Discussion – Johnny Harris: 100 Million vs 100 Billion Net Worth – How the Ultra wealthy live and loophole their way to low taxes

There’s not a lot new there to me. I already knew that campaign donations have a large ROI. I already suspected that the billionaires’ philanthropic organizations were largely tax shelters and I suspect that most of them don’t actually help real people.

I have a thought experiment/question I want to think through: what if I suddenly became a billionaire and I wanted to give most of the money away? How do I even make sure that lawyers, tax people, and nonprofit executives don’t end up siphoning most of it for themselves? Or that they don’t just donate it to other nonprofits creating layers and layers of siphoning?

One that surprised me is that Unrealized Capital gains aren’t taxed when finalizing estates. This means all those capital gains taxes billionaires duck their entire life, are just lost forever when they die and bequeath their holdings. They can earn tens of billions, and never pay taxes on it, and then the slate is wiped clean for heirs to do it again.

Combine that with the loans they take to avoid paying taxes while alive, and they live largely tax free. Borrow billions to live large on while alive and pay no taxes.

Now your heirs are on the hook for those loans. But all that wealth that was untaxed, and growing untaxed is passed on to them completely avoiding potentially tens of billions in Capital gains that are just written off. It’s all reset to zero.

Your heirs could simply continue the process of never paying taxes. They could take out new loans to pay off the old loans, and not have to incur any capital gain to do so, and repeat the process, of growing immense, untaxed wealth, that they enjoy through their life with loans…

Also these loans have ultra low interests rates if you are super rich, like potentially 1% or less.

It’s pretty twisted. But it’s the system put in place by the ultra wealthy controlling congress through unlimited donations, so essentially bribes to further enrich the ultra wealthy.

All they have to do is have them rant about immigrants, brown people, and/or trans people. Then the right wing, ever squeezed middle class and below, will vote against their own economic interest, to further enrich the ultrawealthy, because they are “owning the Libs” by having the government attack people they don’t like.

Not realizing they are owning themselves economically with their easily exploitable bigotry.