Recently, the United States has launched a "rich tax" on the agenda again. According to public documents, for the 2023 fiscal year budget, the United States will propose a minimum tax of 20% on the wealthiest households, covering unrealized gains on assets such as stocks. It is reported that the existing policy in the United States is difficult to tax the "unrealized gains" such as the stocks of the rich, and this "super-rich tax" proposal may directly enter the vacuum of their stock earnings.
Economists at the University of California estimate that Musk will pay an additional $50 billion and Bezos $35 billion to meet the requirements of the new tax plan.
The rich in the United States earn hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but their taxes are not as good as those of civilians
The tax dispute over the rich in the United States has a long history. On April 13, local time, a report by proPublica, a non-profit media organization in the United States, was released, disclosing the tax data of the top 400 rich people in the United States, including the super-rich people such as Musk and Bezos that we are familiar with.
The report shows that between 2013 and 2018, Tesla CEO Elon Musk Elon Musk has a tax rate of 27 percent, while Amazon founder Jeff Musk has a 27 percent tax rate. Jeff Bezos' tax rate is 23.2 percent, which is well below the highest 37 percent tax rate that applies to U.S. tax income.
The website's confidential tax filing report from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) also mentions that during the years, the 25 richest individuals in the United States paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes, a fraction of the $401 billion they accumulated during that period. At these two figures, the effective tax rate paid by the wealthy is only 3.4 percent, well below the 14 percent income tax paid on median household income.
What's more, in some years some of the rich have not paid anything. Records show that Bezos did not pay income taxes between 2007 and 2011, Soros did not pay them for three consecutive years, and Musk's federal income tax bill for 2018 was 0.
Why are they able to avoid taxes so much in full view of everyone? Unlike the payroll income tax paid by ordinary people, wealth giants such as Musk and Bezos mostly apply capital gains tax, which is mainly based on the appreciation of stocks and real estate. If they don't sell these assets, they don't have to pay the relevant taxes. In addition, another strategy of the rich is to minimize their wage income to reduce the corresponding taxes, so many rich people emphasize that their salary is only $1.
The two-sided life of the rich: tax avoidance on the one hand, and splurge on the other
What is quite contrasting is that the rich, while making careful calculations of their wealth and various tax avoidance operations, on the other hand, they are seeking to invest heavily in the field of young technology, and exert "how to safeguard personal interests" to the extreme.
Altos Labs, the "strongest anti-aging company in history", has a $3 billion (about 20 billion yuan) investment from Bezos, which focuses on the field of anti-aging, which is the epigenetic reprogramming discovered by Nobel laureate Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka, a technology that can reprogram mature cells into induced multifunction stem cells (iPSCs) through specific pathways to rejuvenate senescent cells. In layman's terms, this is a process of restoring electronic devices to factory settings. A one-time generous offer to pay 3 billion, which seems to be very different from Bezos's usual title of "dime a dozen" and "the smallest boss in the universe".
Before that, Bezos had also invested heavily in a Unity Biotechnology company that was said to have developed technology that would remove senescent cells from the body— zombie cells that don't die but secrete destructive chemicals. His "old enemy" Musk has gone further and further on the road of "human-machine symbiosis", the largest financing amount reached $205 million, he firmly believes that intrusive devices such as brain-computer interfaces can strengthen the flesh and ultimately achieve human immortality.
Nowadays, it is an indisputable fact that the rich have come together to invest in the life and health track. The case in China is now almost well known - Li Ka-shing, the richest man in Hong Kong, ingested the biological enzyme of Aimuyin, and after purchasing and taking the natural active enzyme in 2017, he bluntly said that he was back in his 20s and invested hundreds of billions of dollars into the stock. Affected by it, the biological enzyme technology of Aimuyin has been relatively mature in the industry, and in 2013, Harvard University professor of genetics David Sinclair confirmed its reversible mouse aging cells in the laboratory, and subsequently passed the human clinical experiments of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other institutions. Jing & East Self-Operating also officially introduced the sale of Ai Mu Yin biological enzymes to expand the big health sector. Li Ka-shing's imitator Pan Shi beg also revealed in the spring of 2019 that he was eating. Interestingly, Pan is also frequently in the midst of tax turmoil.
Can America's plutocrats all back off?
The rich do not lack the ability to banknotes. The 58-year-old Bezos, just in his prime, on the one hand, sees the great prospects of anti-aging technology, on the other hand, he can also get the first month near the water and benefit from the most cutting-edge technology. Including the reason why Li Ka-shing entered the "Aimuyin" track, the industry analysis is a move of "killing two birds with one stone", on the one hand, it is the help of his 93-year-old energetic and clear-headed biotech technology, on the other hand, he has anchored the domestic population of nearly 300 million elderly people, and the money is considerable, at present, in addition to the gene port, the listed companies that lay out the Aimuyin molecules have reached 20. The rich have a keen sense of smell and investment strategies that are very accessible.
The "super-rich tax" imposed by the United States this time, although the threshold is $100 million, directly raises the maximum personal income tax rate from 37% to 39.6% twice, and is expected to help reduce the deficit of about 360 billion US dollars within 10 years, with a huge impact.
I wonder if these super-rich people in the United States can still retreat from this huge "tax collection" storm.