Where do you draw the line? If someone buys the Mona Lisa and burns it for the tax credit, is the owner to be prohibited from doing so based on the public interest?
> If someone buys the Mona Lisa and burns it for the tax credit
This is not how taxes work.
If I buy the Mona Lisa for $100 and burn it for the tax credit. That would only yield me a $100 deduction so a savings of $46 in taxes (and I live in the most tax heavy portion of the US for purposes of my example).
So I would lose $54 in your example. Why would anyone do this?
How does that work when the film rights live in Ireland and the intellectual property lives in the Cayman Islands and your business has a well known catch phrase on for your creative accounting practices?[0]
Yes, explicitly! There are these things called "moral rights".
"The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. The preserving of the integrity of the work allows the author to object to alteration, distortion, or mutilation of the work that is "prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation"."
I'm sure it applies even though Leonardo is long gone.
If I pay 25% marginal income tax and I make a profit of 200 million dollars, I get to keep 150 million. If instead I decide to buy the Mona Lisa for 200 million dollars, and burn it I walk away with nothing but the satisfaction of not have given one cent to the government. Please tell me how my evil mastermind plan to burn the Mona Lisa works anyway?
Buying the Mona Lisa for $200m is not at all the same thing as netting a $200m profit.
Better analogy: you buy a big museum collection that contains some lost Rembrandt paintings, widely regarded as his worst, but still considered valuable because it's Rembrandt. You think you might have a hard time selling them, so you look up their original purchase price and find that it was $1 million, so you burn them instead and claim a $1 million writeoff, for a guaranteed $250k decrease in taxes for essentially 0 additional cost, resulting in $250k of extra profit.
This example doesn’t work. You’d only be able to deduct your cost to buy them, not their potential value.
It only works if you pay $1M now and then years later burn them to offset a different $1M in income. But that would still be stupid as you’re better off selling them for $1M than burning.
I don’t think you’re thinking the math through properly.
Studios aren’t writing these off because they are stupid or scheming. They are writing them off because they can’t sell them.
I feel the Mona Lisa's destruction would be more valuable to culture than its continued existence. Imagine the headlines, the people with stories of having seen it in person, the conspiracy theories...
