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I liked the argument put forth by Trevor Noah here in favor of taxing unrealized gains: https://x.com/SPC_Harry/status/1828873257530839210 https://x.com/SPC_Har

by hd4 2y ago

I liked the argument put forth by Trevor Noah here in favor of taxing unrealized gains: https://x.com/SPC_Harry/status/1828873257530839210 https://x.com/SPC_Harry/status/1828873257530839210 As the article points out, Harris's proposal would only kick in at $100M. I don't see how anyone should be against it.

namlem 2y ago
Here is a good explanation of why you should be against it https://x.com/memeticsisyphus/status/1832869758179381487 https://x.com/memeticsisyphus/status/1832869758179381487
- _uhtu 2y ago
  This is a terrible argument. It implies the money is destroyed by taxation. In reality that money would go towards relieving the governments need to collect other tax revenues. So for example you could increase the standard deduction. Now everyone pays less tax and can either contribute more to their 401k (boosting stock values) or buying more things (boosting stock values). If you want to say the government is incompetent and will waste the money, that doesn't apply here because it applies to every tax, not specifically this one.
  - namlem 2y ago
    Value is destroyed by deadweight loss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss?wprov=sfla1
  - slowmovintarget 2y ago
    There's no world where the government takes money from taxpayers and doesn't just turn around and spend it. Often this spending is several orders of magnitude more wasteful than private individuals spending their own money, because government agencies have extremely weak incentives to spend efficiently. They spend, run out of money, and just stop whatever they were doing because, oops, out of money until the next budgeting cycle. Value is destroyed by taxation, money is just a proxy. We spend on government because there are things we need that only government can do. Wealth transfer is not one of them.
- hd4 2y ago
  That's actually hilarious. "The rich won't invest if you tax their unrealized gains", or said differently an argument for trickle-down economics. News for you: they already don't. Not sure if some of you know how bad things are for the less well-off in the world right now but they are actually fucking hellishly bad. We're on the brink of a recession if we're not already in one.
  - ithkuil 2y ago
    > they already don't? Do you mean "They already don't invest"? I'm confused. Then how can they have unrealized gains if they're not investing? Aren't we talking about gains coming from investment? If the rich are not investing then there are no unrealized gains and so they won't pay any tax under the proposed law and there are no problems in the first place.
EgregiousCube 2y ago
Honestly this reads like a paid post for a candidate, quoting a TV show and following it with a candidate endorsement is either astroturf or a good indication that you should think a bit.
- rorytbyrne 2y ago
  Or a professional politician proposed a good policy and the professional political commentator made a good comment on it? Not everything is a conspiracy.
  - EgregiousCube 2y ago
    [flagged]
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  Honestly this reads like attacking the person instead of the argument.
ithkuil 2y ago
It's hard to foresee what the consequences are for introducing a tax on unrealized gains. If the problem is that some people can leverage the unrealized gains and buy stuff with that, wouldn't the solution be to apply the taxation when the transaction happens? If you're just owning unrealized gains as an abstract number you don't get taxed. If you're using them as collateral for an acquisition or a loan then it can be made the case that it's tax evasion and treated within the legal framework of tax evasion. EDIT: for Musk if would be hard to make the case that he was just "moving investments from Tesla to Twitter" after going public to state his reasons for acquiring Twitter and that he didn't care if it made money or not but he wanted to "fix free speech" or whatnot. That should be a clear case where he's doing extracting value from his unrealized and gains and thus making them realized. You can also make such law apply only to people with over $100M if you want to avoid having millions of tax evasion cases clogging the system
- ivewonyoung 2y ago
  Musk paid 11 billion in taxes in just one year.
  - ithkuil 2y ago
    Nice. Can I also pay 10% of what I earn this year?
- xracy 2y ago
  It's weird to me that we have a concept of "this is the richest person", and we simultaneously defend the richest person as "not being that rich". Like, we're giving them cake after they've already eaten their cake.
readthenotes1 2y ago
Lol That's very similar to the argument used to pass income taxes in the first place
opo 2y ago
If the government puts in the effort to develop systems to track/process/etc a new kind of tax like this, no one should pretend it will only ever be used agains the ultra wealthy. If anyone doubts this, you need only look at the Alternative Minimum Tax: >...Although the AMT was originally enacted to target 155 high-income households, it grew to affect 5.2 million taxpayers each year by 2017, raising $36.2 billion, or 2.4% of federal income tax revenue. The passage of the TCJA for tax year 2018, reduced the affected number to about 0.1% of all taxpayers. This number is expected to rise again in 2026 with the expiry of the individual provisions of the TCJA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_minimum_tax#:~:text=pay%20the%20AMT.-,Growth%20of%20the%20AMT,about%200.1%25%20of%20all%20taxpayers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_minimum_tax#:~:tex....
- xracy 2y ago
  You're saying we shouldn't tax the rich because eventually it might be used to tax the less wealthy? That's a lot of "might" on something that should otherwise positively impact a lot of problems with wealth distribution in the US. The more principled stance here, is "What value are shareholders providing to companies whose shares they hold?" Like, why do I care if we tax you based on your holdings in a space that has historically been used to dodge taxes? Especially when I think the good of taxing the ultrawealthy and subsequently anyone making a lot of untaxed gains through dubious avenues (making building ultrawealth harder) far outweigh the negative consequences of taxing more middle-class folks who happen to have stock. Like, if the concept of a 100-millionaire goes away, then we necessarily strengthen people with less wealth (middle class). And before anyone calls this "class warfare", it's definitely class warfare, just currently the ultra-wealthy are winning.
  - opo 2y ago
    >You're saying we shouldn't tax the rich because eventually it might be used to tax the less wealthy? No, what I said was: >>If the government puts in the effort to develop systems to track/process/etc a new kind of tax like this, no one should pretend it will only ever be used agains the ultra wealthy. If anyone doubts this, you need only look at the Alternative Minimum Tax: >...far outweigh the negative consequences of taxing more middle-class folks who happen to have stock. The older I get the more I realize just how envy-driven people can be.

