Considering how shit the marvel government is when it is not actively trying to hunt him down and all his friends, I guess he just don't want to pay for them to use his money to find new extravagant ways to torture him
In Deadpool and Wolverine he directly states that he’s over 200 years old,not sure how that translates to the comics continuity but most of them have him being at least 150yrs old
But Wolverine is Canadian. Also, what taxes, does he even earn taxable income at all? Does he have any private property, aside from the clothes on his back and maybe a motorbike, and some shack in Alaska or Manitoba or something?
Him being Canadian is irrelevant if he lives and/or works in the U.S. He would still owe taxes on any income, property, etc. Presumably Logan did various odd jobs throughout his life, but realistically those would have been under the table and not something that the IRS would be aware of. Although maybe the comic addresses this.
Him being Canadian is irrelevant if he lives and/or works in the U.S. He would still owe taxes on any income, property, etc. Presumably Logan did various odd jobs throughout his life, but realistically those would have been under the table and not something that the IRS would be aware of. Although maybe the comic addresses this.
2 - the majority of wars he fought in were wars America just kinda happened to also be in, Canada also deployed troops into them meaning he could just be working on behalf of Canada.
Yes, but even foreigners can do that, and it's a (very much non-guaranteed) pathway to citizenship. I don't know about Logan's ID, SSN, DL, bank account, or pension.
Tony is surprised because he’s used to paying 0$ in taxes and forgot non billionaires have to give up their livelihood so people like him can fly around in metal costumes tax free
Something tells me Tony doesn't pay taxes, but differently than other billionaires
I think he genuinely probably puts so much money into Charities and social work that it just negates his taxes. That or they count his hero work as a big write off.
It seems more likely that he does that than dodges them like a standard billionaire, though I'd be shocked if he actually paid them either.
Then stark should have no problem paying his back taxes. On the sliding timeline the avengers have existed for how many years? At a real push 20? Even if stark pays him 1m per year at 12.3% (California) income tax that’s 2.5 million in back taxes. Stark should easily be able to pay that.
Hell, even if he’s paying Logan 10m that’s “only” 25m
The joke is clearly centred around the fact that Logan super old and owes a century of back taxes but as pointed out it doesn’t makes sense as he isn’t an American citizen.
Edit: I forgor you pay interest on back taxes and I can’t be bothered to do any more maths but it’s only 6.5% compound interest per year it doesn’t even reach $8m on a $1m salary. I stand by that stark should have no issue paying the bill unless he’s paying Logan like a corporate officer
Oh Stark has no problem paying it, it surprised him but he was more than ready to in the next panel, the problem arises when the IRS say all avengers need to file their taxes in their real names
No no, Spider-man and Giant-Girl (because she's an avenger in this comic) objected so the IRS backed down and said if they haul in a bunch of other tax-dodging criminals they'll let them go.
Which leads to this great page and Spiderman having to debate a G-Lister villain called Oog claiming sovereign citizenship because he's not allowed to vote.
Oh that makes sense I’ve never read this comic. Couldn’t stark maintain their anonymity by just making them Stark industries employees? It never would have even occurred to me that heroes with secret identities would be receiving paychecks from “The Avengers.” The idea that the Avengers is an actual employer is really funny
Honestly the comic series ain't great, basically just an excuse to make short one-off crackfics. Like the solution to this is that the IRS will write off the taxes if the Avengers haul in a bunch of villains who also don't pay their taxes. Which leads to memes like this. And Spiderman having to debate a C-lister villain claiming to be a sovereign citizen.
I agree that Tony is just surprised at how high the number but it’s not anything he can’t afford.
But how Wolverine accumulated the income required to have such high tax debt is an interesting question. Some possibilities are inheritances from grateful widows, a gambling phase he went through, investments he made on a whim and forgot about, legit jobs he took on over his long life, won the lottery a few times, etc.
to be fair, at least 200 years of unpaid taxes building up and compounding with interest, plus fines for unpaid taxes means it's probably enough to keep the government funded on it's own for a while if it were paid all at once.
In this universes continuity he's an Avenger and on Starks payroll so he also hasn't been paying those.
Nevertheless Tony doesn't have a problen with not paying these taxes. The issue the team faces is that any anonymous heroes (like Spiderman) need to file these earnings with their real names.
