Related: Robert Reich posted earlier today that Tesla paid ZERO taxes on $5 billion in sales (earnings?), so that’s just fucking great.
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The billionaires are the thought leaders. Clearly they didn’t just fail upwards, and should just be in charge of the direction of our entire society. These nepo babies should absolutely be in charge.
Tesla just announced a $5.7 billion profit, and will pay $0 on taxes.
That foreign Goblin destroyed our government, stole priceless data, and pays no taxes?
That’s the kind of immigrant I’m interested in kicking out of the country, after a serious beating.
They didn’t pay payroll tax?
No, their employees did.
That’s not typically how payroll tax is collected. How did they only collect from employees?
I love paying my share of taxes and I will always do so to the absolute best of my ability, whether the amount is justified or not. Taxes are wonderful, represent an investment in your country and your society, and can be used to create great things that benefit all of us.
My anger is not for taxes, my anger is exclusively reserved for those who do not pay their share of taxes and the shamefully dishonest politicians who porkbarrel those taxes into things that mostly benefit themselves and then sabotage other politicians attempts to do actual good because they’re not benefiting themselves.
Taxes are not the problem. Those people are the problem, and we are going to have to do something about those people. I am working deliberately and relentlessly towards that goal instead. I believe in civilization and society and I will rebuild this fucking thing from the ground up, brick by brick if I have to.
That’s a lot of people man. Poor and rich alike. Lots and lots of people cheat on their taxes, lie about their income, and use tax loopholes to reduce their tax burdens, both legally and illegally.
OP above doesn’t have to report that 2500, and incredibly common for self employed people to vastly under report their income within about 10%. The vast majority will never be audited, but from those who have been audited the IRS draws the following conclusion:
“For example, overall, people reporting work earnings to the IRS that are between the 5th and 75th percentiles underreported self-employment income of $4,000 on average,” she said. “In contrast, those below the 5th percentile underreported self-employment income averaging $21,000 while those above the 95th percentile underreported self-employment income averaging $27,000, and this is a conservative estimate, as earnings above $250,000 are masked in the data.”
in other countries it’s far worse. a major part of the 2009 Greek financial crisis was the fact 1/3 of Greek GDP is untaxed. that’s 1/3 of the taxes missing entirely.
https://www.npr.org/2010/03/25/125125500/greeces-bottom-line-too-many-tax-cheats
Yes, I am very aware of this, I have known this since I started paying taxes. It’s very, very abundantly clear. Legal loopholes are fine, I don’t have to agree with the laws, but I do agree to follow them until we get them changed (which we must). But illegal tax dodging? Are you trying to convince me I should respect anyone for that? Even if I believed they have good motives or reasons, which I don’t, there are lots of better ways to practice civil disobedience than withholding taxes like it’s a fucking tip for good government.
it’s not a matter of you respecting them. it’s a matter of whether or not it’s economically or legally worthwhile.
if the fine for cheating on my taxes is less than the tax i’d pay (and the returns I’d get on investing those taxes) it’s worth it.
People behave according to incentives. If the penalty for under reporting your taxes was 20 years in jail and it was rigorously enforced, people would not cheat on their taxes as much. However, the punishment is:
In cases of substantial understatement, the accuracy-related penalty is 20% of the portion of the underpayment of tax.
So basically if I get caught, all I do is pay more tax, which might be scary to lower income people, but for rich people who can get MASSIVE returns on their untaxed income, it is stupid not to do it. if I can save 10,000 per year and invest it and turn it into 400K after ten years, then the 20% extra tax I’d pay on that withheld 100K is a not much of a penalty at all. It’s 20K or 5% of the money I now have from cheating on my taxes. and even if i only double my money to 200K, I’m still only paying 10% of what I have earned.
shouldn’t the penalty be 500K? that would make cheating on my taxes more costly than not cheating.
But but you can’t tax the Holy Job Creators! /s
the jobs they create :
“Pack all this shit into a box so fast that you need to piss in a bottle”
Is it imperative you’re miserable and barely scraping by. Top 1 priority. Actually, it’s in your best interest, but you just don’t realize it!