by hd4 2y ago

namlem 2y ago

Here is a good explanation of why you should be against it https://x.com/memeticsisyphus/status/1832869758179381487 https://x.com/memeticsisyphus/status/1832869758179381487

_uhtu 2y ago
This is a terrible argument. It implies the money is destroyed by taxation. In reality that money would go towards relieving the governments need to collect other tax revenues. So for example you could increase the standard deduction. Now everyone pays less tax and can either contribute more to their 401k (boosting stock values) or buying more things (boosting stock values). If you want to say the government is incompetent and will waste the money, that doesn't apply here because it applies to every tax, not specifically this one.
- namlem 2y ago
  Value is destroyed by deadweight loss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss?wprov=sfla1
- slowmovintarget 2y ago
  There's no world where the government takes money from taxpayers and doesn't just turn around and spend it. Often this spending is several orders of magnitude more wasteful than private individuals spending their own money, because government agencies have extremely weak incentives to spend efficiently. They spend, run out of money, and just stop whatever they were doing because, oops, out of money until the next budgeting cycle. Value is destroyed by taxation, money is just a proxy. We spend on government because there are things we need that only government can do. Wealth transfer is not one of them.
hd4 2y ago
That's actually hilarious. "The rich won't invest if you tax their unrealized gains", or said differently an argument for trickle-down economics. News for you: they already don't. Not sure if some of you know how bad things are for the less well-off in the world right now but they are actually fucking hellishly bad. We're on the brink of a recession if we're not already in one.
- ithkuil 2y ago
  > they already don't? Do you mean "They already don't invest"? I'm confused. Then how can they have unrealized gains if they're not investing? Aren't we talking about gains coming from investment? If the rich are not investing then there are no unrealized gains and so they won't pay any tax under the proposed law and there are no problems in the first place.

