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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

This sounds terrible. The whole idea is that you don't realize gains unless you have to. That is, don't sell your long investments! If gains are unrealized, how do you even pay? You must sell your assets to feed hugry monster called government.

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GP is not fully correct. Under Danish tax rules unrealized gains are not taxed for standard stock investments. Taxation only happens when realizing gains or losses, except for special investment accounts like retirement savings or other account types that have well-defined special rules and clear limits on the amounts that you can put in them. For these special accounts, unrealized gains are taxed at their value at the end of every year.

> You must sell [some of] your assets to feed hugry monster called government [which runs the courts, police, and military which all exist to protect the rest of your assets].

Some assets are only sellable atomically such as art or a house. A government demanding more money because the thing I purchased with taxed money has become more valuable (or not become worthless) is a form of financial gluttony bordering on demonic.

And yet, countries without unrealized gains taxes still have courts, police, and military.

And yet, they all have taxes which feed hugry monster called government

The point was we don't need to invent new taxes

Why not?

Fiat currency is a tool created by governments to accomplish goals. Massive income inequality generally conflicts with most liberal democracy's goals. Taking loans against unrealized gains lets people much richer than me pay a much lower effective tax rate.

Why not invent a new tax to address this?

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