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BS - Worked with a dozen people over the years on the 1031 deal. Has nothing to do with retirement simply a way of saving a whole lot of taxes. And most of the others listed are run as ways of tax avoidance... perhaps in combination with retirement plans in some cases but not in others.
There are ways to structure compensation to stay in the 15 percent tax bracket so that zero rate on long term capital gains stays. A way to fix that would be to use the total income instead of the marginal tax rate as a determinant of the capital gains tax rate.
Now your just making up numbers you have no basis for.
Sadly, I'm not making up anything. That's how big the problem really is.
For 2015, on average across the entire USA, we consumed just shy of $10,000 per person in health care goods and services. Source: the National Center for Health Statistics: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/hea...penditures.htm
In 2017 we consumed north of $10,000 per person per year in health care goods and services - again, on average and across the entire USA, for each of the 327,322,000 people who live in the USA.
That's over $3.27 Trillion. $3,273,220,000,000, give or take a few billion.
That's how much we collectively consume in health care.
THEREFORE, as surely as night follows day, the insurance premiums to pay for that health care MUST cost north of $10,000 per person per year plus administration and profit. When you add in administrative costs and profit, that gets us to at least $12,000 per person per year for each of the 327,322,000 people in the USA which grows at the rate of about 1 every 15 seconds, netting for births, deaths, immigration and emigration. Source: https://www.census.gov/popclock/
Now - let's imagine a Single Payer system. That Single Payer (the Federal Government) needs to collect $3,273,220,000,000 (give or take a few billion) just to pay all the insurance claims.
Now, on top of that, it needs money to pay for administration. How much? Well, to do all of the work, they'd need to hire lots of people -- about as many as currently work in the health insurance industry. In fact, the easiest way to do things is to just hire every current employee who works for a health insurance company - after all, they are already trained. Then, because it is the Federal Government, you need to factor in some extra overhead and inefficiency.
So how much more? In the best of cases, about another $2,000 per person per year. That gets us to -- surprise -- $12,000 per person per year for each of the 327,322,000 people in the USA. Everyone would need to pay $12,000 per person per year.
Of course, employers would no longer purchase health care insurance on behalf of their employees. Presumably, much of the health care insurance premiums currently paid by businesses would, in a hypothetical Single Payer world, go to employees directly as extra compensation. It would then be subject to Federal Income Tax provisions. What's left will help the employees send in their $12,000 per person per year to the new Single Payer Authority (Federal Government). And somewhat north of $10,000 per person per year would then be paid out to health care providers.
In the real world, Congress would certainly impose a progressive insurance premium system. Those who don't make much money would be subsidized. Those who make more money would pay more - much more.
And none of the above addresses the fundamental issue that Health Care Costs Too Damn Much, and therefore Health Insurance (either Single Payer or the current system) will Cost Too Damn Much plus Administration.
Your numbers are the shocking truth and show the results when a health care system lacks cost control and transparency. I used to live in Colorado and a ballot initiative was proposed in 2016 to set up a state-wide single payer system to cover medical care for all residents. They crunched the numbers and found that even with huge increases in the state's income and sales taxes, the plan was totally unaffordable.
Americans pay 3X to 10X more for health care than citizens of other advanced countries. Until we start to enforce existing antitrust laws and go after the anti-competitive practices of hospitals and insurance companies, we will never get a handle on costs.
Your numbers are the shocking truth and show the results when a health care system lacks cost control and transparency. I used to live in Colorado and a ballot initiative was proposed in 2016 to set up a state-wide single payer system to cover medical care for all residents. They crunched the numbers and found that even with huge increases in the state's income and sales taxes, the plan was totally unaffordable.
Americans pay 3X to 10X more for health care than citizens of other advanced countries. Until we start to enforce existing antitrust laws and go after the anti-competitive practices of hospitals and insurance companies, we will never get a handle on costs.
You are making up statistics. It’s like Fox News.
Most of health care cost is labor cost. The US pays the most. Switzerland comes close and per capita spending on health care is 90% of the US. A bunch of northern EU countries are up near or over $6k per capita. Netherlands. Belgium. Germany. Denmark. Sweden. Norway. Canada has to pay well or their workers would flee to the US.
Comp in US health care is totally out of line with the rest of the economy. It’s across the whole spectrum from the guy pushing the broom in the hospital to the surgeon making 7 figures.
I'd bet the number of them making north of $10M is quite low.
If you want to do the math and add up the total of all health insurance execs making more than, say, $1M, and divide that into overall health costs, it might be interesting.
More interesting than arm-waving about how a few guys are horribly overpaid and that's the problem in a trillion-dollar industry.
Wrong again. You look it up, many were paid way more than 10 miliion per year. LOL at the idea these guys would work for 1m when all the collegues makes way more.
I object to the OP calling calling government obligations entitlements. Follow the law and stop trying to disenfranchise those who gave so much to the system for so many years.
Oh comeon. Some of it is obvious. Carried Interest for instance has been an issue for a while. A small business runs his income into enhancing the value of the enterprise instead of taking it in income. An athlete or an entertainer sets up a personal corporation to collect his revenue. A professional corporation is set up by MDs or Attorneys and wealth is built up in the firm. Real Estate is another place where the income can be taken by enhancing the value of the endeavor rather than as income. Or run a mess of rentals into a final home than live in it for a couple of years and own it for 5. Half a million in tax recovery...a relative has done it three times.
Simple cure is tax all income the same. And you might consider making it all subject to an uncapped FICA to fund entitlements.
