Esto Benignus

Just here

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

@derek923400 @mcuban @LordKilmarnock And agree on an estate tax. That and tax on the loans.

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

In other words - if you don’t want to pay the RMD then just invest your post tax dollars in the stock market and keep it there as long as you want, even forever. If you choose to instead defer taxes on that money by putting pre-tax dollars into a 401K then you’ve chosen to pay taxes later. And if you wait too long, the RMD is the mechanism to ensure those deferred taxes are eventually paid.

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

@derek923400 @mcuban @LordKilmarnock The required minimum distribution is a way of implementing a choice that an individual makes to DEFER taxes. No one is required to make that choice. If they do, the RMD simply makes sure that the taxes are actually deferred, not avoided.

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

Well taxing things that aren’t money just doesn’t seem like a good idea to me at all. When you tax money, you pay for those taxes with money that you have. If you tax non-money, you may have to sell something in order to pay taxes, and not only might you have to sell it, you might have to sell it at a bad time and get a bad price for it. I don’t think the government should be forcing people to sell their assets in order to give the government money.
Open that “wealth tax” door and now everything you own can be taxed because it’s all considered “wealth”, and the government will eventually be assigning whatever value they want to your “wealth” in order to determine how much money you should give them for the non-money assets you own. It’s just a bad, bad door to open. Fix the loan issue - that’s actual money that people are getting. They aren’t living on stocks that stay stocks and are never converted into money.

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

@derek923400 @mcuban @LordKilmarnock And I really believe that opening the door to taxing wealth instead of realized gains would come back to bite ALL of us eventually…

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

But you don’t have to realize all of your gains - only those gains that you made with actual realized income that you chose to defer taxes on must be realized so that the taxes are truly just deferred and not avoided. Any other gains that you’ve made some other way, eg stock awards, you don’t have to realize. So the rules are actually the same, some people just happened to get more of them than you or I did. Fixing the loan issue should fix the issues, I think.

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

I’m not sure that example holds water. 401Ks are a way to take realize income and put it straight into an investment account deferring taxes until you take it out later at a presumably lower tax rate. You aren’t taxed for the growth along the way - only when it’s realized. And that’s what happens with stocks that are awarded as well - they are taxed when they are realized. A wealth tax on unrealized gains wouldn’t be good for anyone. Now taxing the loans that people take using stocks as collateral, that’s a different story completely.

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

@mcuban @EdeCalton The loan is what would be taxed, not the collateral. So, why would the collateral going down in value affect the tax paid? It’s an issue for the bank that gave the loan based on the now-lower-in-value collateral, but I’m missing why it would affect the tax on it?

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

@dontdemdownsrq @AGJamesUthmeier @JeremyRedfernFL @AAGDhillon Not “going to”, “already do”…. Too bad they can’t focus on real problems that affect their constituents.

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

@Acyn Do any of the Trump’s have even a modicum of class?

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

I have to say, I love these open conversations @mcuban is having with @RoKhanna, @SaraForTexLege and others about the problems and potential solutions for our broken health care system. Not only am I learning a lot, but also seeing knowledgeable people with differing viewpoints having a *constructive* discussion is giving me hope that this (and other) issue could actually be solved. Thanks to all of you!

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

@NewReaganCaucus Closed primaries are the issue here. We (both parties) are letting the extremists pick the candidates that the rest of us normies then have to choose between. It’s broken. We need open primaries, or better yet, jungle, ranked choice primaries.

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

@dontdemdownsrq One of many bellwethers that we may be in for a worse downturn….

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

@dontdemdownsrq @ShannonJoyRadio @DHSgov Seems we are well otw to a surveillance police state….

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

@dontdemdownsrq What airline and what biometrics??

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

@dontdemdownsrq Mandatory biometrics to fly??? Whaaaaat??

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

@mcuban Ignore the trolls. Most normal people appreciate the ability to put politics aside to help a good cause. It didn’t use to be as rare as it is now. Don’t stop; we need more of it.

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

@NewReaganCaucus Get the moderates from both parties together and build a new coalition

[Esto Benignus @esto_benignus]

@NewReaganCaucus @JohnDalyBooks It should not be an unrealistic bar to expect representatives to be honest and do the right thing instead of embracing and propagating lies to stay in power. That’s what Liz Cheney, Kinzinger, etc did. If it is an unrealistic bar, then we are sunk as a country.