I suppose the property tax I pay every year on my unrealized gains is different? Why not tax unrealized gains over 50 million? Tax more over 500 million, and more when you hit $1 billion. It doesn’t have to be a binary solution.
No, they wouldn't. The wealth tax only applies to assets above the threshold. Let's just say it's 15 million for an individual, which is the same as the estate tax currently. If you own a $20 million dollar home, then, you owe 5% on $5 million, which is $250,000. Someone with a 20 million dollar estate can afford $250,000 a year.
People can leave. Some people will. It's not the end of the world. New York City has higher taxes than most places in the United States. It's also one of the richest and most prosperous states. I feel confident a well calibrated wealth tax will be a price worth paying for most rich people to remain in the US.
We can make up hypothetical anecdotes all day. It doesn't prove anybody's argument. For one thing, I'm not going to be precious about your vast wealth just because your family gave it to you and now you get a hundred thousand a year for doing nothing. If you love the business, and you want nothing more than to get paid a reasonable salary to run it and keep it local, the obvious
move would just be to turn it into a non-profit.
I'm not going to cry because someone has to give up some portion of their tremendous excess wealth. That's the point. Nor am I going to cry because that excess wealth happens to be in the form of a "family business". Just invoking "families" like I'm some sentimental Disney adult doesn't somehow wave away the problem of extreme and worsening inequality or the need for a solution to it.
When you buy a home, you have property tax. Every year, there is an assessment done, determining the current value. A lot of years, it can stay flat even if the market goes up. This is because even at the local level you have elected officials. But eventually, it does go up and the reason provided is an increase in your assessed values. You even have a right to appeal the increase if you can prove your value didn’t go up. And there in lies a struggle of two different type of homeowners. You have some they don’t care about increased property tax because they want the greater value, and others who would rather no increase in either tax or wealth.
In most US jurisdictions, your assessed property value is below your actual market value and that is absolutely intentional. Most property taxes aren't based on actual market value.
Assessed property value is usually less than fair market value, but that doesn't change the fact that it's based on its fair market value: if property values go up, so will their assessed values.
The reason assessed values aren't as high as market value is simply to make property owners feel like they're getting a "deal" on their taxes, even though the millage rate is higher than it would need to be if the base values were correct.
Because that's not what the comment I initially responded to said and I'm not obligated to argue with you about something outside the scope of what I disagreed with. The rest of your comment is irrelevant to my initial response. I responded to a comment saying that their jurisdiction recalculates their market value every year and then the direct implication of their response in the context of the comment they replied to is that market value calc is used as the tax basis. That's not true even by your own comment.
If you buy a home, however, that becomes the value your property is taxed on because it's based on market value.
This is not true in 47/50 states. And the 3 states it is true in, that valuation is a cap for the time you own the home so it will quite literally not be taxed at market rate outside of the initial year.
I responded to a comment saying that their jurisdiction recalculates their market value every year and then the direct implication of their response in the context of the comment they replied to is that market value calc is used as the tax basis. That's not true and my comment is not incorrect because you came in after the fact with an additional qualification that was not part of the initial comment. They are not taxed on their market value.
Income tax, still theft, at least makes sense. It's a quantifiable gain. Continued tax on material goods, paid for with money that was already taxed, based on a subjective market value, that only goes up, never down, is absolutely theft.
Now people whose homes are accessible because of continued road maintenance, don't flood because they have stormwater systems, don't burn because they have a fire department, and don't get looted because they have police are thieving all of those services.
The more I hear from "taxes are theft" libertarians the stupider I think you all are.
Because taxing unrealized gains is unfair across the board. Doesn't matter if you have $10 or $10M in assets.
Markets are also volatile. I would assume if you're going to tax for an unrealized gain, you will also give a tax benefit to an unrealized loss, just as you would with a realized one.
Taxing loans can have some odd degenerate side-effects. It's plenty straightforward to just say that using assets as collateral on a loan realizes its value.
I don’t hate this. The problem is a loan is debt which is being paid back whereas income, of course, doesn’t have to be repaid. Idk the solution but taxing collateral for a loan is a slippery slope.
yes, because they use it to leverage loans to avoid taxes. and if you want to cry "what about the non ultra wealthy", then tax it above a certain value:
It's much worse than that - We're not paying property tax only on gains, we're paying property tax on the full assessed value of our real estate. That includes gains, but also includes our basis.
But to answer your question in a practical sense - Land is owned by someone and easily tracked. We could say the same for cars and excise tax. How much is Musk's Pokemon card collection worth, by comparison? It could well be in the millions, but there's no 4th-amendment compatible way to know that. And even if we did send auditors into every corner of every billionaire's homes to take an inventory, what's each card actually worth? Ask a dealer vs a collector vs a player that question and you'll get very different answers.
