Why is it unthinkable to make billionaires generate some income to pay taxes? I pay property taxes on the "unrealized capital gains" of my house, and somehow I make it work.
Is the tax assessed value of your house actually the same or higher as its most recent market value? If something happened that would put your house market value below its tax assessed value, then you typically won't have any "unrealized capital gains" at all.
Somehow I doubt that, it usually lags true market value by at least 3-5 years.
Why does this matter? Set an "appraised" value of stock portfolios > $10m, make it like the "worst downturn last 100 years" or something, and it would be more fair than home appraisals, and still generate the money we need.
These arguments are not in good faith IMO.
> It gets adjusted once in a while
It gets adjusted nearly every year for most people.
> if it's too high you can bring it down
No, you can't. Not really.
Personally, my property taxes are about 2.25% on a appraised value that is about 70% of the actual home value. This sounds great, let's use these numbers for a wealth tax.
For inflation, yes. Real re-valuations that mark the house to market are a lot more rare, and tend to only happen when a house is sold.
> No, you can't. Not really.
I have personally done this a couple of times, and all it tends to take is a nice letter explaining why the value is too high. At worst you need to get a new appraisal to support the letter. The value is rarely too high, though.
Property taxes in my area are also relative: the tax rate floats depending on how much the local government needs to raise. The sum of the appraisals for the city is added up, and your property tax is your proportional share of the total amount that needs to be raised. For me, that's usually around 1-1.5%.
This is all to say that property tax is not at all a tax on unrealized gains of your house. It's a tax on an imaginary number that occasionally adjusts to be similar to your unrealized gains, and often even has a rate that floats relative to it.