This is a bad idea for so many reasons. People have to understand that the current trading price of a particular stock does not mean as much as they think it do

This is a bad idea for so many reasons. People have to understand that the current trading price of a particular stock does not mean as much as they think it does. Just because a stock is trading at price X at a particular time does mean that one can sell a million shares at price X. Thus if one has a million shares of that company, it is unfair to assume that they have X times a million of ready money. Thus, this tax is unfair and dangerous. It can easily cause a stock's price to collapse as an investor is dumping shares to pay the IRS. Furthermore, it will probably cause more large companies to go private, which will result in great inefficiencies in our economy. The problem here is that certain people are trying to think up some weird exotic tax which will satisfy the popular desire to tax the rich more fairly and yet leave those certain people untaxed. As far as the supposed unfairness of the examples provided by the article that is caused by a loophole that happens at death more than anything else. It seems that when someone dies their heirs get to have a higher basis on their assets without paying any income tax on the asset gains. We can easily close this loophole without enacting new exotic taxes. You can simply make it so dieing does not result in increasing the basis, which is the logical thing to do anyways.