Tax unrealized gains
“Oh, but that’s not real money, they’d have to sell their assets to get the cash to pay those taxes, thus diminishing the value of the assets.”
Oh, so the value of the assets is over valued then? So them taking out loans with those assets as the collateral is fundamentally allowing them to take out more money from the financial system than they are realistically due? Damn, tax their fucking loans against their assets as well.
“NOOO! That’s not fair! Then they’re paying a higher tax rate than specified by the law!”
Crazy how that works, crazy how tax rates actually payed can be different from those specified in the laws. Hey did you know that Warren Buffet pays effectively a lower tax rate than his laundry lady, being stated as unjust by himself. Crazy how right now people working for wages get taxed way more than people working for asset valuations.
Because you’re poor and don’t have any influence over tax policy or enforcement.
This definitely won’t be popular, hope you stick with me to the end, but real estate is collateral that holds its value quite well most of the time, and is insured by the homeowner.
Stocks don’t have that. Companies with large valuations can liquidate overnight.
Does that mean it’s all a bad idea? No, but it just is different than the frame provided. They are different assets.
Taxing rich people in new ways can be a good thing. Taxing unrealized gains gets complicated, but can be done. But also comparing it to property tax is problematic for a lot of reasons. There are much better arguments, so I think we should stick with those. This one has too many easy attack angles with valid points, even if the main point of “rich people get out of taxes more than normies” is completely true.
Tax everyone, tbh.
If the taxes are going towards making life easier, maybe we’ll end up in a utopia and not the shithole corporations are building.
That’s the rub… Rich people don’t want life easier for society. They just want it easier for them.
If poor people have life easier, they might rise up and form unions, demand livable wages, and my million’s of dollars I inherent every year might be a few thousand less and that is unconscionable.
I agree with the core argument, here, but…
Interesting how “unrealized gains” only become a problem when wealthy folks are involved
…do you think wealthy people don’t own property? 🤔
Ah! So you’re telling me that wealthy people DO get taxed on the unrealized gains of the properties they own? Just like us normies do?
Not for long, see the push by Republican groups for abolishing property tax.
If property taxes are abolished it better be for EVERYBODY, not just for billionaires & corporations & private equity groups.
In the US, the mortgage interest tax write-off goes disproportionately to the wealthy. It also inflates housing prices, so it doesn’t really help affordability. Certainly not enough to justify the cost.
you know what’s not complicated? a wealth cap.
that or guillotines, those seem to be a permanent solution to this problem.
Wealth caps are actually complicated too.
Also… guillotines? permanent? LOLOLOL. “Meet the new boss… same as the old boss…” - The Who
when the new boss has to stare at the old bosses head until it rots off the pike it sets a line that’s not to be crossed.
Wow, let me just stand back and give you room to do your badass thing.
It’s all bullshit guys, like on the other side we have to pay $1500 a month rent because the bank doesn’t believe we can afford a $1000 a month mortgage.
Anyway I’m pretty sure $1,000 mortgage payments are a thing of the past.
I might catch heat for this take, but having roads and schools is nice. But billionaires should be paying for the vast majority of it
You’re right though. However the problem is when people’s property tax goes up by more than their wages. My parents had an $800 increase even though the property assessment dropped by 100k. They keep allowing all this residential to go up without letting industrial build aswell meaning the tax burden mostly on residential and not commercial.
Til, I pay less than a grand a year on two properties but I’m also in a fairly rural area.
The “it’s not real money until it’s sold” argument is such horseshit. Just give it to me then if it’s not real. It’s like saying the money in your bank account isn’t real until you take it out at an atm. Dumbest shit, but for some reason a super appealing argument because people keep repeating it.
They can’t give it to you because it’s not real.
Also your money in your account isn’t real until you take it out of the bank is true. You never heard of a rush on the bank? Your bank isn’t keeping most of your money, they are using it. The system only works if everyone believes it works, but if everyone took it the money, 90% of people would find out there money isn’t there.
Same with taxing stocks. It only works if everyone isn’t rushing to the market to sell. If we taxed stocks, the money would have to come from somewhere or the system collapses. This is why no party has dared yet taxing unsold stocks. It would collapse the system.
