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>create a $70-80K writeoff on a $120K asset, which often larger than the check they cut for the property in the first place

They're only deferring the tax on $70-80K, correct?


> They're only deferring the tax on $70-80K, correct?

Yes, if they sell normally. But usually capital gains tax is lower than that on the income so overall they're saving.

To be explicit: They use the $70-80K depreciation to offset their rental income (which often means they pay no tax on the income for that year and several years after). They'll pay it eventually when they sell, but at a (usually) lower tax rate.

There are tricks like 1031 exchange to avoid paying taxes when they sell, but I don't know how depreciation benefits factor in to those.


This is almost completely wrong.

First, depreciation on real property is about 27 years. 80k annual depreciation indicates a 2.2m purchase price.

Corporate capital gains don't get a special rate. They're taxed the same as regular corporate income. The 1031 like kind exchange is also very difficult to achieve as the bar is very high even under the Trump admin.


> First, depreciation on real property is about 27 years.

That's straight line depreciation. Look elsewhere in the thread and you'll see cost segregation and bonus depreciation. To give you an idea, I once invested $50K in a multifamily property and my depreciation for the first year was $18K. I never paid taxes on any of my income (but did pay more taxes when it was sold due to the lowered cost basis).


Are you equating receipts with tax level? Tax is a rate applied to an income or wealth amount. Note that GDP includes government spending, which is not subject to tax but is based in part on debt.

https://www.pgpf.org/article/six-charts-that-show-how-low-co...


If you are in favor of more taxes nominal vs effective rates is not a can of worms you want to open. Effective tax rate was lower in the past even if the nominal was higher. SALT was amounted to basically nothing back then whereas they are far more now.

sure but that sword cuts both ways. it is well documented pretty much nobody actually paid top nominal rates in the 50s because there were so many loopholes

No. The chart shows "Federal Receipts as Percent of Gross Domestic Product"

Why choose that metric rather than income, corporate, capital gains, etc. tax rates? Seems like it could obfuscate who bears the burden of those taxes.

Because we are talking about the federal debt, not distributional issues.

My main used of the Tektronix terminal was to preview troff[0] output before sending the final product to the phototypesetter[1], which cost a nominal fee per page as I recall.

[0] Unix program to format high quality printed documents, similar to newspaper/magazine/book printing

[1]machine using photographic paper to output typeset pages, supporting a variety of fonts


I owned an ADM3a and used it often back in the days of 300 and 1200 baud modems. My recollection is that it was just a dumb TTY.

The ADM3A was slightly more than a dumb TTY; it supported direct cursor addressing despite being made of SSI TTL chips. It was the main platform for vi. I bought a used one at a government surplus auction and, many years later, wrote an emulator. Thanks to termcap/terminfo, most TUI programs work adequately on an ADM3A emulator.

No graphics, though, not even TRS-80-style pseudographics. Not even inverse video.


The ADM3a was just a UART chip, RAM chips, character ROMs, and a bunch of 74LS chips to glue it all together. No CPU, and no way to generate graphics.

Just to clarify, I think a lot of the Tek terminals that could generate graphics also lacked CPUs.

>the standard deduction is now large enough that most people don't get to deduct the interest anymore.

They don't get to itemize their interest deduction, but they still get to deduct from their taxable income an amount equal to or greater than the interest they paid.

The standard deduction was not significantly increased in order to reduce total deductions, it was simply to remove the need to itemize them as often. (And incidentally, to replace the personal exemption deduction which was removed.)

This is in reference to changes to U.S. income tax beginning in 2017.


> They don't get to itemize their interest deduction, but they still get to deduct from their taxable income an amount equal to or greater than the interest they paid.

But they get to deduct that amount regardless of whether they paid any interest, so if they take the loan they're paying all of the interest themselves relative to what happens if they don't take the loan.


>something I’ve been seeing a lot of lately

It's not only recent, according to this quote from 300 years ago.

Jonathan Swift — 'It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.'


Disagree, in the U.S. the original by Johnny Nash reached number 1 on the Billboard chart while the cover version by Cliff only reached #18. While chart position is not the ultimate determination of "better", I also personally have always liked the Nash version, I didn't even know Cliff did a cover until today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Can_See_Clearly_Now



>Politics are not a value system

They most definitely are. "Some of the public’s most negative judgements are reserved for values that are most squarely in the political sphere" [0]

[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/04/26/2-views-of-a...


Politics have never been a value system, but politicians have always done the hard work to convince people otherwise.


> simple black drip coffee drinks

I visited London last year and was surprised & disappointed that the McDonalds across from the Trocadero did not have any such thing as simple black drip coffee (to which I could add half-and-half). The closest I could come was "flat white", which I never heard of before in the U.S.


A flat white is just a small latte (i.e. with a higher espresso to milk ratio). It's not based on filter coffee.

Half and half does not exist in the UK (or Europe more generally, AFAIK).

Filter coffee exists but is less common, especially now that office coffee tends to be handled by coffee machines that make espresso(-style) coffee.


>The company’s [Additive] technology automates complex tasks such as extracting footnotes from K-1s, K-3s, and related forms, so every staff member can become a reviewer and complete work that used to take weeks in a matter of hours.

Any tax professional who takes weeks to enter footnote info from a K-1 form into their professional tax prep software is probably just as bad at other job-related tasks and either needs more training or to find another job.


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