Biden to Propose 20% Tax Aimed at Billionaires, Unrealized Gains | Hacker News Reader

Biden to Propose 20% Tax Aimed at Billionaires, Unrealized Gains

bloomberg.com

10 pointsxqcgrek216 comments

"... minimum 20% tax rate that would hit both the income and unrealized capital gains of U.S. households..."

a tax on unrealized capital gains of any kind is idiotic; literally taxing imaginary wealth. The "unintended consequences" of such a law would be a disaster, in two ways:

1. as intended, by focusing on 'billionaires', the tax will force mass liquidation events on young volatile companies, wiping out the very wealth the law sought to tax (and not just the billionaires' wealth, either)

2. as not intended, assuming the notion of taxing unrealized capital gains (i.e. theoretical gains on paper, not actual income) survives logical and legal challenges, when the "only on billionaires" part gets dropped and "also on your house's market value" comes into play.

The first income tax was a tiny percentage on millionaires. It didn't stay that way, neither would this.

This swimming pool is getting warm isn’t it? But its fine, there's still a frog in the water.

Unrealized gains tax is a good watch to destroy startups.

> Unrealized gains tax is a good watch to destroy startups

If one of your founders is worth more than $100mm on the back of your venture, you’re no longer a startup.

If one of your founders is worth $100mm only on paper (i.e. unrealized gains), then you are definitely a unicorn.

I'm looking for a good stock to invest in. One in which there are few, if any, 'centi-millionaire' owners. That way, I don't get left holding the bag, when the 'centi-millionaire's have to liquidate. Remember what happened last year when Elon Musk had a forced-sale of Tesla stock?

The companies will rise prices to make up for it, after all, taxes are just another cost of doing business.

Nonsense. There's quite a bit of room to work with when billionaires get taxed. It's not like a billionaire's compensation is equivalent to the cost to write and print a book, so that any tax on the book must be made up with a price increase.

You can see this in what people did with pandemic relief checks: regular people used it to buy necessities, or pay rent. The rich invested it. If the rich hadn't gotten a relief check, they wouldn't even have noticed.

What companies are you referring to? This tax would be on households.

The households of billionaires are very closely related to some well known companies... I bet that you knew that.

They don't even need a loophole to make up for the loss...

Then we tax them more, 95% was the norm.

> 95% was the norm

No, it never was. There was a headline rate at that level. But the actual rate was much lower.

People need to realize that billionaires shouldn't exist.

In a world where people die from famine, billionaires should be seem as an aberration, or something immoral.

Taxes wouldn't solve the problem, billionaires must be extinct.

In countries where people die from famine there are not a lot of rich people. High concentration of rich people is found in societies where people are not starving.

So you are right in saying that in a world of starvation rich people should be an aberration. That is to be expected.

Thousands of people die of malnutrition per year in the US.

We tried that in many parts of the world. It was called social realism, socialism and communism. It never worked out. There’s always a group of people who just don’t care and the rest is much worse off than in capitalism. So what do you do with those outliers?

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