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I realize people want to tax the rich but seems to me that taxing unrealized gains would seriously penalize investment.

That’s a huge blow to the natural compounding that occurs as stocks appreciate over time.

Wouldn’t that kill their stock market? Who would invest with such taxes?

Seems like people would just pour their investment funds into real estate rentals or such where only “realized” income would exist to be taxed… (ignoring appreciation of the property)

Whenever I bring up the idea of taxing the rich via unrealized gains, people oppose it by saying it’ll hurt investment. The reality is that years of huge stock market returns haven’t made life easier for the vast majority of people who actually do the work that makes companies successful. At least in the US, wages haven’t kept up with housing, healthcare, or basic costs, and I’m sure European workers face these kinds of problems too. At some point, it’s fair to ask why protecting unlimited tax-free growth for the top 0.1% should matter more than the financial stability of the workers actually doing the hard work to drive that growth. If the Netherlands finds that people avoid taxes by investing into real estate rentals, then maybe there should be laws covering those loopholes too.

But if the alternative becomes more real estate investment than we already have won't that be even worse?

Investing in the stock market at least in principle is investing in businesses that use that money to increase productivity. We should discourage investment in vehicles that do not optimize for productivity (real estate, bitcoin, metals and similar).

Selling your investment to pay taxes for unrealized gains forces more liquidity and movement in the market and might have a huge impact on preventing bubbles forming.

How does that work when some of the most outstanding ways remaining to make money are from a bubble?

I am not sure if you're agreeing with me or not lol

You are somehow romanticizing the hard workers who build the real economy. No one works hard anymore. Within EU it's all about real estate and leveraging it to buy even more real estate, and then a small studio for short term rental on top of it.

You might be right. I’m sure it didn’t help her case.

A crummy idea is a crummy idea, even if you otherwise like the person having it.

> Hopefully the Dutch political scene is a little less volatile than ours was in 2024.

They have 3-4 party coalitions and all of them want markup on your wallet. This is how tax the rich ends up, everyone else gets hit with taxes.

> Kamala Harris's threat to tax unrealized gains just prior to the election is probably why we have Donald Trump in office today

It was not a good policy and was unpopular with many Democrats, but I think there were several other more major contributing factors to why as Trump won (ex. general displeasure with inflation post-COVID, high emphasis on the asylum crisis/trans issues, plus only having 4 months lead-up time after Biden's withdrawal).

Another factor was tech and crypto. The Biden administration was widely seen as hostile to crypto and DeFi, which turned off a lot of younger and online voters and created unexpected opposition to Harris.

There was also a perception of politicization in agencies that are supposed to be neutral. People pointed to things like EV summits excluding Tesla, or regulatory pressure and delays affecting SpaceX launches and Tesla investigations. Whether justified or not, the optics made it look selective and punitive.

Individually these aren't huge voting blocs, but at the margins they likely added to the broader dissatisfaction.

And what also didn't help was the perception that the Harris campaign operated in something of an ideological bubble. For example, reports that staff discouraged her from doing a Joe Rogan interview because they disliked him reinforced the idea of an echo chamber, which ties into your point about trans issues.

Add to that the fact that there were no Democratic primaries.

Even if what you’re saying is true, this just goes to show how badly we need to rein in the ultra-wealthy by taxing their unrealized gains. Like I’ve pointed out elsewhere in the comments, letting billionaires (some of whom will soon be trillionaires) get away with having tax-free spending power disenfranchises the many people who labor for a living. The very fact you so casually say “their media outlets” just goes to show how their concentrated wealth threatens the public discourse. As a society, we can’t allow people to use their wealth to influence government and civilization as a whole without at the very least being able to tax said wealth. The solution to taxing the rich isn’t to downplay the issue for electoral convenience. It is to educate and build a grassroots movement that can oppose the power of concentrated media ownership. The very points you make kind of undermine any principled opposition to taxing unrealized gains.

You're aiming at two different targets, one being tax policy and the other being media ownership. What I'm saying is, let's fix the latter, then the former.

Otherwise there's no way to put the issue in front of the people for discussion.