Income is the worst way to make money.
Which is why these rich clowns don’t make (relatively) much money. All of it is capital gains and loans. Taxed far less and not at all, especially when it’s routed through all sorts of expenses and shell companies.
Well how else are they going to subsidize the losses of the rich if not with your dollars?
I don’t understand the humour in this
Pro tips:
Many jurisdictions don’t require you to have a business license if your revenue is under a certain threshold and the work you do is unregulated. Basically, you can just decide you own a business at any time without filling out any paperwork.
Housecleaning, auto mechanic, and IT consulting businesses aren’t regulated and can be used to justify 90% of common purchases. A YouTube channel is a business and can be used to write off anything you make a video about.
Any major purchases you made throughout the year can be declared as an asset of your business. If you say you only use it for business 50% of the time, it’s practically impossible for anyone to disprove.
Also, 50% of the money you spend on those major purchases can be declared as a business loss, which further reduces your tax obligation.
So, let’s say you bought a PC and a 3D printer this year. You can decalre both as assets belonging 50% to your business, declare half the cost as a business expense, and declare no income from the business. You can also declare half of your gas purchases as being for your business. You’ll get a credit for the asset, and a credit for the “business loss.”
Basically, you can create a company that has your home address as its HQ, say it didn’t earn any money, but you invested in it. Then, declare ordinary purchases as assets and investments into the company by saying you use them for business 50% of the time.
There’s no requirement to have a business license before telling the IRS you have a business. There’s no requirement to run a business “well” and there’s no penalty for running a business badly. Receipts aren’t required to declare assets or losses, but you may need them if you’re audited. You’re unlikely to be audited due to the 50% declaration. If you are audited and you have receipts, you’re covered.
Disclaimer: I’m not a tax professional and this isn’t advice.
Not where I’m from. If you have a business in Florida, you must register with the state (about $130 a year), and the county (about $100 a year), and there’s state licensing, depending on your business, and that’s all over the place, but figure $350 a year. There’s lots of other charges that will come up, too. Florida’s hand is always out.
And then you have to sign up with the Department of Revenue and submit a monthly sales tax report, even if you don’t collect sales taxes.
Ironically, the state border sign to Florida says “Welcome to the Free State of Florida!” where NOTHING is free.
I fell like the disclaimer should really be at the top. Specially because it is very geographically dependant and this is the internet.
Maybe. On the other hand, if you choose to act on unreliable or incomplete information, that’s on you.
Part of being a responsible adult is understanding the law and how it applies to you in any situation in which you may find yourself, BEFORE you make up your mind what you’re going to do.
(I’m not a professional and this is not tax advice)
However, I have a home business pulling in a few thousand a year.
About business losses, I think you’re partially right. The IRS has a tile that you need to show that you’re trying to make a profit, despite losses. One of the ways they do that is showing a profit over the course of a few years. (Maybe 3 out of 5 years? My memory is foggy.) But if you don’t seem like a business, then you are only allowed to deduct up to the amount that you earn.
But yeah, year one of a business, you can definitely take a loss. And why not? The IRS is short-staffed so fewer audits.
I do programming as a hobby, and it’s not out of the question that some day I’ll make something that will be sold. Can I claim my gaming PC and my homelab as business expenses? As well as my electricity and intenet?
As far as I understand tax law (which isn’t very far), when filling out your Schedule C, you can write off 50% of the cost of the PC and lab equipment without raising too much suspicion. You can also claim them as assets and claim depreciation on them. You can also claim the portion of electricity and internet used, unless you’re a full-time W-2 employee working from home.
You can also film yourself doing these projects and upload it to YouTube, which means you have a video production business.
My understanding is this is how most upper-middle class people and minor millionaires legitimately reduce their tax obligations.
I’m not an expert on tax, but I can tell you from personal experience that for the company that I run, with me being the only employee, I claim anything related to the business. The grey area is what percentage it’s used for the business, I’m not sure on that part. I have a separate laptop I use for the business and when I purchased it I claimed it 100 percent. Like stated though keep your receipts to cover your ass.
