Stocks are not real estate, I’ll leave it at that.
It’s not a particularly compelling argument.
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2695
What’s the problem that we’re trying to address by taxing unrealized gains?
As it stands, you’re gonna get to tax that wealth as soon as someone actually wants to use it for literally anything. Why isn’t that good enough?
The problems to be solved are 1) how do we prevent, even reverse the ongoing concentration of wealth and the resulting depredations of the wealthy on democratic society, and 2) how do we fund a better social welfare state?
I get that you’re against taxing wealth, but you don’t need to offer bad arguments against a wealth tax to be against it, you can just say you’re against it as a matter of philosophy.
You’re not. Read the article that Matt just posted.
I’m totally sympathetic to the problem, but effectively saying that there’s no way to tax unrealized gains is admitting there’s no possible way modern nation-states can effectively tax the multinational finance system, purely because “we don’t know what to do” about it.
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2698
It’s just that, in order for me to spend any gains in the stock market, I need to sell the stock, at which point I pay taxes on it.
I think the disconnect is the phrase “taxing unrealized gains” when what it really means is “taxing all wealth including current unrealized gains, every year.”
Yes, that’s fair. The effect is the same, but ‘wealth tax’ is a better way to describe it.
Yeah, per the article, the gains get realized… for more tax breaks:
What’s worse, these methods and practices—things such as offsetting income with losses in unrelated businesses; structuring assets to grow rather than generate income, then borrowing against those growing assets for cash needs; and deducting interest payments and state taxes from taxable income—are so downright mundane and commonly applied that most rich people don’t see them as unethical.
Outside of a primary residence, if an asset is leveraged this way, it probably should be taxed as income.
The other massive scam is the “Income” Taxes vs. “Payroll Taxes” one. Not only do the wealthy not pay much in “Income” Taxes, they structure their jobs so they don’t pay “Payroll Taxes” either. Yet also think that the Government Programs those taxes pay for (Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment, etc.) should be slashed.
The fix? Not wealth tax, but extending payroll and income taxes to any income earned by working age Americans who haven’t retired.
The fix? Not wealth tax, but extending payroll and income taxes to any income earned by working age Americans who haven’t retired, or aren’t at retirement age. Exemptions can be made for primary residences, medical/child care/education expenses, etc. but not loans against unrealized assets, etc. - and there could easily be progressive ceilings/floors.
One thing about the initial ProPublica document I haven’t seen answered is why doesn’t the AMT apply, at least for the “income” portions? Wasn’t the goal to address these run-arounds? If so, maybe fix that…
And what that really means is “taxing all wealth above tens of millions of dollars including current unrealized gains, every year.” It’s not an issue that anyone outside of the top 0.1% of US households will be affected by (I mean, outside of benefiting from a better social safety net, or infrastructure, or…).
That was my next question, we’re still talking roughly about the Warren/Sanders proposals, yes?
Yes. It’s all prompted by the (underwhelming) ProPublica revelation that the super-rich aren’t paying any taxes, upthread. So that’s the target group I’m talking about.
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2705
This doesn’t really say that they are somehow realizing those gains though. I guess it’s talking about taking out loans against those holdings? But that’s not really realizing gains. You’re paying that money back. Further, even in the case where you are deducting things like interest payments, in those cases, those interest payments are then being taxed on the bank’s end, so the Feds are still getting their cut of that stuff.
If you’re trying to reduce someone’s wealth or stem the growth in their wealth, the way to do that is to tax their wealth directly. Taxing their income in the unlikely event that they decide to liquidate some of their wealth isn’t really going to work.
I’m willing to back off my demand for a wealth tax (less progressive, more aggressive, that’s what I say) in return for dramatic restructurings of modern society that more naturally distribute the fruits of human endeavor among the population and prevent multi-generational wealth accumulation.
How anyone is against this I really, truly have no idea. Useful idiots, I guess.
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2708
See, for me, I don’t really have any desire to limit anyone’s wealth. That’s not a useful goal, imho.
Rather, what I want is to make sure that the government is receiving the revenue it needs to support the programs it wants to run, and I think that those resources should be collected in a progressive tax structure.
Yes the oligarchy is awesome, they are such wonderful contributors to society.
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Yes, we know.
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A wealth tax of ~2% won’t prevent people from getting rich(er).
“Taxing income is right but taxing wealth is wrong” is a really strange position, one that I don’t begin to understand.
Taking a percentage of what someone earns, based on each transaction, is very different from annually taking a percentage of what someone owns. Taxation is generally applied to transactions, not savings or assets.
Indeed it is different, just as chocolate ice cream is different than strawberry ice cream. Now what?
