As the article points out, Harris's proposal would only kick in at $100M. I don't see how anyone should be against it.
>...Although the AMT was originally enacted to target 155 high-income households, it grew to affect 5.2 million taxpayers each year by 2017, raising $36.2 billion, or 2.4% of federal income tax revenue.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#:~:tex....
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.
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.
I would be taxed more according to what you're saying, and I'm still advocating for it.
I recognize that the benefit to society of having better distribution of wealth far outweighs any potential cost to myself in the scenario where this gets expanded.
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
Like, we're giving them cake after they've already eaten their cake.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not everything is a conspiracy.