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Comment by flurben | Hacker News Reader

The goal of the legislation is to shift the tax burden towards high net worth individuals, and away from wage-earners.

Raising cap gains rates and/or increasing top marginal income tax rates are not very effective ways to achieve this goal.

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If you have high net worth that means you have control, not that you are necessarily living lavishly. If you want to pay for personal expenses and buy yachts and the usual kinds of things that socialist complain about, you need to take that out in income or through capital gains. Thus, they want to pay for everything by forcing founders to sell control to the country's financial oligarchs like Blackrock and Vanguard who already own large amounts of most public companies.

Blackrock and Vanguard are just intermediaries, they do not actually own the shares in their ETFs, they manage the assets on behalf of clients.

They could easily exert any kind of pressure on these companies though. For example, Blackrock was given exclusive access to do wealth management in China recently[1]. It's one of the few western financial institutions allowed to do so. What kind of influence do you think the Chinese government exerts on Blackrock in exchange for this privilege?

[1]https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/blackrock-expands-china-foot...

Or get a loan at a very low rate using equity as collateral thereby avoiding income/cap gains.

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