Did I say mandatory? I meant optional! You’re “free” to die in a cardboard box under a freeway as a market capitalist scarecrow warning to the other ants so they keep showing up to make us more!
Did I say mandatory? I meant optional! You’re “free” to die in a cardboard box under a freeway as a market capitalist scarecrow warning to the other ants so they keep showing up to make us more!
I think a law stating you can’t borrow against unrealized gains would be sensible.
You can keep your unrealized gains forever, live of your dividends for all i care, and pay no tax. But realizing them, either through selling or borrowing against, triggers a taxation.
Mhm. There’s two very good reason unrealized gains aren’t taxed: volatility and cash flow. Are you and the government expected to swap cash back and forth everyday to correct for changes in the market? No that’s silly. Should people go into debt because they don’t have the cash to pay the taxes of a baseball card they happen to own that is suddenly worth millions? Also silly.
For that same reason, using unrealized gains as security is dangerous, just like the subprime loans market was!
There’s a very good reason they should be taxed; half a dozen people are richer than god, and basically never pay any real amount of tax.
if you secure debt against them, they should be taxed?
Yeah owning a baseball card worth money sure whatever, if you pawn that card sorry, pay taxes. You use that card a to secure a loan with lower interest rates than you’d get without then sorry, you are realizing gains whether or not you want to admit it. This goes along one of the lawsuits against Trump. He lied to get favorable interest rates by overvaluing his assets to get better interest rates. If that’s against the law why the fuck is that not counted as a “gain” to use assets to secure favorable interest rates?
We’re talking about the stock market. And it would be quarterly or annual. Please stop exaggerating.
There’s a precise moment in time you take a loan. Use that moment in time to calculate worth; tax.
Sure, but this shouldn’t apply to everybody. Unrealized gains up to $10 million don’t get taxed. Unrealized gains over that amount get taxed.
If you pay it yearly you’re not paying this every day. People with this much money almost always go up in unrealized gains every year, so it’s not going to be a back and forth. It’ll be a yearly adjustment. No different than literally everybody else that pays taxes on their new wealth every year.
Edit: as for the baseball card example, if you’ve got over $10 million in unrealized gains on baseball cards, yeah, maybe you pay taxes on that.
That was my thoughts as well.
Wouldn’t that affect things like Home Equity loans?
Homes are taxed based on assessed value. They are already a form of taxing unrealized gains.
Most of the population either has:
I think it’s fair to ask that the rich play by the same rules. You can either borrow against your gains and pay taxes on them, or not pay taxes and not be able to borrow against them.
No because the mínimum for this to apply is 100 million.
Depends on the exact implementation, but sure, you could happily write a version where an initial home loan isn’t hit, and only “top up” loans against the INCREASED value of your home is targeted.
How are you going to enforce that? The Bank can cite whatever they want for giving the loan.
If we just tax them then it’s easily enforceable and it’s done.
It can just be flipped on it’s head;
How are you going to enforce taxing on value, the person can just cite whatever value they want for the asset.
No they actually can’t. In stocks the price is publicly listed by a third party. In real estate an assessor gets involved. For commodities like cars they have to be unique or nearly so before there isn’t a third party listing it’s value.
For edge cases, especially large real estate, we could always make a second law, one that says the government can buy your building at the value you gave the IRS if it’s significantly below market rate on dollars per square foot for it’s type (office, industrial, residential, etc), or that it’s represented as a higher value in investment reports or bank loans. We’ll frame it as a bail out, helping them offload toxic assets. Then the government sells the building on the open market. That way when someone like Trump decides his buildings are suddenly worth less than all of the surrounding buildings we can keep him from going bankrupt again.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-fraud-ruling-property-valuation-michael-cohen
A former sitting president has been indicted, if not convicted of this very crime. You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t believe it’s that uncommon.
It took literal decades and the magnifying glass of running for public office. I’m not comfortable with that being the standard.
It is the standard. Now. Currently.
If you don’t like it, might I suggest a guillotine or several. Worked for the French.
Or, we could pass a law changing that standard.