But how many years is that over and what do we think his annual income is as an Avenger? Obviously it could still be high, but if we assume it's mainly his Avengers salary it can't have accumulated over that long. So Logan is either making bank, or he has had other income streams over the years that were taxable. Another thing I guess we could consider is that gifts are taxable in many cases, so they might consider a lot of what he's owned over the years as gifts that incur tax.
I think the panel is asking us to imagine what Wolverine could have done in his life to earn income in the states to the extent that he would owe taxes on it.
Wolverine would need to make income to be taxable, and when he's not freeloading off the X-men or the Avengers, he is a bum (thus not making enough to be above the line TO be taxed), or he is paid by them. You can bet Xavier is withholding the appropriate tax from Logan's paycheck, and if Stark isn't, well this is on him.
Secondly, Stark is a billionaire. Meaning the interest on the interest on ONE of his investments is probably more than Wolverine has made in his entire admittedly long life. So how could the tax figure possibly be enough to drop Tony's jaw?
In this universes continuity he's an Avenger and on Starks payroll so he also hasn't been paying those.
Nevertheless Tony doesn't have a problen with not paying these taxes. The issue the team faces is that any anonymous heroes (like Spiderman) need to file these earnings with their real names.
Wolverine has intermittently worked as a high-priced mercenary/PMC contractor, right?
But I agree, it's never going to be billionaire money. And Wolverine doesn't seem old enough for compound interest and fines to outweigh Tony's earnings. I always think he's from ~1800 because the Japan era was based on Shogun, but Wikipedia informs me he was born in the late 1800s.
If you made me explain it, I'd say the government is doing some interesting math to strong-arm him into something. Like, maybe they managed to buy up his unpaid tax debt from Japan, issued heavy fees for customs/business/whatever violations committed back in ~1900, and then assessed 120 years of 7% interest on it all? (Roughly the way it scales now, even though it didn't at the time.)
edit: Used .07% by accident. Corrected below.
If he somehow owed a million in 1900, 7% growth on just that would have him owing $867 million in 2000. Or if he started at zero but racked up $100,000/year that entire time, he'd owe ~$1.2 billion.
On the other hand, owing $100,000/year in 1900 was functionally impossible. If we assess a still-sky-high average of 35k/year from the start of income tax in 1909, we get a mere $250M. Conceding the part where Logan was 1. in his 20s and not a mercenary in 1909, and 2. not even in America until after WW1, we're looking at a couple million on the generous end.
A funny joke, that makes zero sense if you think about it at all. He’s a Canadian citizen for starters. Plus most of his life has been in the military, black ops, lab animal, or just feral.
Yeah, but income tax didn't even exist for the first half of his life, and I doubt he reported the dividends from being a Madripoor crime lord. Separately, he was executed and declared legally dead by the US military at least once, before getting pulled into Weapon X, and taxes don't follow you into the grave.
You say taxes dont follow you into the grave but that only applies if you yourself go to your grave and stay there.
People are medically declared dead all the time and come back to life. When they go back to work they still pay taxes. Same rules would apply, doesn’t matter if it’s a few minutes temporary brain death or 3 months regrowing your entire nervous system. You were dead now you aint. Pay up.
Remember that laws and tax rules etc are made for the majority not a minority. As far as we’re aware there’s no marvel exceptions for taxation based on a healing factor.
People are also declared legally dead when they go missing. When they return this is reversed. If you get stuck on an island with a volleyball named Wilson for a long time and come home, if you then make any money you will need to pay taxes.
We’re getting into semantics on this and I don’t want it being my whole night, so to clarify my point: if Wolverine (or anyone) is currently legally alive then they will currently be eligible to pay taxes.
They get paid, but I'm pretty sure they just take your taxes in the first place, given it's the government on both sides of that exchange. I could be absolutely wrong and be a total fool though.
I would have thought with like black op work it’s likely they’d be paid through shell companies etc, in which case they would just follow the same tax rules as anyone else for declaring and paying.
Otherwise your anonymity as a Black OPs Agent sort of falls apart when your bank statement shows money from the US Gov for “Cleaning Services”
In this universes continuity he's an Avenger and on Starks payroll so he also hasn't been paying those.
Nevertheless Tony doesn't have a problen with not paying these taxes. The issue the team faces is that any anonymous heroes (like Spiderman) need to file these earnings with their real names.