Have you heard of a federal reserve? Yes your bank doesn’t have your money, but someone does. Your money someone else has is insured by the federal reserve so bank runs don’t happen. You’re talking about an economy that existed 100 years ago.
You clearly didn’t know how money works
You are so very wrong. The Fed does NOT have the cash, nobody does.
It exists only in the banking system itself with no tangible assets to back the majority up, we don’t have the actual cash to cover even 10% of deposits.
Where did you hear “the fed has the money”? Please share how the Fed “has the money” (or anybody else).
The “insurance” will collapse, just as the banks
You’re talking about an economy that does not exist. The FED does not have the cash.
Also, please note the more cash that they do print, the less the dollar is worth… this is called “inflation”.
They can’t give it to you because it’s not real
You literally can. You can transfer ownership of stocks. Dumb argument.
How did transferring stock ownership help the common person, or help the government run programs?
Until you actually can’t, super dumb argument. We’ve seen these “bank runs” over and over again, they aren’t mysteries.
Technically it was people they hired to convince us.
the complication comes from th tax lawyers getting loopholes and diaphanous exemptions implanted in the code
It’s wild how the rules work. We pay taxes on every little unrealized gain, while the wealthy can enjoy tax-free yachting lifestyles in Dubai with zero capital gains or annual taxes. The gap just keeps getting wider.
Okay a history lesson on how capitalism started and feudalism fell.
When you are “rich” in feudal society it means you have land. Land that everyone sees, that gives predictable income and even least educated peasant would be able to tax you reasonably (reasonably = as high as possible without you starting a rebellion over it). But then come merchants - they can have a wagon full of wood or just a small pouch of spices and it would be worth the same. Nobody really knows how much their wares earn because it fluctuates and every goods transport is a huge risk. So the merchants gain wealth indefinitely because king can’t see how much they have ant tax them accordingly, while landowners get poor because they are taxed to oblivion.
Now who is the modern “nobility”? Who has wealth tied up and measured in such a way that government knows exactly how much to tax them? Wage workers. In fact your employer rats you out to government on how much you earn. In exchange things like companies, banks, stocks, loans etc. are in the “nobody knows how much they are worth” category. Say you are taxed 10% on the value of all the stocks you own, this means you have to sell 10% of your stocks annually, and by selling stocks you make those stocks less valuable for everyone… so technically they should be taxed less because value drops down? Generally speaking if taxing something changes it’s value drastically then governments avoid taxing it.
My personal solution - outlaw stocks, bonds and loans for fucks sake.
Say you are taxed 10% on the value of all the stocks you own, this means you have to sell 10% of your stocks annually,
Myth.
You can transfer the stocks themselves to the IRS, and leave the IRS with the responsibility for liquidating them. We can require the IRS to look at the total traded volume of any issue they acquire, and prohibit them from selling more than 1% of that volume in the same time period. Liquidated shares will comprise no more than 1%; those shares will not significantly affect the market value of the issue.
My personal solution - outlaw stocks, bonds and loans for fucks sake.
“Stock” is what the ownership interest is distributed among multiple people. When two people equally build a business together, they each hold a “share” of that business’s “stock”. Banning “stocks” means banning every type of joint ownership, which is every type of business except “sole proprietorship” and “government enterprise”. Banning stocks is only feasible in a completely centralized economy.
Banning Bonds and Loans is even less feasible, and results in even more absurdities. Taken to extremes, your Amazon driver would have to collect payment at time of delivery, not at time of order. Payment before delivery could be considered a type of loan. Likewise, a business’s order to a vendor for supplies would have to be paid at time of delivery. Any other time would be considered a “loan” one way or another.
IMO just stop letting them borrow against the unrealized values. You can borrow against what you’ve paid taxes on.
Say you are taxed 10% on the value of all the stocks you own, this means you have to sell 10% of your stocks annually, and by selling stocks you make those stocks less valuable for everyone… so technically they should be taxed less because value drops down?
Just a note, suggesting a 10% tax is pure fear mongering that billionaires and capitalists use to scare people. The average property tax rate in the United States is 1.1% so that’s a reasonable percentage to give. People don’t sell 1% of their home every year.
Property taxes are a thing. Stocks are property.
I honest to god used 10% as an idea of “ridiculously low tax” but I guess the topic of problems with billionaires may be too american for me.
