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Steve Ballmer Gets Billion-Dollar Tax Write-Off For Being Basketball Baron
McGruber (1417641) writes "According to a report published by The Financial Times (paywalled), ex-Microsoft CEO Billionaire Steve Ballmer will be able to write off about a billion dollars of his basketball team's purchase price from the taxable income he makes over the next 15 years. "Under an exception in US law, buyers of sports franchises can use an accounting treatment known as goodwill against their other taxable income. This feature is commonly used by tax specialists to structure deals for sports teams. Goodwill is the difference between the purchase price of an asset and the actual cash and other fixed assets belonging to the team."
On the other hand, the person who receives payment has to pay taxes on the overvalue.
And the loopholes are there because of the influence the rich have over the government. You can be mad at the people who made a loophole and the people who abuse it simultaneously.
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he would pay more in tax in a single year than 99% of the population pay in there entire lives.
Except he won't, he'll exploit exceptions and loopholes until he's paying less tax than a top-level middle manager. You don't seem to understand how taxation works.
he would pay more in tax in a single year than 99% of the population pay in there entire lives.
Except he won't, he'll exploit exceptions and loopholes until he's paying less tax than a top-level middle manager. You don't seem to understand how taxation works.
Actually, this is only sort of true. On a percentage-of-annual-income basis, it's correct. But in terms of dollars and cents paid in taxes annually, it is incorrect.
The fact that Ballmer is involved in this is the only reason it's on Slashdot...let's face it. This situation relates to capital investment, and it happens several times a day with regard to transactions of varying sizes. We could argue about whether or not it's about the taxpayer that gets stuck with this or that, or whether capital will flee if we tax the rich more, but one thing is true: Ballmer is no more to fault for leveraging available, documented, and legal tax write-offs than we are when we all claim a write-off for our mortgages, business expenses, or even just the standard deduction (if we don't even itemize).
None of us seek to maximize the amount of taxes we pay. But we demonize the ultra-wealthy, by name, when they do the same thing as us but on a larger scale. Don't fault them, fault the system...and then change it.
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Waiting 15 years is a better deal than everybody else gets. Everybody else gets to wait indefinitely; most have to realize a loss before it can be claimed. In other words, if you overpay for an asset you don't get to claim a loss until you sell that asset to somebody else.
We fault them because they design the system expressly to create loopholes that only they can afford to exploit, via legalized bribery and the good 'ol boys network.
Stop being an apologist shill. Fuck off. You're never going to be that rich unless you're a sociopath who doesn't mind screwing over everyone in your path.
Sure, but only if I can get a tax credit for 50% the price of my next house. I mean, if the house was not sold, there wouldn't be any tax revenue.
They have lots of ways to steal, and they are really good at it. First, of course is their monopoly status. It's what every giant corporations dreams of. All the benefits of pretend capitalism, none of that pesky competition.
Then there's the stadium scam. Get a city to build you a stadium, along with getting a bunch of tax breaks. Pretend that you are bringing in "jobs". In fact most of the jobs are low level minimum wage jobs for running the physical plant and selling food. Not much in the way of real economic benefit.
The media contracts are where they real big time theft happens. If you have cable or any high speed media link, you are automatically paying for sports. Then if you want to watch something not in your area, you have to pay extra for the privilege. It's like the MicroSoft Tax, only worse. The only way to opt out is to stick to terrestrial HD broadcast.
No wonder Ballmer joined the owners club. He finally achieved 100% monopolist status, which he was never quite able to get at Microsoft.
Personally, I hope he chokes to death on some greasy stadium food.
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*sighs*
A billion over FIFTEEN YEARS. Amounts to about $70 million a year.
Considering that Ballmer is worth north of twenty Billion, we're not actually talking about a huge tax break here.
What we are talking about is an article that combines fifteen years of tax deductions in order to put that magic "B" in the title to get people excited....
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If it's not that much to Ballmer, I'll gladly take just a month of that. 5 million is plenty to me.
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And who do you think tells the politicians what to do? Hint: it's not the general public.
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Someone who makes $10 million (or more) a year could afford to pay 90% tax and still live comfortably. But in what way is that fair? Presumably this person is providing a service to a business that they have both agreed is worth $10 million a year, and that they are both happy with the arrangement. Why should the government be allowed to take such a large amount of money as taxes? The rich person doesn't really get much extra out of the deal. At the end of the year, they may have only paid $100,000 in taxes, which is 1% of their earnings, but the have paid the same in taxes than 10 people making $30,000 who may have paid $10,000 each.
The rich person gets to harvest most of the productivity of a vast number of people who receive many services from the government but don't personally cover the entire cost through their taxes.
