"Here's what that means in practice:
When I get my salary, taxes come out immediately. When a billionaire's stock portfolio increases in value by millions, they don't pay taxes on that growth until (or unless) they sell those stocks.
Here's how it works:
Billionaires borrow money against their stock holdings (which isn't taxed), live off those loans and then pass their assets to heirs largely tax-free when they die. Meanwhile, regular people like me can't defer taxes on our paychecks or borrow against our retirement accounts without major penalties.
The AI used ProPublica data to illustrate this:
"The top 25 billionaires saw their wealth grow by $401 billion from 2014-2018, but paid just $13.6 billion in federal income taxes " an effective rate of 3.4% on wealth growth."
That 3.4% figure is what really stung. While they're paying their legal tax obligations on realized income, their actual wealth is growing at a rate that's taxed far below what middle-class workers pay on their salaries."
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"ChatGPT ran the numbers on what would happen if billionaires paid taxes at the same rate middle-class families do " around 15%-22%.
Using the ProPublica data, if those top 25 billionaires had been taxed at a 20% rate on their wealth growth, they would have paid around $80 billion instead of $13.6 billion.
"Extrapolate that across approximately 1,000 billionaires?" the AI asked. "You're talking hundreds of billions in added revenue annually."
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"Middle-class families can't defer taxes on wages or borrow against stocks tax-free," ChatGPT pointed out.
This creates a fundamental unfairness where people who work for their money get taxed immediately, while people whose money grows through investments can delay or even avoid those taxes entirely."
