update:Democrats vs Republicans vs Woke Chiken rights (debs4) Activist vs Elon

here we see two actors portraying a wokester being followed by Elon Musk into Twitter HQ

 

There's a lot of problems with our tax system and rich people unfairly getting away with lower taxes....but Elon Musk is not the problem - and I am by no means a fan boy or even fan. Options owners will eventually pay the tax on their stock when they exercise the options and when they sell the stock. He paid his tax bill on Paypal when he exited in 2002. What difference does it make to the federal gov't whether he pays his taxes now or in 10 years?

People for get that the value of stock isn't real money. It's not taking cash out of the system. The value of a stock is merely the value someone is willing to pay for it. But that value isn't real money. If Musk were to actually sell all his stock in Tesla for instance, he'd get a lot less than the stock price because the very fact he is selling will lower the price substantially.

 

I really don't care about this guy enough to keep talking about him. I don't idolize him like the 3 amigos. I don't hate him or really care what the hell he does any more than I care

I'm off this merry go round. I don't care enough about him to keep discussing him.

 

We're just talking about him as an example. There are plenty of other entrepreneurs in similar positions.

 

"Inherited Stock" https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/inherited-stock.asp#:~:text=Inherited stocks are equities obtained,die, does not get taxed.

Do you see the problem here?

The ultra wealthy can leverage their stocks for liquid cash through bank loans for their entire lives where it isn't taxed. Any increase in value of said shares when passed on does not get taxed. Call it the "death loophole"

And in the mean time the increase in value probably came from expansion of company and increased production which resulted in increased use of publicly funded infrastructure.

 

I think it's fine to tax inheritance on current value so long as the asset is liquid.

If someone has stock in a private company that has increased in value since the decadent acquired it, then they should not be taxed on it until they sell outside the standard inheritance tax. That might be a loophole to you but to me, I don't think people should be forced to pay a tax on an nonliquid asset's appreciation in value. Ultimately they tax will be paid.

But take an example of a painting one got and then went up in value to obscene amounts. Is it far to continually tax someone on the increased value of that painting that hangs in their living room? What if its a family heirloom that just is increasing value? What if the value then exceeds the amount of liquid cash they have?

Let's say the person who owns the Mona Lisa dies, and gives it to you as an inheritance. It's currently worth like a billion dollars. So should you be taxed on its last sale of 100 million as inheritance tax, and then pay 20% on 900 million? You'd then be forced to sell the painting to pay the tax. Do you see the problem there?

 

The thing about the Mona Lisa growing in value, it doesn't increase the burden on our publicly paid systems. A company like Amazon growing creates massive burdens on our public infrastructure. So the owners of the shares of those companies that benefit from the increase in value of said companies need to somehow pay in taxes the proportional amount that burdened our public systems.

But you see the issue here also. One doesn't ever have to turn their stock assets liquid to get disposable cash to live a wealthy lifestyle because they will just leverage their assets to get loans and then eventually die and their decedents pick up those assets that grew immensely and follow the same pattern and die and so on and so forth.

 

On the first part that's not entirely true. First off the value of a company isn't based on the current size or growth of a company, or the number of people it employs, but rather the expected future state of a company down the road. It's also based on a marketplace so the more people looking to invest will drive the price up.

Secondly, a growing company doesn't put a massive burden on public infrastructure. If Amazon hires 10,000 new employees, either those employees are already living in the area and thus putting a burden on the infrastructure, or they are moving into the area to put additional burden, but they are also taxpayers and thus paying for the burden they place. That's how it works. In fact, a growing company may take pressure off because it reduces unemployment payrolls. This is why a local area may give a tax break to the company because it will recoup the revenue in other ways.

And finally, the deferment of tax can not go on perpetually. Even if you borrow against your stock, that can only be temporary as you have to pay interest on the loan. Eventually that interest will exceed the taxes you would pay and thus make no sense. The only reason to borrow against your stock is multifold:

1. You want to maintain ownership of the company
2. You are not yet eligible to sell that stock based on the rules
3. Selling the stock would greatly reduce the price and cause problems for the company and yourself.
4. You want to be able to invest in new ventures.

Eventually you need to pay the tax versus borrowing cash, for your own financial benefit. But if that cash you are borrowing yields a positive return through building another company and making it more successful, that's a net gain in revenue anyway.

I think when you look at the overall picture of things, taxing people on paper stock values doesn't make a lot of sense.

 

US egg factory roasts alive 5.3m chickens in avian flu cull – then fires almost every worker

Laborers worked for a month disposing of birds killed in a gruesomely inhumane manner. Then they found they too were disposable

Chris McGreal in Rembrandt, Iowa
The Guardian

Labourers at the one of the world’s largest egg factories arrived at the plant in Rembrandt, Iowa, early one morning in March to discover they were about to work themselves out of a job.

As they gathered at the huge barns housing stacks of caged hens, the workers were told to forget about their usual routine of collecting eggs and feeding the birds. Overnight, the factory had begun slaughtering more than 5 million chickens using a gruesome killing method after detecting a single case of avian influenza. Even supervisors were assigned to the arduous task of dragging dead hens out of packed cages as Rembrandt Enterprises raced to contain the spread of the virus, amid the largest bird flu outbreak in the US in seven years.

The culling has been repeated at chicken and turkey farms across Iowa and 28 other states from Maine to Utah. More than 22m birds have been killed in an attempt to contain the outbreak – the majority in Iowa, the US’s biggest producer of eggs. The slaughter of 5.3m hens at Rembrandt is the largest culling at any factory farm in the country.

Workers spent nearly a month pulling the dead poultry from the cages and dumping them in carts before they were piled high in nearby fields and buried in huge pits. The killing over, about 250 people were summarily thrown out of work with just a few dozen skeleton staff remaining.

In the weeks that followed, animal rights protesters targeted Rembrandt’s billionaire owner, Glen Taylor, over the cull, including disrupting games played by the professional basketball team he owns, the Minnesota Timberwolves. But few voices have been raised in support of Rembrandt’s workers, some of them undocumented migrants.

Others fired from the plant contrast the seriousness with which the bird flu outbreak has been taken by Rembrandt’s management to what they describe as the company’s lax approach to the threat to workers from Covid, as it swept through factory farms and slaughterhouses in Iowa and elsewhere.

“Right now everybody’s worried about the chickens,” said Oscar Garcia, a former supervisor at the plant. “We get it: it was really inhumane the way they killed them. But chickens are chickens, right? People worked in those barns pulling out dead birds in terrible conditions, faeces everywhere, doing 12- or 14-hour days.

“They couldn’t protest because then they’d be fired and lose their redundancy pay. Then they’re thrown out of work and no one speaks for them.”

Outside criticism of Rembrandt has focused on the method of killing. Chicken farms have previously slaughtered hens en masse by suffocating them with foam or pumping barns full of carbon dioxide, methods that have been criticized as inhumane.

But Tom Cullen of the Iowa newspaper the Storm Lake Times revealed that birds at Rembrandt were culled using a system known as ventilation shutdown plus (VSD+) in which air is closed off to the barns and heat pumped in until the temperature rises above 104F (40C).

“They cooked those birds alive,” said one of the Rembrandt workers involved in the culling.

An animal rights group, Animal Outlook, used freedom of information laws to obtain records of experiments at North Carolina State University that show that VSD+ causes “extreme suffering” to the hens as they “writhe, gasp, pant, stagger and even throw themselves against the walls of their confinement in a desperate attempt to escape”.

Continued...