Billionaires pay a lower tax rate than the rest of America's taxpayers, new study finds

[Bomb#20]

A market price is the monetary value offered for an item or service and accepted.

An unaccepted offer is not a market price since it is not accepted.

Fair point. Google tells me the bid/ask on Amazon stock is $232/$235. So if some hypothetical Asset Assessor Service tries to use market conditions to assess the worth of Bezos's 900 million shares, they'll figure out would-be buyers would rather have Bezos's stake than $209 billion, whereas would-be sellers would rather have $212 billion than Bezos's stake. So the AAS would presumably assess Bezos's stock for tax purposes at somewhere between those numbers. Which is to say, an offer to buy that is not accepted is a lower bound on what an asset will be assessed to be worth. And both the upper bound and the lower bound are measures of how much other people want Bezos's stuff.

Wouldn't it be better to use stock valuation?

I'm not following you. The procedure I described is stock valuation. What method of stock valuation do you have in mind?

 

[Playball40]

Well, duh, higher on the ladder generally means a higher percentage of their income is from capital gains.

This still comes down to the basic issue that you are paying tax on "gains" that are just keeping up with inflation.

Gains are gains. I don't see why gains you don't put in any actual effort to realize should have lower taxes than the alternative. I think it should be the reverse.

Agree. They should be at a HIGHER tax rate, not a LOWER one.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

A market price is the monetary value offered for an item or service and accepted.

An unaccepted offer is not a market price since it is not accepted.

So anything not on the market doesn't have value?

Our house is AFIAK unique. (Normal builder house, but to the best of our knowledge nobody else took all the room options we did.) Does that mean it has no value and I shouldn't be paying $4k/yr in property tax??