A Quote by Urjit Patel
People were holding high denomination notes to keep tax unaccounted for money. Some sectors like real estate were using cash to avoid tax.
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I was shocked to see that some of the very wealthiest people in the country have organised their tax affairs, and to be fair it's within the tax laws, so that they were regularly paying virtually no income tax. And I don't think that's right.
What people really haven't thought about with real estate is, if you get tax reform, you're going to see real estate now... the velocity of selling and buying real estate will just kick.
We all use cash in our everyday life, but we don't use hundred-dollar bills. We're not using 500-euro notes. And yet these account for mountains of cash out there. I think they're being used in tax evasion and by criminals of all types.
I don't want to get into the 'who's a hostage-taker' discussion here, but what is the estate tax? It's a double tax on death. Economists will tell you that it's really not a tax that soaks the rich, but it's a tax on capital that deprives business investment and therefore job creation.
I've been buying real estate because it's an asset I can control, that I could finance extremely cheaply if I chose to. I do not choose to; I buy my real estate in cash. I'm not interested in making money on it. I just want to keep my money safe.
Local tax increases can cause high-net-worth individuals to move, tax experts said; tax avoidance and tax arbitrage are multitrillion-dollar affairs, and rich people are sensitive to tax rates. But many of the people who move when their home state raises taxes are close to retirement anyway.
If you're a full-time manager of your own property - and full-time, according to Congress, is 15 hours a week - you can take unlimited depreciation and use it to offset your income from other areas and pay little in tax. One of the biggest real estate tax lawyers in New York said to me, if you're a major real estate family and you're paying income taxes, you should sue your tax lawyer for malpractice.
I really like the idea of consumption tax, and most countries have a pretty serious consumption tax. It's called a value-added tax or a goods and services tax ... It's a sales tax. It doesn't tax labor, it doesn't tax savings or investment - it taxes consumption.
Textbooks don't teach people how to avoid paying any income tax. But that's what an army of tax lawyers and corporate tax accountants do.
We must end the iniquitous multi-taxing of the same money. It is not right to tax people's incomes, then their savings on that income, to tax the movement of assets through capital gains tax, stamp duty and tax them again through inheritance tax if they have the audacity to die.
The real estate lobby has prominent allies in both parties. After the last major overhaul of the tax code, in 1986 - under a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, a Republican Senate and a Democratic House - it was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who signed legislation that restored lost real estate tax breaks seven years later.
Arthur Laffer's idea, that lowering taxes could increase revenues, was logically correct. If tax rates are high enough, then people will go to such lengths to avoid them that cutting taxes can increase revenues. What he was wrong about was in thinking that income tax rates were already so high in the 1970s that cutting them would raise revenues.
On the estate tax, if you look at the couple of groups who are the biggest advocates for repealing the estate tax, it really is the pass-through business, and it's the farmers.
It used to be that we taxed property - zapped farmers basically. And there were very rich people who didn't pay that much tax. So in 1913, they put in the income tax. It was incredibly popular. The tax we love to hate today.
We need real tax reform which makes the rich and profitable corporations begin to pay their fair share of taxes. We need a tax system which is fair and progressive. Children should not go hungry in this country while profitable corporations and the wealthy avoid their tax responsibilities by stashing their money in the Cayman Islands.
The estate tax punishes years of hard work and robs families of part of their heritage by imposing a huge penalty on inheritance after death - a tax on money that has already been taxed.
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