Unrealized gains taxes are a pointless hassle | Hacker News Reader

Unrealized gains taxes are a pointless hassle

noahpinion.blog

1 pointpaulpauper7 comments

“Taxing the rich” is ridiculously easy problem to solve if any politician was actually interested in doing (they are not).

The solution is simple - if unrealized gain is used in any capacity as asset, it immediately becomes realized (as it is) and you must pay taxes. We currently allow rich to claim unrealized gains for tax purposes while at the same time allowing them to claim them as realized and borrow against it

It would be so dangerous to people who participate in bubbles it might greatly discourage them and redirect investment away from financial assets to productive assets. On the other hand robe fair you’d have to give people tax credits for unrealized capital losses and that might encourage counterproductive behavior.

>Just raise income taxes on people with high incomes.

I've always been taught that "the rich" are people with high incomes; whereas "the wealthy" are people with high wealth (and generally no income).

Billionaires have zero taxable income other than income they want to have (for other reasons). Billionaires own private banks that loan them cash at essentially zero rates. They do not need to sell stock. And the "loan" from their private bank is not income and thus not taxable.

There is a simple reason why America has an income tax and no wealth tax. The truly wealthy (again, not the rich; the wealthy) do not have income and therefore do not pay income tax. Income tax is for laborers who work for a living, including rich people.

There are exceptions - Elon Musk with a 'wage' he now proposes to be: 50 billion dollars per year. Seriously, why are we having this stupid discussion. Does anyone in their right mind honestly believe that Elon Musk and his buddies are paying millions upon millions of dollars to cover the cost of the campaigns of every member of Congress for fun? They control the tax code. And that is the only reason there is an income tax. And why there is no wealth tax.

I've always been taught that "the rich" are people with high incomes; whereas "the wealthy" are people with high wealth (and generally no income).

There are many notable exceptions: top athletes, fortune 500 CEOs, top movie stars

Wealth tax is not easy to implement. This is why current “proposals” introduce arbitrary limits like “we’ll tax unrealized gains but only for people with ____ in assets” which is just silly. There shouldn’t be any laws that define arbitrary limits to pay tax, simple rules can be established such that taxation is the same across the board. In reality all you need to is tax assets that are used to loan (non-taxable as you said) against it. It Elon wants to take out loan against his shares of ____ he needs to pay the tax on gains on those shares as he’s effectively sold them. The issue here of course is that people that would put in these laws are the same that are bought by the very money they are supposed to tax… ;)

Are people really this blind to the government's grift? They're the ones creating the problems, and people think those with a lot of resources should sacrifice themselves to fund an entity that has a track record of failing over and over, not to mention creating so many wars. This is absolute insanity.

I can only excuse the bottom tier of society for believing this, as they are the primary targets because of their situation, not to mention their lack of education. Everyone else should be smart enough to understand that more taxes will mean more wars, instead of solving the homeless crisis.

How about just cut government spending.

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