Stocks should be taxed on buy/sell and yearly hold though.
I honest to god used 10% as an idea of “ridiculously low tax”
You live in a country that has 10% property tax rates?
I enjoyed reading this perspective, thanks. It’s definitely compelling.
Yeah, the financial market was never actually useful. Its just a money vacuum that the rich benefit from
Just have countries force the “you can’t charge interest” rule on Christians.
Islam coming later was able to see the obvious loophole so they added you can’t accept loans with interest btw.
Though this does interfere with separation of church and state it seems countries already forgot about that.
They’re right: it is pretty complicated to tax the rich using the current tax code. And there’s a very good reason for that: they made sure it’s as complicated as possible.
I think the idea that taxing the rich is difficult or our tax code is too complicated feeds into the narrative around the problem being too hard to solve. I think the reality is more straightforward:
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Bring back the previous top tax bracket of 39% that Republicans did away with. That will bring in a significant revenue.
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Raise or add the top brackets on the capital gains taxes.
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Add a new top tax bracket of you want to raise more revenue, e.g. 46% above X millions.
When you look at reports by the congressional budget office or independent budget groups, most of the other proposals are noise in the grand scheme of things. Even the buy, borrow, die strategy that gets a lot of airtime (because it rightfully violates most people’s sense of fair play) only really accounts for something like 2% of the funds used by the ultra wealthy.
Most of the things like wealth taxes would require more complex legislation and be treated by the courts, certainly going to the supreme court. But the above three bullets would meaningfully raise revenues, are simple in terms of legislation, and have clear statutory authority and case law on their side.
The only thing hard is electing enough people who actually care about the budget and the people.
you literally missed the point on the tax loop literally all billionaires use.
Income tax may be a solution to government revenue, but it’s not a solution to inequality.
Capital accumulates exponentially, and if you don’t address that exponential growth, then there will be ludicrously wealthy people, social immobility, and all the problems we have now. Tax wealth.
Of course it will be complicated. Of course there will be court cases. All of that is true of the current system. We can’t get to a working system if we don’t even start. Tax wealth.
Tax wealth.
Agreed.
I don’t think we even need to tax all wealth. We need to specifically tax registered securities. Financial assets.
Economically, it isn’t a problem for a rich person to buy a yacht or a plane: Those assets were produced by workers; they are maintained by workers. The purchase of tangible assets means paychecks for the workers producing those assets. Economically, we shouldn’t be discouraging the purchase of personal property assets.
The value the ultra-wealthy are capturing is the ownership of companies. The value of those companies is generated by workers, but is transferred to the ultra-wealthy. The workers are compensated with cash, rather than ownership interest.
What we need to do is make those securities more expensive for the ultra-wealthy to hold, and cheaper for the workers to hold. We need a progressive tax on securities, payable in shares of the security, rather than the dollar value of those securities.
Exactly. Company value shoots through the roof, it becomes a worker owned cooperative. Original owners get paid in cash, rather than in market distorting power.
Billionaires will argue they wouldn’t take the bet, but they’re bullshitting. They’re constantly betting on stupider risks with lower payouts, all the time.
Forget 39%. We have greater national debt as a percentage of GDP than we did in 1944. We need to reinstitute the tax brackets from then until 1965, which had a top rate of 90%. There are reasons we had a middle class back then, and this is one of them.
Nobody paid that 90%. Just like today, there were methods around it.
But they paid much more, and that’s the point.
Capital gains should just be taxed as regular income instead of having a special rate.
I think Denmark does it like that, but I haven’t verified with any Danes yet.
Realized capital gains are usually taxed at a higher rate depending on the amount of time it was held, but I agree high earners should be taxed a lot more.
Proposal:
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minimum wage = 0% taxes
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N * minimum wage = N% taxes
So mathematically that serves as a pay cap, because once you get to 100x you are taxed 100%. Some countries do have compensation caps for CEOs that are a multiple of the lowest paid employee, and I tend to like the model because it incentives increasing pay of employees who aren’t generally considered competitive or in high demand, and those are the folks that need market intervention most.
