Assuming billionaires were going to get a special tax, how would you actually determine how much to tax them? Sure some would be straightforward like Musk where it’s entirely derived from a few companies with known ownership stakes, but what about all the others?
We don’t even know the names of most of the billionaires. With all the games they can play to hide money, now made even easier thanks to the changes Trump made in his first few months, how would you even figure out who and what amount to tax? They don’t have a normal salary or easily documented income like everyone else.
I’ve heard this before but don’t understand how it works… Eventually they’ll need to pay it off, no? So they sell stocks to pay the loan?
yeah, but by the time you have to pay it back your stock has accrued more value, so you just take out another loan.
Its a buy borrow die strategy. You take loans and refi them to be larger and larger until you die, when you do, the cost basis is reset (so if your cost basis was 1,000,000, but you investments are now worth 20,000,000, your cost basis becomes an untaxable 20,000,000) this new “stepped up” untaxable money (in investments) is used to pay off the debt by selling some assets, lets say 5,000,000 in debt covered by selling (untaxable) investments. This would be for someone with a handful of millions of dollars, I can only imagine what it is like for someone who has hundreds of billions in assets…