> I'm talking about having your company own a subsidiary in Ireland that owns trademarks your company licenses from them for, conveniently, 100% of your profits, which then moves their profits to the Netherlands, which then lets them move to a Dutch Caribbean island which then takes advantage of Caribbean solidarity laws to move it to the Caymans where yet another company that did no work takes the money and pays the 0% taxes there.

Name ONE company that isn't a criminal organization that does this. Just one.

I can imagine a lot of things. Just because I do, it doesn't mean that thing is real.

> I'm also talking about loopholes like allowing individuals to take loans secured by appreciated assets to avoid having to sell those assets until death, when the estate will instantly adjust to market value.

You are kidding, right?

Every homeowner in the US has an appreciating asset. Their home. And massive numbers of them take out loans secured by that asset in the form of second mortgages or cash-out refinancing. And none of them pay for the value their asset gained. When they die, and their estate is handed to their heirs, the tax treatment is exactly the same for everyone.

The other part you left out of your comment is that the loans still have to be paid after death, of course. So, if you leverage 100% of the appreciated value the heir is left with nothing. This is, quite literally, the mechanism in place for every single home in the US.

This loss of tax revenue (if the term applies to billionaires, it has to apply to everyone) dwarfs, in real dollars, what any one group of wealthy people could derive as a benefit through the same mechanism.

If you don't like it, go talk to your representatives to have them change tax laws as they pertain to real estate. Let's see how far you get.

> I said they were morally wrong loopholes. And I stand by it.

Oh, please. These are not loopholes.

Dictionary definition:

"an ambiguity or omission in the text through which the intent of a statute, contract, or obligation may be evaded"

A loophole would be something like discovering that because you have N+1 dollars you get to deduct at a rate twice that of everyone else because nobody imagined that anyone could have N+1 dollars when they write the code.

There is no ambiguity or omission when it comes to the tax treatment of real estate used as colateral for loans. This is the law, very clearly and completely stated and, quite literally, as I said, applying equally to every single homeowner or real estate owner in the US, billionaires included.

If you want to be angry, I'll point you to a very real loophole that is costing US taxpayers more than anything you can imagine billionaires might be doing.

The Universal Postal Union agreement of 1874 setup a situation whereby China, and others, could ship packages of 2 kg or less from China to anywhere in the US for a lot less than it would cost someone in the US to ship within country. For example, a Chinese manufacturer can ship a t-shirt from anywhere in China to anywhere in the US for $1 to $2 or less. It would cost a US manufacturer $7 to $10 or more to ship that same t-shirt within the US. Think about that for a moment.

Imagine wanting to manufacture and sell t-shirts in the US. You are done before you even made your first t-shirt. The only way you can be in that business is to get them made in China and have them shipped from China to your customers. Entire industries have gone "poof" because of this alone. Which, of course, means the untold numbers of jobs they supported have gone "poof!" as well.

This is how Chinese vendors on eBay, Amazon and elsewhere are able to provide free shipping. Those of us who manufacture goods in the US cannot possibly compete with this without raising prices and eating into profits, both of which weaken us over time and damage our ability to compete. The more likely scenario is that US-based manufacturers shift shift towards industries that are harder to export (aerospace) or fire everyone in manufacturing and run a hybrid US-designed/Made in China operation.

This agreement, signed over 140 years ago, was intended to help poor and developing nations (imagine China 140+ years ago) access other markets. Fair and just cause, of course. And yet, they did not think of adding some sort of a clause that would trigger if, say, for example, China became the second largest economy of the world. And so, China has been shipping product for nothing to the US, Europe and elsewhere for decades, absolutely destroying local competitors just on that basis.

That is probably the best example of a real loophole (ambiguity or omission) I can offer. One that we must fix, yet the political will to do so does not seem to exist. Trump tried to exit the agreement. Politicians used it to, once again, label him all kinds of nasty things. They ended-up making some adjustments. Not enough, we are still in it. US and European manufacturers cannot compete in their own region against goods shipped from China. Brilliant.