In this exact formula, I suspect it would underwhelm. Someone who earned the federal minimum wage, $7.25/hour working full time would get a paltry $15,080 per year. Someone making $250k/year would only pay 16% income tax, a meet decrease. Now, maybe it is good to shift the cost burden more to the ultra wealthy giving relief to even those making good money. But that would require some data crunching to see where the breakpoint is.
Under that plan, the maximum net income would come from a gross income of 50x minimum wage. Above that, taxes rise faster than pay.
Any minimum raise hike would automatically cut income tax rates across the board.
What would likely happen is the same thing that happened when we had a 91% top-tier tax rate: People with gross earnings above that rate would figure out how to turn everything they bought into a deductible business expense, and spend until they were under the line. Which isn’t really a problem, IMO, as that spending turns into worker compensation, rather than a rich-person’s stock portfolio.
Under this plan, executive compensation would still come primarily in the form of stock rather than pay. That’s already a problem, and this would compound it. Stock needs to be easy and cheap for the working class. It needs to be supremely expensive for the ultra rich to acquire and hold. We need cap gains taxes that start lower but progress much faster and higher than income taxes.
That pay cap would hit at about $1.5m. I think that’s okay. I did some napkin math and eyeballed it to graph the proposed tax rates vs 2018’s marginal and effective (because that’s what was available): https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/61835557-1968-4d28-be95-493de6de6900.avif
It’s not the worst idea I’ve heard, but I’d want to scale by the number of taxpayers in each bracket to find out how much tax revenue we’d win or lose. A real congressional study would also consider what is considered “income” for tax purposes, and whether this would cause anyone to get creative with their compensation to avoid paying more tax (well, even more than they already do).
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How difficult would it be to enact legislation to prevent using loans against stock/assets and avoiding income/capital gains tax? Something like “if you have things worth money you need to sell them before taking a frivolous loan.”? Idk I just hate that loophole
Very hard, since you can just take the loan in a different country, even in USD.
Wealth tax is probably much easier.
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How about removing property tax for sake of consistency?
How is the government supposed to make money then?
You wouldn’t even have to make a huge reform to make a big difference. If we changed using “unrealized gains” as collateral to count as realizing those gains, the ultra wealthy would pay a fuck ton more in taxes. Also, the interest on those loans should not be deductible. Boo hoo if you end up with a margin call. Don’t make risky bets.
This is where I stand on it. Charging taxes on unrealized gains is never going to happen, and its not like we’re going to give them a refund if it swings the other way.
Taxing collateralizion and usage of the unrealized gains would be massive, and if they don’t like the new system, then sell them and pay taxes like everyone else.
Edi: also you can audit what they spend and how they got the money to afford it to trigger the tax. Knowing someone’s unrealized net worth can be incredibly complicated beyond public stock ownership, and even then that can be hidden as well.
Don’t try to tax the dollar value of the securities. Enact a wealth tax of the securities themselves. Transfer shares of the security to the IRS, to be liquidated slowly over time. Non-liquid securities would be held much like a lien.
That’s significantly more complicated for no real benefit. It actually carries a much higher risk for the IRS as the securities are volital.
All you have to do is tax them when they use the assets as collateral, and for good measure tax the loan as income.
You could even throw in a minimum threshold to not apply it to regular people, and force them to pay people more in the process. This can be achieved by setting the threshold to a variable, like 100x the average annual take home pay of the bottom 20% of earners (~$1.6m) and make it a annual total of loans to close the loophole of a bunch of small loans.
If they want cheaper loans people have to be paid more.
All you have to do is tax them when they use the assets as collateral,
If you tax loans backed by collateral, the banks will just change their lending policies on unsecured personal loans. No collateral = no tax on the use of that collateral. The method of taxation you are suggesting is trivial to evade.
That’s significantly more complicated for no real benefit.
It is more complicated, but the benefit is immense. The benefit is that Shareholding becomes much less valuable to the oligarch Problem Class, and much more valuable to the Working Class. Company ownership and control is driven toward workers. Working Class shareholders become the predominant voice in determining company policy. Profit extraction goes to Working Shareholders rather than the Problem Class.
It actually carries a much higher risk for the IRS as the securities are volital.
Describe that risk. Remember: The IRS is not owed dollars. They are only owed the shares. The dollar value of those shares is entirely irrelevant.
