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Comment by jcpham2 | Hacker News Reader

If you want capital flight this is how it starts. If this went into effect I would owe taxes on several hundred thousand dollars in gains that I can't afford, or I couldn't afford unless I sold stuff, causing more taxable gains.

Seychelles shell corp looking pretty good right now.

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Don't forget once this mass sell off happens it's likely to tank the entire economy. But at least for a brief period the federal government will have to borrow $1 trillion instead of $1.5 trillion to cover the deficit.

I'm under the impression that this policy would only apply to individuals with over $100m in assets. I'm sure there's reasonable provisions that could be applied to this with respect to liquidity. These proposals are obviously targeted at individuals like Jeff Bezos who do things like take out loans against their unrealized gains so they don't have to pay taxes on their wealth.

Policy targetted at one person, or a small heterogenous group of people, is not good policy.

Okay so are you just against progressive tax policy then? I don't really find myself having a lot of sympathy for people with over $100m in wealth, who seem to not be paying much in taxes relative to that wealth.

Nor do I! I am as envious of them as anyone else. I don't own a home and likely never will, and it's because of rich people (and black rock) moving in a buying up homes for speculative/investment reasons mostly. Envy and housing market competition aside, morally it's a "camel through the eye of a needle" thing. Rich people should give more wealth away, for moral reasons.

But I also think policy shouldn't be based on (these) sentiments alone. Policy should be judged by it's net impact. This seems like absudly myopic policy, coming from the same bright minds who gave us a 2 trillion dollar stimulus package they named "inflation reduction act" that was a net negative for working people, but a boon bureaucrats and other industry special interests.

People who have $100 million dollars have that money because the United States is a developed, mostly politically stable country with a highly skilled workforce and a massive military. They should pay into the system that made them so absurdly rich.

I also disagree with assessment of the stimulus and the inflation reduction act. In terms of monetary policy, juicing the economy with stimulus is exactly what you're supposed to do during times of economic crisis. Policymakers wanted to avoid the slow recovery of 2008. The ultimate result of post-covid monetary policy is that we had a brief period of major inflation (much of which was caused by pandemic and war related supply shocks) but things are getting back to normal and we've largely avoided the worst outcomes. With respect to the inflation reduction act, large investments were needed in infrastructure maintenance, onshoring manufacturing, and tackling climate change. That law did all those things, so I don't really care what they call it tbh.

It's a strange thing to me that it is impossible to stop foreign entities from extracting value from our country. It makes it seem as though we do not have sovereignty in our own home.

if you are worried about being able to afford the taxes on your assets then you just plain arent rich enough for it to apply to you, dont worry you are safe

This is almost certainly untrue. The issues is that at any asset level, the tax itself can force a sale, which forces realization of gains. Whether that is on-balance more than the value realized is another question, but it definitely could force a sale at any asset level depending entirely on the ratio of your liquid to non-liquid assets.

So, in effect, the question is, should the government use tax as a club to force you to sell assets? Does this have any benefit for the economy/society?

Any asset level over $100mm you mean.

Given historical precedence, it's almost a certainty that it will not stay at that level, but regardless the context of my response was someone basically saying that high net worth individuals wouldn't have a problem paying the tax, and that's almost certainly not actually true.

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