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but another problem too that you can attribute to the fed and i talked about this on my last podcast and this is the fact that you have a lot of very wealthy americans some of the wealthiest americans don't really pay a lot of income taxes certainly in certain years they may not pay any income taxes at all or a very very small uh percentage of the amount of money they're actually potentially earning or spending is being paid in tax and one of the main reasons that a lot of very wealthy people are able to avoid tax is because rather than earning income and spending it they borrow money and they spend that and so there's a big difference between spending money that you earn and spending money that you borrow because when you earn money you pay taxes on it before you get to spend it so you know let's say you earn money and you're paying 30 percent tax well you only have 70 cents on the dollar to spend because 30 cents went to the government but if you borrow a dollar and spend it well you could borrow you could spend the whole dollar because you didn't actually earn it because an income tax is a tax on money you earn it's not a tax on money you borrow right so if somebody decides they want to buy a house and they take on a mortgage let's say for 300 000 and borrow that in one year the irs doesn't say oh you have 300 000 in income because you borrow that money and the irs doesn't tax it because you have to pay the money back you got a mortgage you owe it so you didn't actually earn it you have to repay it if the government were to tax you on the money you borrowed to buy your house nobody could take out a mortgage because nobody could afford to pay the tax on the money they borrow but the way the rich people or very rich people are doing this is they are borrowing money against their assets in many cases publicly traded stocks a lot of ceos of companies have been doing this for years they pledge their stock as collateral and then they borrow money against that appreciated value and then they use that to support their lifestyles they buy all sorts of things with the money that they borrow against their stock portfolios now what is enabling this the fed without the fed this couldn't be happening because fed monetary policy which is artificially low interest rates is specifically designed to boost asset prices the very assets that the very rich are holding on to so the fed is conducting monetary policy to inflate asset prices while at the same time keeping interest rates at rock bottom so now you own a lot of highly appreciated stock and now you can borrow money at very very low rates of interest against that stock and you can spend it and you can have all sorts of things and you can live a pretty high lifestyle spending lots of money that you borrowed but never have to pay a dime in income taxes because you didn't actually have any income i mean yes your stocks appreciated and so you have more wealth but you haven't generated any income because you haven't liquidated any of that stock the only income that you get is the dividends that your stocks are paying and this is the beauty of this levered up trade if your company's stock that you own is paying a dividend that is higher than the margin rate to borrow against that stock which is a pretty low hurdle now given how low interest rates are then there's no cost to the loan because the loan pays for itself there is a positive carry and as long as the stock is always going up and the stocks will always go up as long as the fed keeps printing money and keeps interest rates at zero then the money you borrow never really has to be repaid and you can live off of debt in perpetuity but the only reason this happens is because of the federal reserve now of course the federal reserve has some help from the u.s government which is running these big deficits that need to be monetized or that the fed is monetizing in order to prevent the government from having to be honest with the public and you know tell the truth and cut spending and all that but in order to perpetuate this big government the federal reserve cooperates and keeps interest rates low inflates asset bubbles and makes it really cheap for people that own a lot of stock to borrow against the stock instead of selling it if they had to sell the stock then they would generate income and have to pay a tax but because interest rates are so low why sell the stock hold it it'll keep going up borrow the money instead and live off of that and the same thing happens with real estate a lot of people that own a lot of real estate they never sell the real estate they just borrow against it and they live off of that money but borrowed money is not income and therefore it's not taxable but if the fed were to do the right thing and really raise interest rates then two things would happen one asset prices would crash and two the cost of financing your margin would go way up and that would actually force a lot of people who have been able to avoid paying income taxes for all these years by borrowing against the inflated value of their assets that would actually force margin calls on a lot of these people they would have to liquidate their stocks and assuming they still had a gain because the markets would crash then they would have to pay the income taxes see the solution isn't to try to come up with an unconstitutional wealth tax to get around the problem caused by the fed creating inflation just have the fed stop creating inflation let's have honest money let's have interest rates that reflect the market not the fed and let's have asset prices that reflect reality earnings and dividend yield not manipulated by artificially low interest rates and that will solve the problem in fact you know what fixes this a return to the gold standard if we went back to the gold standard and had honest money and market interest rates this problem would be solved and all these super rich people that aren't paying any income taxes would suddenly start paying income taxes you
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