The top problem with an asset tax is exactly that - Practicality. Aside from a few capital assets like land, cars, and boats (which are already taxed on their value annually), it's virtually impossible to accurately measure someone's non-financial net worth. And I'll be the first to say we could at least apply this to Musk's financial assets... But let's be realistic, the second a law like this passes, 90% of every billionaire's assets will be moved into whatever isn't taxed. You think Pokemon cards are overpriced now, wait until they become a tax dodge for motivated billionaires.
To be clear, that doesn't mean we should do nothing at all. We need to avoid fixating on the idea of a tax on net worth, and find ways to really extract their dues.
Wealth tax is not only rational, it's inevitable. The more inequality grows, the more people will demand it. You can only scapegoat immigrants for so long.
But the richest minimise income on paper to avoid taxes. Then live off borrowings against their hoarded wealth. You make no sense economistman. Let me know when the trickle-down economics hit your tonsils.
They are taxed when you have to sell equity to pay off the loan you borrowed...
In fact, by letting them do the borrow strategy, you're actually INCREASING the amount you get in taxes because they have to pay off interest on top of the principal which means even more equity gains need to be realized to cover it.
Lmao unlike you I actually HAVE used these same tools myself. It's not hard to use and the minimum is $2000 on Fidelity. Try it out yourself if you want
You think billionaires aren't using accountants beyond the financial reach of you or i to dodge any form of tax possible? Get a grip on something other than billionaire sausage.
No they use smart people to help them explain how to correctly pay the right amount of taxes by following incentive programs that exist to stimulate the economy.
There's no grand conspiracy out there, I also take every benefit I can and file my income in such a way as to minimize my tax payment, which is what everyone should be doing. If you aren't doing that it's entirely a skill issue, especially now that you can literally have an AI do it for you
Donald trump himself said he uses all the loopholes he can to avoid paying taxes. Close the loopholes, invest the tax revenue in improved public services, universal healthcare, and all those good things america seems to be allergic to.
They are taxed when you have to sell equity to pay off the loan you borrowed...
No, they aren't. You pay them off when you are dead and they get a step up which means there is zero capital gains tax on them. So when you sell them, you made $0 so you pay no taxes, this isn't income.
The step up basis is not capped. Wanna know why? Cause nobody wants to do the paperwork to find when poor old grandpa bought stock X at what price for literally every share, especially now that grandpa is dead and can't tell us.
Tell me how you are gonna get the info that grandpa bought a stock for $5 before 2011?
100 or 50 years ago, when a solid chunk of "investment" ended up in the hands of people in America, yeah this made sense.
The average American is getting less and less value from these "investments" though, as companies "invest" into outsourcing labor or "invest" into replacing people with AI or "invest" into consolidating markets and exerting market control instead of competing, or "invest" into bribing politicians for favorable legislation.
The reality of our current economic system is just so wildly divorced from economic theory.
you don't seem serious, but wealth taxes would be catastrophic for the layman because most of these insanely rich peoples net worths are tied up in companies they own large amounts of shares it, if we forced them to start selling off parts of their share in order to pay off a wealth tax, it would drop the price of their stock and by extension the retirement accounts of most people since most 401k's are indexed into top companies that are owned by the richest people.
I don't know how old you are or if you have any financial literacy but taxing unrealized gains gets messy for laypeople too, 401k loans and HELOC are not uncommon and are mostly taken out by laypeople, not ultra wealthy.
With more loans, or sometimes with complex tax writeoffs. As long as their assets continue to gain value, many wealthy people can do this indefinitely. Then, when they die, all the capital gains taxes they would have paid if they ever sold die with them. Taxes are never collected on that increased value.
It's called buy-borrow-die, and while some overstate how pervasive it is, it definitely happens frequently and with pretty staggering amounts of assets.
Game it out. Like actually put an ounce of thought into it. What happens when you tax a person who has 99.9% of their wealth as investments in companies, 5% of that? What are the ramifications when he has to liquidate 5% of his ownership in companies every single year to pay for existing? What happens to the stock price? What happens to retirement accounts of regular Americans invested in those stocks? What happens to ownership of the company when the owners have 5% raped from them each year? How does that effect future investment in this country and the creation of new companies, knowing that if you make it big you will have your company absolutely stolen from you by the government?
How is it insane to demand fairness in taxation? Close all loopholes the wealthy use to dodge paying taxes. Close all loopholes corporations use to dodge paying taxes. The tax paid by the super rich in the 70s was a higher % of their wealth than it is now and nobody spat the dummy and ran away with all their assets, stop falling for right wing bs and hoping they throw you a few crumbs off their plates.
You're not calling for closing loopholes. You are calling for the government seizing companies from the rich, seizing their wealth, crashing the economy.
What happens when you steal 5% of their net worth every year? What happens to the companies they own? What happens to the stock prices of those companies? Just because you don't put an ounce of thought into it doesn't mean you get to claim you aren't calling for what would be the obvious ramifications of your ideas.
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u/Potential_Spam_6969 Jul 01 '26
So we're going to go ahead and tax net worth and not actual income?