I am also not an accountant, but in my country even a failed business project is still a business project. E.g you run an IT consultancy and suddenly decide you need to do something with AI. Wellll now that gaming PC with a really over the top GPU is actually a business purchase because you NEED that VRAM. AI project didn’t do all that well? Oh well, shit happens. Keep the PC tho, maybe you’ll need it for another project soon.
Home office is another fun one. In my country, you have to decide what % of different purchases are for business vs living use, for tax-free expense compensations. But the interesting thing is, you can go really in depth with that. 20-40% of your toilet paper could be business usage reasonably, depending on what percent of awake time is spent working vs not working.
As far as I understand it, these can all be written off in America under the same pretense. The only difference is the paperwork is a lot more complicated. Most of what you’re describing is handled in the 1040 Schedule C
There’s a joke on a Family Guy episode where Peter starts a business, then later on he’s like “Lois we need to immediately put a desk in every room in this house”. It’s a good joke but I wondered how many people would get it.
I feel like this is all well and good until you need insurance. If you damage something and get sued without insurance/LLC, they’re suing you directly instead. Dicey territory depending on what you’re being sued for.
Assuming you’re actually doing work and not just using the business as a loss center, yes.
If you’re actually doing work, it’s well worth your time and money to form an LLC.
However, an LLC can’t deduct the same things as a sole-proprietorship. So, if you simply want a business on paper to serve as a loss center, that’s probably the better choice.
Again, this is just MY understanding of things. I’m in no way trying to give advice or tell you what YOU should be doing, only you can decide what’s best for you.
The 2025 Big Beautiful Bill lets you write off 100% of the expense on the year you purchase it, instead of depreciating it over several years. Make big purchases, pay less tax dollars to this government.
Disclaimer: I am not an accountant or financial advisor, do your own homework to see what qualifies in your situation.
I declare my self an IT consultant. Now what?
Total up all your major tech purchases for the year, divide that number in half to get your total “losses” for the year. Fill out your 1040 Schedule C, say you have an IT Consulting business, sole owner, sole proprietor, no LLC. Declare zero income, then declare your losses in the appropriate category (office expense, equipment, break room supplies, etc.). The more receipts you have, the better, in case you get audited. If you declare it, save the receipts just in case or just roll the dice and claim whatever you want, there’s barely any auditors left and they’re all busy looking at the people claiming dogs and dead people as dependents.
Once you finish filling out your Schedule C, you should see your federal obligation reduced.
I wish I knew this last year when I got that GPU. Should I declare pizza and beer as income if I help bro build a PC?
Can you fix my printer?
No.
Printers work using ancient black magic and are powered by the tortured souls of the lost and damned. To fix them is to understand them, and to understand them is to descend into madness, becoming one of the lost souls to fuel the eldritch horror that is the ink slinger.
Seriously though, if your printer isn’t a Brother laser printer, throw it in the trash and go buy a Brother laser printer, then write it off on your taxes. Mine has worked for years and hasn’t needed anything but a $50 toner cart every few thousand pages.
For most people though, it’s more economical to just print at the local FedEx or Office Depot
Do you really need to print? That will be $500.
Sure! bodily throws it out the window
Now you get pay the employer half of your social security tax!
Bold of you to assume I have the charisma to convince someone to pay me.
shit I should have claimed my laptop
If you’ve already filed, you can still do an amended return
Pro tip: if you are actually making side income like this and reporting it to the IRS then in many situations you can deduct the costs of the things you needed to buy in the course of generating that income.
This does not work on W2 income, though, as much as it would be nice to deduct the costs of driving to an office etc
That only matters when the value of those deductions exceeds the standard deduction though, isn’t that right?
No, deductions for business expenses happen “above the line” so they reduce your taxable income. The standard deduction happens “below the line” and is applied to your taxable income after business expenses etc
Yes and for the purposes of reducing taxable income, not the overall tax burden.
