U.S. billionaires would pay tax on unrealized gains from their assets to help finance President Joe Biden's emerging social-policy and climate-change legislation, according to a proposal unveiled on Wednesday by the top Senate Democrat for tax policy.
Semi-based, shame it will die somewhere in a committee
Right? Like, the argument for not taxing unrealized gains is actually coherent. I have yet to see a good argument for a lower tax on long-term (asset owned for >1 year) capital gains.
Although it’s not even that coherent. If you think about it, real property is taxed on assessed value (minus exclusions and exemptions) on an annual basis so you could easily make the argument that assets, including securities, can just be taxed on their FMV (average or as of date) and unrealized gains could just be included in annual income. It’s only not normal to think of stocks in the same way as real property because capitalists write the laws and fund think tanks. For them, assets are assets and the more they control the more power they have.
Except that those values are just bullshit until the property is actually sold, hence "unrealized." Individual taxpayers are assessed on cash-basis accounting for a reason!
Hate to break it to you but all of accounting is made up bullshit. All of the market values are nonsense too.
You don’t need to carry water for the wealthy by saying they shouldn’t pay taxes on unrealized gains. Like I said homeowners pay taxes on unrealized gains via property taxes so why not other assets?
My car---without which i can't get to work from the parts of town that i can afford to live---is worth more than when I bought it, thanks to the chip shortage. Why the fuck should I pay cash to the state because of that?
BTW cash-basis is the least fictitious, so yeah.
___By the same token a $50 million Ferrari 250 GTO that’s been in storage for forever also doesn’t pay gains taxes even though it appreciated 300% within a decade. Taxation on gains is only a bandaid to a wider problem.
There could also be a 100% inheritance tax but someone will come out of the woodwork saying “so if I die and have $5 to my name, the state takes it?”
Don’t individualize a structural problem. I am not attacking you I’m attacking the idea that arbitrary things have arbitrary rules that only benefit the wealthy. Any crumbs normal people get is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
This particular rule isn't arbitrary and my individual example is simply one example of the reason why this particular rule exists.
We're discussing income taxes. Taxing "income" that hasn't actually come in yet is bad.
Who the fuck cares
:very-intelligent: