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At this point, congress should be focusing on cleaning up the tax code, not trying to tax Zukerberg. What's unfair is that we got a byzantine taxation system w

• rayiner 15y ago
  That's kind of like saying we should rewrite the Windows codebase because it has all sorts of patches, hacks, etc. Do you have any evidence on how much those things are actually costing us? I don't (I'm not the one making dramatic claims), but my hunch is that most of the real revenue losses in our tax system are from some broad failings, not little loopholes. Our ridiculously low capital gains rate, for example. To the point of the article, there is actually a deep-running theoretical difference between various realization schemes. This isn't just "trying to tax Zuckerberg" but rather figuring out how to properly compute "income = net accession in wealth." The theoretical amount subject to tax is: Gain = Net income + Delta(value of property). Theoretically, you could compute the latter term at any interval you like (every year, etc). As a general policy we compute the term at sale of property because it's the easiest time to do so (the valuation is fixed precisely by a market transaction). But for something like a publicly traded stock, that rationale carries much less weight. And the counter-veiling concern of ensuring that the amount does get fairly taxed (instead of being held on-to indefinitely) probably outweighs that rationale in this case.