An example in a vacuum: If you report $10,000 and itemize a $2000 deduction for an expense, you’d be taxed as if you made $8000.
Some take it to believe the $2000 deduction means they deduct $2000 from what they owe in taxes and then feel cheated and blindsided when they still owe.
The standard deduction is just under $16,000. So if we round things out: the tax bracket for the first $10,000 of taxable income is a 10% rate. If you made $26,000 you’d owe $1000 with the standard. (26k minus 16k, leaving 10% of 10k.)
In this same scenario if you could itemize $26,000 in deductions on $26,000 of income, you’d owe $0. No one self employed or any worker can actually do this reasonably. But large businesses can, and do.
This is how billionaires pay no taxes. They use their business expenses, loans, and losses to deduct the entire amount of their taxable income to eliminate any possible tax burden.
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Above the line deductions reduce your taxable income, from there you take the standard deduction or itemize. You are conflating two separate events
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Yes, that’s how I always understood it
During the previous administration, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $80 billion for IRS to hire more people to go after the rich. The CBO estimated that it would collect $200 billion in the next decade, but there were other predictions of $560 billion.
Trump reversed all of that. Elon Musk and DOGE fired 1/3 of the IRS work force.
But you know, both sides are the same, right?
Correct. Their donors allowed only a temporary, token gesture they knew could be immediately undone.
Dems get to look like they did something, Rs get to look like they did something, no actual progress is made, and the march of tyranny continues.
But it wouldn’t have been reversed if people voted for Democrats. So you’d get something out of it instead of getting something negative (reversing it and going long ways the other way
Yeah, and maybe people would vote for Democrats if they’d represent our interests. Instead, all we get is “we need something to campaign on next election” until people get fed up and elect Republicans who undo everything the Democrats did and the cycle starts over again.
The system never progresses, the people never learn, and corporate interests reign supreme another election cycle.
As long as we have two parties working together to further corporate interests, nothing will change, which is why we need 5-6 political parties, ranked choice voting, and a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United.
Oh for fucks sake you people.
Material facts are never inconvenient for those seeking truth.
Whom appointed you the fairy godfather of the democratic party by the way? Convinced if only everyone believed harder the democrats would win!
Quite pathetic, especially given you stalk the same people online for months to make trolling points as such.
I don’t stalk shit Hector, you’re just chronically online with garbage takes and I can read usernames. You are not remotely special enough to follow around, you’re just another bot carrying water for Russia.
I don’t stalk shit Hector, you’re just chronically online with garbage takes and I can read usernames. You are not remotely special enough to follow around, you’re just another bot carrying water for Russia.
Yeah, dont you just hate it when those pesky workers expect a government that represents their interests? Can’t they just accept the two parties that are captured by the same corporate interests and be happy? The nerve of them…
it’s almost like the rich are the ones actually running the country
And we still have to play the guessing game where we try to estimate the number that the government already knows, but won’t divulge to us, like some sort of fucked up psychological game.
This shit is so fucked. I’m awaiting the collapse.
This is when daddy marx reels you into his pleasure house by telling you about how he predicted all this shit in 1848 and had advocated for the dictatorship by the proletiariat (the working class is in power, no conflictions between power and politics by allowing lobbyism), capitalism has always been doomed and the reagan bullshit about the trinkle down economics has always been known by econimists as nothing more than a self-contradicting distraction whilst we robbed foreign nations to sustain an unsustainable system.
“We have a finite environment - the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist”. ~ Sir David Attenborough
economic growth isn’t necessarily material growth.
there is no material limit on how much code I can write. or the books i can sell digitally.
the economy can grow with less resource use, and really it has compared to history. agriculture is far less resource intensive than it used to be due to improvements and far more economically productive.
that’s what progress is and why productivity continues to skyrocket. we can do way more with far less.
Couldn’t they also be a mathematician? The Pointcarré recurrence theorem is a good example of infinite rate in a fixed dimensional space. Also, that quote really oversimplifies environmental engineering, the ozone layer has been fixed by the kyoto convention because every person with the simplest understanding of the carbon cycle can understand why the earth has been able to sustain ressource consumption for all animals and can still do so for a very long time still, infinitely or not.
