge tax cut in 2003. We were promised that these tax cuts would lead to faster job growth. They did not. The wealthy got wealthier. We would expect that. The income of the top 1 percent has grown by more than 275 percent over the last few decades to an average of $1.3 million a year. But prosperity sure didn’t trickle down. Instead, during the last decade we had the slowest job growth in half a century. And the typical American family actually saw their incomes fall by about 6 percent even as the economy was growing. It was a period when insurance companies and mortgage lenders and financial institutions didn’t have to abide by strong enough regulations, or they found their ways around them. And what was the result? Profits for many of these companies soared, but so did people’s health insurance premiums. Patients were routinely denied care, often when they needed it most. Families were enticed and sometimes just plain tricked into buying homes they couldn’t afford. Huge, reckless bets were made with other people’s money on the line. And our entire financial system was nearly destroyed.
Zakaria: America needs a 2-page tax code
“America has what is arguably the world’s most complex tax code. The federal code plus IRS rulings is now 70,000 pages long. The code itself is 16,000 pages. The statist French, for example, have a tax code of only 1,909 pages - only 12% as long as ours. And then there are countries like Russia, the Czech Republic, Estonia that have innovated and moved to a flat tax, with considerable success.
You have to understand, complexity equals corruption.
When John McCain was still a raging reformer, he used to point out that the tax code was the foundation for the corruption of American politics. Special interests pay politicians vast amounts of cash for their campaigns and in return they get favorable exemptions, credits or loopholes in the tax code.
In other countries this sort of bribery takes place underneath bridges and with cash in brown envelopes. In America it is institutionalized and legal but it is the same thing: Cash to politicians in return for favorable treatment from the government.
The U.S. tax system is not simply corrupt, it is corrupt in a deceptive manner that has degraded the entire system of American government. Congress is able to funnel vast sums of money in perpetuity to its favored funders through the tax code without anyone realizing it. For those who despair at the role of money in politics, the simplest way to get the corruption out of Washington is to remove the prize that members of Congress give away - preferential tax treatment. A flatter tax code with almost no exemptions does that.
The simplest fix to our tax code would be to lower the income tax dramatically, lower the corporate tax, and instead raise revenues through a national sales tax, or a value-added tax (VAT).
The U.S. is the only rich country in the world without a national sales tax. Germany has one at 19%, Britain at 20%, Korea at 10%.
What’s the appeal of a consumption tax?
First, it is efficient. Most studies, including one by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), suggest that the federal government loses several hundred billion dollars a year to tax fraud. This is much tougher to pull off with a consumption tax. Second, it provides the government with a more stable form of revenue than income taxes. Income taxes fluctuate greatly between boom and bust years. Third, American’s consume too much, often using credit and leverage to do so. A consumption tax would moderate this behavior. Government will always get less of a behavior it taxes and more of what it subsidies. […]
But the best thing about tax reform is that it kills corruption. So if you ask me what kind of tax code I am in favor of, I am in favor of almost any new tax code that fulfils one requirement: It should fit on two pages.”
Yes, please.