Remember the house flipping here in vegas in the early 2000. Eveyone we knew who were in mulitmillion dollar homes were doing it every 2 years. We did it one year, made 1.1 million profit off the house. The agents took about $170,000, we took our $500,00 tax free and in the sales documents included lots(rooms) of furniture we didn't need any more. I had kept all receipts on the furniture as I have always done. Expensive big house expensive furniture. Expensive upgrades. CPA said OK. Paid no taxes on the difference. Basically just got my money back on the upgrades and furniture. But happy to break even on it. One of our neighbors grossed 7 million on his house.
We have a warehouse in another state. Our home is big enough and our business offices takes up a third of it. So 1/3 of our bills are paid with our CPA's blessing. (This is way less than what we would pay if we were renting somewhere.) She's been here to see these rooms are businesses. Many of our neighbors do this too. We are creators and wholesalers. So we can do this since we have no customers coming here. We use lots of other small companies so have 1099's over employees.
How many real estate agents work out of their house. Got a few in our development. Used a very specialized attorney once, (most people would have no use for his services), he worked out of his house. They are all paying a certain amount of their bills, depending on how much room in th house they use, in tax fre money.
You make a certain amount of money, you can take some in captial gain.
Look at the abuse Wall Street does on avoiding taxes.
Here is my post that you responded to. Pay particular attention to the highlighted portion:
My post stands as 100% correct.
Well, you have a point there if "type" is considered as having 20 top lawyers and tax attorneys studying every cent of your income.
However, it is somewhat disingenuous in context - as you seemed to be saying that the "the rich" pay the same as everyone else. No. A newly rich person (lottery winner, etc. or even started a biz and made the big bucks) pays a LOT more taxes than a long term wealthy person who figured out (or his professionals figured out) all the loopholes.
Semantics, I guess. There is a very good reason Trump won't release his returns from the last 10 years. Probably multiple reasons. Also, if you take the money that he gave to the Mormons out, Romney paid as low as 13.6% on tens of millions of income.
I don't think you or I would get that deal....even with the same type.
The point stands IF the point is that the system gives the rich more loopholes, tricks, tax breaks, etc. than it gives even the regular working wealthy (a surgeon).
We have a warehouse in another state. Our home is big enough and our business offices takes up a third of it. So 1/3 of our bills are paid with our CPA's blessing. (This is way less than what we would pay if we were renting somewhere.) She's been here to see these rooms are businesses. Many of our neighbors do this too. We are creators and wholesalers. So we can do this since we have no customers coming here. We use lots of other small companies so have 1099's over employees.
How many real estate agents work out of their house. Got a few in our development. Used a very specialized attorney once, (most people would have no use for his services), he worked out of his house. They are all paying a certain amount of their bills, depending on how much room in th house they use, in tax fre money.
You make a certain amount of money, you can take some in captial gain.
Look at the abuse Wall Street does on avoiding taxes.
Right - it always depends on whether one makes enough money to make the acct. bills worthwhile. That is another place where the regular guy or gal pays more.
For example, I too take a home office deduct. But I own 3 house - and (just as an example, but it's close) I make a living from photography. So when I am in those other states (houses), I am making money. Therefore I should be able to write off a percentage of those houses.
BUT, to do so requires filing tax returns in those states which would eat up most of the savings I would get from the deducts.....
However, if I were a Rich Man (da da da da da da - Fiddler on the Roof song!) - then the accountants fees are tiny compared to the vast amounts I can deduct by using 30% of a Tropical Mansion and expenses as offices.
Advantage=the Top 1%...
I tend to fall into the income bracket where I get hit the hardest...I have written yearly checks over 6 figures for Fed Taxes and I certainly didn't make 6 or 8X that amount those particular years.
Anyway, thread has run off-topic as usual. If we wanted to get entitlement under control we wouldn't have destroyed the possibility of balancing the budget with 1.5 Trillion more borrowed (and more to come).
Trumps health care stuff is gonna raise the entitlement costs...as well as make more people suffer...
So we are going in the opposite direction as we should. It was the perfect time to get the budget under control as we were getting relatively close to balanced compared to former years (Recession-caused). But instead of doing what is right, we did what makes wealthy people even more wealthy. Now THAT'S an entitlement.
That was one of George McGovern's proposals during the 1972 presidential election campaign. He pointed out that it would save the federal government a lot of money to just provide an income floor through the IRS and close all the social service offices. He was a little ahead of his time.
The Negative Income Tax has been an academic topic studied by many over the past decades. It has lots of very good properties. It was originally published in the academic literature back in the 1930s and 1940s, and made its way into public policy debates in the 1940s in England by Lady Juliet Rhys Williams. Indeed, it formally became a plank of the British Liberal Party.
The Negative Income Tax of course was most famously championed in the USA by Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman in the late 1960s and 1970s. Do you remember his regular Newsweek Magazine columns? He had a couple of them supporting the Negative Income Tax back in 1968 when he was still at the University of Chicago.
Most economists -- both liberal and conservative -- like the NIT because of its ideological purity and because of the incentives for work that you can build into it. They also like its theoretical government efficiency, as you point out about George McGovern.
Unfortunately, in the real world, the government can only realize those efficiencies if the NIT actually replaces all the myriad web of other social welfare programs and their employees. The history of the Federal Government is that it almost never replaces a program; it merely adds to and layers upon existing programs.
It is rare to actually kill off a government program, even when it is not needed. Remember the Y2K bug? Well, the Federal Government had a Y2K program office. It survived Y2K, of course, as well as both Bush administrations and both Obama administrations. It was only killed in the summer of 2017, over the objections of many in Congress who represent the districts where the Y2K offices resided.
So in theory, the efficiency of the NIT would be a wonderful step in the right direction - but only if we terminate all the other government programs it would replace and -- more importantly -- terminate all the federal employees in those other programs.
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