Ozone was fixed because the cost of shifting to a different gas was economically viable for largely Western countries.
The Montreal protocol was still impressive though as something that many countries could agree on without it becoming political. Ah, simpler times.
Haha, i agree, and thank you for the correction, my memory is not what it used to be, the montreal protocol did fix the ozone layer problem, the kyoto protocol adressed different issues, my error. Hopefully common sense will shift regarding the assumption that nuclear energy is bad, in my view, it is the only way to sustain humankind as we move past the recent start of the fifth industrial revolution. Humanists like Marx, Keynes and Rifkin seem to agree that the hopeful (and paradoxially very unlikely) sixth will be the death of work but I still have to see how things advance before I start believing into it.
China has shown a lot of promise thus far with their carbon reduction and development of small scale nuclear reactors, and hopefully someone will fix the fission theory someday. And concerning the simpler times, things are strange indeed in the future we live.
IMHO mathematicians go into the madman category.
Obligatory
At times when we cannot understand the causality of a problem, it is better to acknowledge what we know, and more importantly, what we do not know rather than to create narratives from ignorance. I hope that my words will find you in a tone of compassion, not as an attempt to be classist or make you think that your grasp of reality is not valid.
Rest, and relax, math is not the issue here, the problem is ignorance. What you have just posted a tribalistic fallacy believing that things are simple, us vs them and the system being akin to big brother, this is a normal human behavior that some describe as Projective Identification. Nature is more complex than we think and so is a reality in which over 8 000 000 000 exist, and all pitch in to the pool of what the future will always carry back to us. Wether positive or negative.
Animals don’t grow infinitely. If their population surpasses capacity, they have a mass die-off
I don’t know why you bring in the ozone layer here. That was not a problem that had anything to do with reaource consumption.
The real question is how many billions in welfare government bailouts and credits did Tesla get?
Republicans are so worried about poor people on welfare, but Tesla would literally be closed without welfare money. Rules for thee.
When Tesla does it, they’re called “carbon credits”
Walmart
The issue afaik is that Jeff bezos’s $200B is in assets like stocks, and the buy borrow die strategy of getting loans using assets as collateral lets rich people spend money without actually cashing in said assets which would trigger capital gains taxes. Idk how to stop this prevalent strategy but between that and the corporate tax system ignoring money that goes back into the company letting corporations invest their profits to ignore taxes that’s why so few taxes are collected on those groups. Feel free to correct anything inaccurate.
you pass a law to stop it. there are many active variations of how to tax such things that come with various benefits and drawbacks.
Seems pretty simple to me. Tax the collateral loans as income. And don’t allow the interest repaid to be tax deductible.
Be better to ban loans on financial assets. These are loans against stocks/bonds etc that they commonly use. In order to get a loan it has to be against a physical asset. Also set firm limits to how much any physical asset can be leveraged.
You’re kind of suggesting two different things there. Should loans on financial assets be banned, or should the amount able to be leveraged be limited?
Either would have massive unintended consequences. Mortgages on homes as well as secured car loans would have to be either discharged and re-applied or the terms redrawn. They could also be forgiven, but then every financial institution would go bust or the government would have to step in and shell out insane amounts of money. It would at least cause another GFC, if not a global depression, if done quickly.
I’m not discounting the idea necessarily, but it’s always important to consider the unintended consequences of a simple idea.
and both would have a big impact on the economy, that may not generate overall positive results.
Tax wealth the same way it’s already taxed with estate and inheritance taxes. If the person doesn’t have enough liquidity, they can sell the assets, like regular people already have to do often to pay the estate taxes.
I think an easy solution could be to start seizing anything over something like 100 million total value, with the value updating once every few years (otherwise people dumping their houses and stock would trigger devaluation enabling them to keep more than they should)
It’s called fiduciary duty
Wait what?
Oprah was a web dev back in her hippy days, and now her ex (Pope of her sect) wants her to man up and do her job.
