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daughterofelros:
blueskiesazureeyes:
tilthat:
TIL In 1966, the Beatles were making so much money that they had to pay a 95% “supertax” on their earnings in the UK. After finding out how much money they were losing, Beatles guitarist George Harrison wrote the song “Taxman” out of anger.
via reddit.com
This gets more bananas. That was a marginal tax rate. As in, each increasing amount of tax only applies to the chunk of change you earn over each income level. There was then a super tax that applied only to the most extreme high income earners.
So the Beatles got mad, they wrote Taxman, and they ended up forming a couple of corporations to avoid the income tax rates and pay corporate tax rates that maxed out at 30%… and turn most of the profits into capital gains. Those corporations were formed around their songwriting, and therefore the corporations held the rights to their songs.
Pretty shorty after that, they took the companies public, sold shares in the stock market, and they all sold a bunch of their shares to avoid a new capital gains tax. Suddenly, the Beatles held between 1.6% and 15% of the rights to their own songs.
And then Michael Jackson came along with his scads of money and bought up the rights. So he held more of their song rights than they did.
I’d heard the last part of the story, always as a “woe, poor Beatles” narrative. But today I learned that they ended up in that situation because of pure greed that stretched and strained and did every legally and morally gray thing possible to avoid paying their goddamn taxes…keeping the taxes for their highest earning bracket that were supposed to be helping middle income and struggling citizens out of the economy, while those same people scraped together their money to buy their albums.
I find myself with very little sympathy for rich white men who want to be richer.
(Your picture was not posted)
daughterofelros:
blueskiesazureeyes:
tilthat:
TIL In 1966, the Beatles were making so much money that they had to pay a 95% “supertax” on their earnings in the UK. After finding out how much money they were losing, Beatles guitarist George Harrison wrote the song “Taxman” out of anger.
via reddit.com
This gets more bananas. That was a marginal tax rate. As in, each increasing amount of tax only applies to the chunk of change you earn over each income level. There was then a super tax that applied only to the most extreme high income earners.
So the Beatles got mad, they wrote Taxman, and they ended up forming a couple of corporations to avoid the income tax rates and pay corporate tax rates that maxed out at 30%… and turn most of the profits into capital gains. Those corporations were formed around their songwriting, and therefore the corporations held the rights to their songs.
Pretty shorty after that, they took the companies public, sold shares in the stock market, and they all sold a bunch of their shares to avoid a new capital gains tax. Suddenly, the Beatles held between 1.6% and 15% of the rights to their own songs.
And then Michael Jackson came along with his scads of money and bought up the rights. So he held more of their song rights than they did.
I’d heard the last part of the story, always as a “woe, poor Beatles” narrative. But today I learned that they ended up in that situation because of pure greed that stretched and strained and did every legally and morally gray thing possible to avoid paying their goddamn taxes…keeping the taxes for their highest earning bracket that were supposed to be helping middle income and struggling citizens out of the economy, while those same people scraped together their money to buy their albums.
I find myself with very little sympathy for rich white men who want to be richer.
(Your picture was not posted)