Also, some may argue that the wealthy do get more out of their taxes, but that is something that should be changed. We should fix the system so that they get exactly as much as everyone else. Not make them pay more because we know they get more out of the system.
Sounds fair. We'd have to stop them from absorbing so much of the value that others produce.
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Giving a pittance to the poor doesn't really compare.
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They don't have to understand to the same level as you, they know that the extremely wealthy can protect their wealth via vehicles the rest of the world cannot. That's the fucking difference.
Most of society, including wildly successful people across all faiths, disciplines, and cultures.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The successful ones aren't really watching. They're just playing a different game. It's amazing what you can get sports fans to do with a ticket to a suite.
And who do you think tells the politicians what to do? Hint: it's not the general public.
Two words: Citizens United.
*sighs*
A billion over FIFTEEN YEARS. Amounts to about $70 million a year.
Considering that Ballmer is worth north of twenty Billion, we're not actually talking about a huge tax break here.
What we are talking about is an article that combines fifteen years of tax deductions in order to put that magic "B" in the title to get people excited....
We shouldn't need a 'B' to get excited. A billion is a billion whether it gets paid in a year or 15. And $70 million in taxes is $70 million no matter how you cut it. Under what type of cynic logic can this be justified?
This is not $70 millions in non-taxable charities, but an investment on a money machine in the sports/entertainment industry.
It's actually a lot more simple than that. As currently written, the tax code preferences capital over labor because capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. All of the complexity is mostly a red herring. Increase the capital gains rate to match ordinary income, and the effective rate on the wealthy will increase substantially.
Think of it like this:
If we took that money and spent it on education alone, considering the average cost of what it takes to put a student through school in a year ($11,153), that would allow for 6276 students. That's per year for 15 years.
In less than two years, India would have been able to pay for another Satellite to orbit Mars.
Think of the amount of road work that could have been done in that time?
I know this is from a Tax and Spend Democrat, but right now, I know there are a lot of students that could use that money, as improving their living conditions would improve their school performance.
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You know that AGI stands for "Adjusted Gross Income", right? It's a little disingenuous to use their income minus deductions when the whole conversation is about how they have more ability to take advantage of deductions.
Also, even with them paying for most of the taxes by dollar amount, they are getting a fantastic deal. They command the vast majority of the accumulated wealth, get almost all of the benefits of increased productivity and economic growth, own the majority of real property, get preferential law enforcement, and have almost exclusive access to legislators.
And as passive income that billion a year is taxed at a 15% rate after all of his other deductions and loopholes. Whether or not you think a $70 mil writeoff is insignificant to a hundred billionaire, it's just this kind of insult to injury loophole (available only to the hyper rich) that makes a travesty of the notion that we're all in this together. But, of course, we're not - and apparently CrimsonAvenger is fine with that...
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Basketball tickets are a luxury. If you buy them, it's because you chose to give Ballmer money. I can't help you with that.
I'm perfectly fine with Balmer making money from his basketball team. I'm just not fine with the fact that he gets away with not paying taxes on HIS income and purchases, when poor people still have to. If I go down to the grocery store and buy a gallon of milk, I have to pay a 5% sales tax (even though it's far from a luxury item). So why should Balmer be able to buy a $2 billion basketball team without paying HIS tax? He can certainly afford it more than most of the rest of us can.
$20 billion in the bank.
Figure 5% annual return (highly conservative) for $1 billion gross income
15% unearned income tax rate.
$150 million annual tax payment
-$70 million annual tax credit
So yeah, cutting his tax burden in 1/2 for buying a basketball team seems a little out of whack.
For instance, imagine if you or I got to cut our income tax rate in half because we sponsored a little-league team. Wouldn't that be nice! But of course we can't. This law isn't set up to benefit the whole of society, it's set up to benefit those members of society who have enough money and power to effect the rules.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Basketball tickets are a luxury. If you buy them, it's because you chose to give Ballmer money. I can't help you with that.
Thats right, we can choose not to buy basketball tickets (and I'm already in that camp), but we can't choose not to subsidize Balmers purchase of the team because a set of, long since gone, politicians wrote that nice little loophole into our tax code for us. The way I do the math, those assholes transferred about $10 from my pocket into Blamers pocket with just this one transaction. I had no say in the matter. I had no interest in the stupid basketball team (or the sport for that matter), and yet here I am subsidizing it...
I want to know: What humanitarian need did my $10 fill? In what way is the world a better place than it would have been if Balmer had to cough up the price without my subsidy? I could fully support the idea if my money had gone towards curing cancer, or helping dying children, or something equally righteous, but how is supporting Basketball, a sport that is fully capable of paying its own way, helping better humanity? How is this anything other than yet another way in which those with the power and the money are stealing from the rest of us?
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