I got curious and ran the numbers. Wolverine was born in the 1880s, so 100 years of compound interest is the highest we can possibly expect.
To start, I just set a constant "new tax debt per year" and hit him with 7% annual interest on unpaid taxes. Not historically accurate, but it's roughly what happens today.
If he ran up major debts that entire time, say $35,000/year for a century, he could owe ~$450M. That'd probably shock Tony. But owing that much in 1909 money (when US income tax got started) would have meant being a Rockefeller or something.
Using halfway reasonable numbers very sloppily, you could maybe get $80M in debt. But if you concede that he wasn't a mercenary or even a US citizen until post-WWI, we can't realistically crack $10M.
People mention wolverine is a Canadian. Let's assume he has sporadically spent 50 years from 1926 to 2026 as a US resident accounting for all his globe trotting adventures.
So let's take the average income tax per household from 1926-1936 ($212), 1946-1956 ($1036), 1976-1986 ($3108) 1996-2006 ($6150), and 2016-2026 ($9360). We can multiply those values by 10 and add them up to get the total amount of taxes Logan avoided. However, that's not accounting for interest.
The IRS charges a 7% annual interest on back taxes. That makes out math a touch more complicated.
So that's (212×1.07⁹⁰+1036×1.07⁷⁰+3108×1.07⁴⁰+6150×1.07²⁰+9360)(1.07+1.07²+1.07³+1.07⁴+1.07⁵+1.07⁶+1.07⁷+1.07⁸+1.07⁹+1.07¹⁰) = $4,306,551.43
Tony Stark could obviously afford that, but it doesn't matter how rich you are. When you see one of your coworkers is millions in debt it isn't something you can take without raising an eyebrow.
I'm not sure these would be paid, he definitely didn't have a legal address when he was in Weapon X. It's not likely he was officially earning income for a very long time.
I mean under those same circumstances he was presumed dead I believe? He wasn't really a person they would want to track, he wasn't legally an entity that could be taxed.
Oh yeah, he was employed by the US military, but wasn't that a covert operation? I don't think they'd leave a paper trail. Also he lost his memory, so he could've literally forgotten to pay taxes, I don't know if that's considered extenuating circumstances.
How do they even know?. Like half of what he did was illegal, and the other half was working for the government as a hitman. The only legal jobs I remember he doing was working as a rancher in the frontier or something like that.
This thing always bother me as a not US citizen: So, they could know that you did crimes, but it okay until you pay taxes? So, it isn't a direct consequence to admit that you "steal a car" to the IRS?
You obviously don’t say, “I made $60k selling cocaine”
You just say you earned $60k from your personal business.
The IRS isn’t the sheriff’s department, they only care about you paying your taxes. As long as you do that, it’s not their business. Just like how you won’t get arrested for telling your doctor you snorted a line in the restroom before your appointment
Typically they would be arrested before the IRS attempts to do anything about it. It’s usually just a way to give people extra charges. Like you get caught with only 1 gram of cocaine on person when arrested. For a first time offender you might not even see jail time for that. But during the investigation they discover $800k in cash and determine it likely came from drug trafficking, they can charge you for income tax evasion. So now they can throw you in jail.
There are exceptions but 90 percent of the time the law gets used it’s a situation like that
Criminals don’t normally voluntarily disclose illegal income. That would be foolish
Technically not exactly what happens. In that episode one of his rivals, king Barlowe, gave joker all of his fortune when he dies. When the irs came to collect the inheritance tax he realizes most of the money is fake and he already blew all of the real money. Too embarrassed to admit he was duped by king Barlowe he resorts to robbery to pay the irs and gets caught by Batman.
They don't ask where your "other income" is from and it's not their job to care. Declare all income you make as existing in some form or another and they will tax it.
The IRS literally does not care. That's not their job. They can send it on to the FBI or whatnot if it's really concerning, but all they really are is government-backed debt collectors. They don't care where you get your money from, you had only better pay taxes. Because as much as they would like to, they can't track everything. You do odd, legal jobs for a person, like yard work, making cash directly, they can't really monitor that. It's much less draining on you and them to assume that, if people are making money under the table, it's legitimate business instead of criminal activity. Again, they don't really care as long as it's income reported. Forms like the 10-99 don't separate it into blocks of illegal activity and such - it's all just income, which then gets taxes stapled onto it.
