The notion that someone keeping what they earn is "theft" while having something forcibly taken from them via taxation isn't, is wild.
I agree everyone should pay taxes, including billionaires, but this is like saying if my neighbor doesn't give me his couch, he's stealing from me. It's just logically (and morally) wrong.
The government gets a percentage of your income, this is the agreement that everyone makes.
For simplicity we only do this when a sale of an asset is made.
Claiming that adjusting this timing is theft is ridiculous, Larry Page has a debt that hasn't come due for his profits is all. Adjusting the timing on the payments of that debt isn't theft.
Per capita the rich get the best deal BTW as billionaires don't exist by a few orders of magnitude without the benefits of society. Sure they pay more taxes but they also benefit massively in comparison to most people in absolute terms of benefit.
>>The government gets a percentage of your income, this is the agreement that everyone makes.
Forgive me if I do not accept the proposition that the non-wealthy had equal influence in the decision how to fund the government. The wealthy decided 'wages earned' would be the determining factor to fund the government, not wealth. I guess I would have done the same if I had so much wealth I didn't need to earn a wage.
However it is accomplished, all citizens should share the same impact on their lives ( wealth being the best approximation I can think of ) in contributing to the annual cost of funding the government.
Put another way: it is immoral for the wealthiest and most powerful in society to shift the burden of paying for government away from themselves and onto the rest of society.
Historically it was fine because dividends were significant and counted as income.
Unfortunately everyone realized the stock market is a shell game where there is no price limit and capital gains doesn't kick in until you sell and even then at a reduced rate...
This proposed tax is an EXTRA tax on billionaires only. The “all taxation is theft” position is pretty indefensible in modern society, but this explicit “No, fuck you in particular!” tax is ALSO indefensible.
That is a hole we could fix tomorrow by eliminating the step up on death. No need to introduce a new global financial surveillance regime for tracking asset ownership for wealth tax purposes just to fix that.
Fuck billionaires. The fact that individual people possess so much wealth is poisonous to society. It is the easiest thing in the world for a billionaire to become a not-billionaire and they will still be stupendously wealthy.
Your reasoning is ignoring that billionaires disproportionately benefit from public investments (tax money). Therefore, when they avoid paying taxes, they're taking more from the community than they are putting back in: this is theft, and degrades society for everyone (even billionaires, in the long run).
Better neighbor analogy: your neighbor asks for small favors all the time, and you provide. One day you ask him for one and he leaves the neighborhood entirely instead of obliging.
I agree everyone should pay taxes, including billionaires, but this is like saying if my neighbor doesn't give me his couch, he's stealing from me. It's just logically (and morally) wrong.