A Boring Dystopia

9887 readers

1502 users here now

Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.

Rules (Subject to Change)

--Be a Decent Human Being

--Posting news articles: include the source name and exact title from article in your post title

--If a picture is just a screenshot of an article, link the article

--If a video's content isn't clear from title, write a short summary so people know what it's about.

--Posts must have something to do with the topic

--Zero tolerance for Racism/Sexism/Ableism/etc.

--No NSFW content

--Abide by the rules of lemmy.world

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

364

The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax (www.propublica.org)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

The uber rich spending is generally via “business expenses”.

For example: Elon doesn’t own his private jets, SpaceX does. When he takes it down to Hawaii for a 15 minute investor meeting followed by hanging out with them for the weekend at the nicest hotels with all the fixings and flys back, that’s all business expenses that he “derived no personal benefit from”, so SpaceX writes it all off as a business expense, thus reducing their tax burden and he never personally gets taxed for it.

A less egregious example that happens considerably more: a person has a rental property that resides between their normal living area, which they consider the “home office”, and an area of interest they travel too. They go to the area of interest, but make sure to stop by the rental on the way there and back. The milage from the home to the rental is business miles, and thus they can deduct the travel expense from any business incomes.

I am not advocating for any of those, but it doesn’t really matter if these business expenses are legal because the IRS doesn’t have a great way to determine these minor abuses, and certainly doesn’t have the people power to track it down.