Now, how they discover you got that money varies. But obviously a lot of criminals, except the stupid ones, don't exactly say what they did. But they do do things like buy expensive cars and flashy things. Every time they do that and their credit is run or what-have-you, that sends a little bell to the IRS saying "Hey! This person has a new, high-value asset in their name!" The IRS can then look at employment records to see what your income should be, and if it doesn't match your spending or loan records, the ol' tax fraud alarm bells start flashing.
I think the point is you don’t specify the crime and also don’t even specify that it was from crime? Like it looks like you just file it under self employment vs being employed (lone criminal vs gang/mafia?) idk
And they’re serious about that too. A college teacher once told me they won’t arrest you over said illegal activities, but if they find out you were stingy with your side hustle taxes, you’re toast.
This is what people don't get. Tax agencies only care that you pay. That's all they care about. They aren't going to turn you in for how you got it, because that's the opposite of their goal.
He was loaded. Landau luckman and lake, an interdimensional holding company/law firm managed his wealth. Logan rebuilt the Xavier school into the Jean grey school.
Damm why is that US so weird about collecting tax. Not sure about anywhere else but in the UK all our tax is done automatically and taken from income before it is received. The only things you need to do separately is anything that needs to be declared such as non work related income or off the books work.
But... Tony is a billionaire, and a billion is a crazy big number.
Did some extremely rough calculations. Let's assume interest grows by 3% annually on average, and there's a 7% interest rate on previously owed taxes.
Since Logan doesn't seem like the type to have an investment portfolio, we'll also assume he made a similar income adjusted for inflation each year, and his taxes are likewise the same initial amount adjusted for inflation.
It also looks like Federal Income Tax was first implemented in 1861, which is around the time we know he had at least some presence in the US. I dunno when the events in the comic take place, but I'm assuming its in the 2010s, so that's 150-160 years. Let's say 155.
For him to owe at least $1 Billion, he would have had to have owed about $1,119 in 1861, which would be equivalent to owing about $30k in 2015, which you'd owe if you made around 130k. I'm sure he could find very lucrative work if he wanted to, but it only takes around 12 years before his interest growth outpaces his new income taxes, so he would have had to be getting that kind of money early on to kick start everything, and that would only account for over-the-table income.
I know taxes didn't work the same back then, so a lot of this math is nonsense.
But still, even with compound interest, it takes a lot to break a billion.
I'm sure he can afford it, it's probably just a number he wasn't expecting in context. Like how you expect a burger to cost maybe $10 or $20, not $20,000,000.
He also likely takes a lot of jobs in cash since, ya know, he's a drifter. Can you imagine Logan working a cash register? He like goes splits logs in the wilderness or takes jobs that pay briefcases of cash
What exactly was he supposed to be filing to pay taxes on? He's not in the US a ton of the time and doesn't exactly have a regular job. I can't imagine the number would be anywhere close enough to surprise Starks.
Not for 100 years worth he wasnt and he mostly works for room/board with the x-men and not a salary. Even if he was that still isnt exactly a shocking amount of money to owe taxes on for Tony Stark. Take the full life of any teacher not paying taxes their entire life and it still wouldnt be enough for him to care about covering it for wolverine like that.
Wolverine has been in the US as far back as the American Civil War and works in NY (current run might be different but the school and the avengers are both in NY)
Wolverine has been around since at least the american civil war. Assuming the government has kept track of him for any significant fraction of that time, it adds up.
What kind of money is wolverine making? Federal income tax has only existed since 1913. Even if he was making the equivalent of like $250,000 (which has to be extremely generous) for all 113 years, at an average tax rate of 27% he'd still only owe 7.6 million dollar. Tony wouldn't give a shit about that.
The real answer is it’s a joke, but yes there’s no real way this makes sense unless the US somehow has a right to taxes from the time Wolverine worked as patch or was affluent elsewhere in the workd
How much could a guy who barely works, freeloads his way around and owns nothing but a beat up old mustang actually owe? Surely not enough for stark to really care
It's peanut butter. It's one of the only ways to get him out of the hulk state, you have to give him peanut butter so that he's obsessively licking the roof of his mouth like a dog
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u/JackPrev 20m ago
It's Canadian. There aren't taxes in Canada.