Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth!

[Parsad]

Most of you know how I rip the right for many of their stupid policies and moves, but here's one that the left is equally culpable of.  What a stupid article! 

 

I'm sure the left would prefer if the rich just passed the money on to their irresponsible children and nepo-babies!  Cheers!

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/column-300-million-donation-harvard-120002899.html

[rkbabang]

6 hours ago, Parsad said:

Most of you know how I rip the right for many of their stupid policies and moves, but here's one that the left is equally culpable of.  What a stupid article! 

 

I'm sure the left would prefer if the rich just passed the money on to their irresponsible children and nepo-babies!  Cheers!

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/column-300-million-donation-harvard-120002899.html

 

Yep.  He could have donated that $300M to the US Treasury, but thought that Harvard would make better use of it than the United States Federal Government.  I agree.  I always ask leftist how much they donate to the Federal Government every year above and beyond what they have to pay.  I've never found a single person who thought the government could use their money better than they could or a charity could.

 

[Saluki]

If you are going to rip on some ridiculous tax breaks, this is a silly one to pick on, it's a university.  It's well funded already, but it's going towards education. That writer is an idiot. 

 

If this guy really wanted to rail against something he should look at the art "museum" of the Walton heiress or one the Rales' brothers.  It's ostensibly a museum, even though it's not really open to the public. So you have taxpayers subisidizing the costs of acquiring and maintaining your art collection on you property.  Your grandma doesn't a tax break for her collection of tea spoons from every place she visited, but billionaires get the taxpayers to subsidize their art collecting hobby?  

[Castanza]

4 hours ago, Saluki said:

If you are going to rip on some ridiculous tax breaks, this is a silly one to pick on, it's a university.  It's well funded already, but it's going towards education. That writer is an idiot. 

 

If this guy really wanted to rail against something he should look at the art "museum" of the Walton heiress or one the Rales' brothers.  It's ostensibly a museum, even though it's not really open to the public. So you have taxpayers subisidizing the costs of acquiring and maintaining your art collection on you property.  Your grandma doesn't a tax break for her collection of tea spoons from every place she visited, but billionaires get the taxpayers to subsidize their art collecting hobby?  

 

Sports stadiums are up there too 

[scorpioncapital]

I like the article. Most countries have free education, or near free. Also, let's ask how many of these ultra-rich would make these donations without a tax deduction at all. Why should there be any deduction at all to induce ultra rich to make donations? Try an experiment - have 0% deduction and see if donations plummet.

 

[Parsad]

On 4/15/2023 at 5:34 AM, scorpioncapital said:

I like the article. Most countries have free education, or near free. Also, let's ask how many of these ultra-rich would make these donations without a tax deduction at all. Why should there be any deduction at all to induce ultra rich to make donations? Try an experiment - have 0% deduction and see if donations plummet.

 

 

Deductions are an incentive.  You want incentives to be in line with long-term goals of a nation and its citizens. 

 

Donations to institutions aren't solely for education, but R&D grants, which help keep the U.S. at the forefront of tech, development, medicine, etc.  A lot of countries may have subsidized education, but they aren't propelling the world forward.

 

It's the "teach a man to fish" parable...governments generally just give the fish to a group...targeted donations by high net worth/businesses tend to teach a group to fish.

 

Cheers!

[ValueArb]

On 4/15/2023 at 5:34 AM, scorpioncapital said:

I like the article. Most countries have free education, or near free. Also, let's ask how many of these ultra-rich would make these donations without a tax deduction at all. Why should there be any deduction at all to induce ultra rich to make donations? Try an experiment - have 0% deduction and see if donations plummet.

 

 

If you don't personally benefit from some earned income or capital gains, why should you be forced to pay taxes on it? I think that should be a constitutionally enforced principle of income taxation. Its not just for charitable donations, but for things like alimony. Some people don't know this but the Trump tax cuts changed alimony so it is no longer tax deductible to the payer, but is now tax free to the recipient.

 

Imagine you make $200,000 a year, and your stay at home wife divorces you. Now you still have to pay taxes at the $200,000 bracket. while paying her $100,000 a year that is tax free to her. How fair is that when you are only living on $100,000 a year now?

 

Or the taxation of exercised options. If you work at a startup for four hard years and get 100,000 shares of stock at an exercise price of $1, and the company goes public at $10 so you exercise your options. Now you have a $1M "imputed" gain, but as yet have received zero actual cash. If you dwaddle about selling enough stock to pay for taxes (because maybe you believe in your company, or didn't realize it was taxable) and the stock crashes to $4 at years end, you have to sell ALL of your stock to pay a massive tax bill for money you did not and now will never receive.

 

This happened in the internet bubble, where unwitting employees momentarily thought they were rich and exercised their options, but didn't realize the tax implications and ended up without enough stock value to even pay their tax bills. I have one friend who was momentarily worth $20M when he did that, by the time the taxes were due his stock was worth only a couple million, far less than his tax bill. So how did we solve this problem? We didn't change the law to make it fair, the IRS just "ignored" the tax obligations of exercised stock options that year. Which turned out great for one of my friends, but terrible for another one of my friends who was aware of his massive tax obligations and forcibly sold every single share he had before year end at the lowest prices the stock would ever see. If only he had know about the unannounced tax holiday that would be given out.

[Parsad]

On 4/17/2023 at 8:43 AM, ValueArb said:

 

If you don't personally benefit from some earned income or capital gains, why should you be forced to pay taxes on it? I think that should be a constitutionally enforced principle of income taxation. Its not just for charitable donations, but for things like alimony. Some people don't know this but the Trump tax cuts changed alimony so it is no longer tax deductible to the payer, but is now tax free to the recipient.

 

 

That's just ridiculous!  What was the justification for it?

 

Cheers!

[ValueArb]

On 4/18/2023 at 9:00 AM, Parsad said:

 

That's just ridiculous!  What was the justification for it?

 

Cheers!

I can only speculate that it was done because it increased tax receipts. Obviously women’s groups would be for it since usually divorced women would benefit from it.