I, too, am a fan of Shark Tank and of Mark Cuban. He's clearly a self-made man and deserves the riches he's accumulated. He is, however, a bit disingenuous in his responses about the top 1% and China. Nothing he said about either of those subjects rang true.
The top 1% don't take salaries that would be subject to ordinary income taxes. Th…
I, too, am a fan of Shark Tank and of Mark Cuban. He's clearly a self-made man and deserves the riches he's accumulated. He is, however, a bit disingenuous in his responses about the top 1% and China. Nothing he said about either of those subjects rang true.
The top 1% don't take salaries that would be subject to ordinary income taxes. They take stock options. Therefore, they only pay taxes when they sell that stock and, even then, they are not taxed as ordinary income but rather as capital gains. Capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. Now the capital gains tax also benefits you and me when we sell stock, but we don't have the option of foregoing a salary like Mark Cuban does. Also, if he has no objection to paying more in taxes, why not set a precedent and write a nice fat check to the government? He can certainly afford it. He doesn't do that because he knows the government will waste 2/3 of it. And the top 1% won't wind up paying any more if Biden's new tax proposals are passed.
The second area where I fault him is on China. Saying that he doesn't comment on politics in other countries allows him to blindfold himself in the face of horrendous human rights abuses in China. What they are doing in Hong Kong in contravention of the agreement with the UK is a breach of contract that should be brought to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Just this week they have destroyed the single pro-democracy news organ in Hong Kong.
What they are doing to the Uyghurs is a Holocaust. And nobody is saying much more than tsk tsk. The richest people in the world are supposed to be the most powerful. They should be making the world better, not kowtowing to a totalitarian regime. But they are raking in the dough and, by they, I mean the NBA in particular. Mark Cuban is no better than Lebron James. The one sports voice that spoke out was effectively silenced. And it was done in the name of the Almighty Dollar.
I, too, am a fan of Shark Tank and of Mark Cuban. He's clearly a self-made man and deserves the riches he's accumulated. He is, however, a bit disingenuous in his responses about the top 1% and China. Nothing he said about either of those subjects rang true.
The top 1% don't take salaries that would be subject to ordinary income taxes. They take stock options. Therefore, they only pay taxes when they sell that stock and, even then, they are not taxed as ordinary income but rather as capital gains. Capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. Now the capital gains tax also benefits you and me when we sell stock, but we don't have the option of foregoing a salary like Mark Cuban does. Also, if he has no objection to paying more in taxes, why not set a precedent and write a nice fat check to the government? He can certainly afford it. He doesn't do that because he knows the government will waste 2/3 of it. And the top 1% won't wind up paying any more if Biden's new tax proposals are passed.
The second area where I fault him is on China. Saying that he doesn't comment on politics in other countries allows him to blindfold himself in the face of horrendous human rights abuses in China. What they are doing in Hong Kong in contravention of the agreement with the UK is a breach of contract that should be brought to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Just this week they have destroyed the single pro-democracy news organ in Hong Kong.
What they are doing to the Uyghurs is a Holocaust. And nobody is saying much more than tsk tsk. The richest people in the world are supposed to be the most powerful. They should be making the world better, not kowtowing to a totalitarian regime. But they are raking in the dough and, by they, I mean the NBA in particular. Mark Cuban is no better than Lebron James. The one sports voice that spoke out was effectively silenced. And it was done in the name of the Almighty Dollar.