Thread by @ErrataRob

To be fair to Marjorie Taylor Green (and her comments on "HIPAA"), the left-wing can be equally obtuse when it suits them. A good example is the tweet below. As far as anybody can tell, Bezos and Musk pay all their income taxes.

https://twitter.com/DanRather/status/1417546766337990665

I mention this because of stories like this from ProPublica that deliberately twist the data to make people believe these guys aren't paying their fair share of income taxes.
propublica.org/article/the-se…

The ProPublica piece just exploits peoples ignorance of tax law, lack of common sense, and political bias in order to drive readership, but fails at rationality, just like Marjorie Taylor Green's views of HIPAA and Section 230.

How did Bezos' wealth increase by $3.8 billion in 2007 while he paid no income taxes? It's because he earned no income. The value of your assets increasing isn't income -- it's only income when you sell those assets.

Housing prices have shot up during the pandemic, with lots of people in $300,000 that are suddenly now worth $600,000. Imagine if they had to pay income taxes on the increase. With 15% long term capital gains, they'd suddenly be hit with a $45,000 tax bill.

So they have the sell their home to pay the $45,000, and lose another $30,000 on top of that because of realtor commissions, and then since all other home prices have gone up, can only afford a home less desirable than the one they had before.

This is why no country on Earth taxes people on the growth of their assets as ProPublica claims they should. Governments don't care when they tax people on the growth net worth, because they know they'll get the taxes eventually when it's sold creating income.

All the growth in Bezos's net worth will get taxed eventually, when he sells it. It's stupid to assume that growth in 2007 needs to be paid as income tax in 2007. This is especially true when he has no income with which to pay those taxes.

Most people have steady income and few savings. And they hate billionaires. So they work backwards to create some non-existent standard of how taxes should work, rather than how they actually work, in order to hate billionaires.

Same with Marjorie Taylor Green, an extraordinarily ignorant person who works backwards from how she thinks the world should work (in her favor) into a standard of how HIPAA and Section 230 actually work.

To be clear, as far as all the data shows, including ProPublica's leaked IRS info, billionaires are paying their full share of income taxes. Dan Rather lives disagrees, but he lives in the same world as Marjorie Taylor Green.

Bezos sold stock in Amazon (just not in 2007, obviously) to invest in Blue Origin. That means he paid income taxes on all the money that he spent on his space flight.