EgregiousCube 2y ago

Honestly this reads like a paid post for a candidate, quoting a TV show and following it with a candidate endorsement is either astroturf or a good indication that you should think a bit.

rorytbyrne 2y ago
Or a professional politician proposed a good policy and the professional political commentator made a good comment on it? Not everything is a conspiracy.
- EgregiousCube 2y ago
  [flagged]
Brian_K_White 2y ago
Honestly this reads like attacking the person instead of the argument.

ithkuil 2y ago

It's hard to foresee what the consequences are for introducing a tax on unrealized gains. If the problem is that some people can leverage the unrealized gains and buy stuff with that, wouldn't the solution be to apply the taxation when the transaction happens? If you're just owning unrealized gains as an abstract number you don't get taxed. If you're using them as collateral for an acquisition or a loan then it can be made the case that it's tax evasion and treated within the legal framework of tax evasion. EDIT: for Musk if would be hard to make the case that he was just "moving investments from Tesla to Twitter" after going public to state his reasons for acquiring Twitter and that he didn't care if it made money or not but he wanted to "fix free speech" or whatnot. That should be a clear case where he's doing extracting value from his unrealized and gains and thus making them realized. You can also make such law apply only to people with over $100M if you want to avoid having millions of tax evasion cases clogging the system

ivewonyoung 2y ago
Musk paid 11 billion in taxes in just one year.
- ithkuil 2y ago
  Nice. Can I also pay 10% of what I earn this year?
xracy 2y ago
It's weird to me that we have a concept of "this is the richest person", and we simultaneously defend the richest person as "not being that rich". Like, we're giving them cake after they've already eaten their cake.

readthenotes1 2y ago

Lol That's very similar to the argument used to pass income taxes in the first place

opo 2y ago

If the government puts in the effort to develop systems to track/process/etc a new kind of tax like this, no one should pretend it will only ever be used agains the ultra wealthy. If anyone doubts this, you need only look at the Alternative Minimum Tax: >...Although the AMT was originally enacted to target 155 high-income households, it grew to affect 5.2 million taxpayers each year by 2017, raising $36.2 billion, or 2.4% of federal income tax revenue. The passage of the TCJA for tax year 2018, reduced the affected number to about 0.1% of all taxpayers. This number is expected to rise again in 2026 with the expiry of the individual provisions of the TCJA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_minimum_tax#:~:text=pay%20the%20AMT.-,Growth%20of%20the%20AMT,about%200.1%25%20of%20all%20taxpayers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_minimum_tax#:~:tex....

xracy 2y ago
You're saying we shouldn't tax the rich because eventually it might be used to tax the less wealthy? That's a lot of "might" on something that should otherwise positively impact a lot of problems with wealth distribution in the US. The more principled stance here, is "What value are shareholders providing to companies whose shares they hold?" Like, why do I care if we tax you based on your holdings in a space that has historically been used to dodge taxes? Especially when I think the good of taxing the ultrawealthy and subsequently anyone making a lot of untaxed gains through dubious avenues (making building ultrawealth harder) far outweigh the negative consequences of taxing more middle-class folks who happen to have stock. Like, if the concept of a 100-millionaire goes away, then we necessarily strengthen people with less wealth (middle class). And before anyone calls this "class warfare", it's definitely class warfare, just currently the ultra-wealthy are winning.
- opo 2y ago
  >You're saying we shouldn't tax the rich because eventually it might be used to tax the less wealthy? No, what I said was: >>If the government puts in the effort to develop systems to track/process/etc a new kind of tax like this, no one should pretend it will only ever be used agains the ultra wealthy. If anyone doubts this, you need only look at the Alternative Minimum Tax: >...far outweigh the negative consequences of taxing more middle-class folks who happen to have stock. The older I get the more I realize just how envy-driven people can be.