1603
Let's play the rich get everything. The rules are the rich get everything. participation is mandatory.
(lemmy.world)
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!
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?
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.
This would effectively lock out every small investor from the stock market due to the liability of both success and failure.
How so?
"Oh no, I made money, better put a small percentage of my gains away for tax season, just like I do with all of my income, because I'm American and lack a good PAYE system".
Someone here has made a false assumption. In fact, I'm pretty sure we both have made several. The question is who has made a fatal false assumption? Let's go.
My root comment, at the top of all of this, was my idea that perhaps we should consider gains "realized" when they are sold OR used as a collateral in a loan.
Your assertion is that it would wipe out small investors.
I would question how many small investors are using their small investments as collateral in a loan?
You said small investors not Wallstreetbet degenerates.
But sure, now we're just insulting each other, I'm going to ignore that and try to answer your point.
TBH. US tax is weird as fuck, and I don't know nearly enough about it to have more than a high level discussion on it. In my head, this would simply change when you're paying taxes, as opposed to how much.
But.... Nope. Tried to reason about it, can't think of a nice clean way out. It's friday afternoon. I'm out.
What is your alternative solution to the over all problem?
Constitutionally outlaw corporate personhood and all derived market futures. But, that won't solve the core issues with capitalism or human proclivity.
Sounds reasonable. Why not both? Both sound good.
I don't answer questions twice.
No it wouldn't. The proposal out there right now has a floor of something like a million dollars. Most of us will never need to worry about that.
I mean the stock market is literally gambling, so the risk of success and failure is already there. The proposal is whether or not we should allow people to use unrealized gains to secure loans without having to pay taxes on said gains at the point of taking the loan. This would only occur if you're worth more than 100 million. You can afford to pay that tax.
I've a better record of success than the most successful poker players. Is it ten years of good luck or the consequences of effort and skill?
Thus locking out all non-corporate investors from margin, prerequisite to options, prerequisite to risk mitigation and gains enhancement. The average investor looses the freedom to do much more than DCA a fund.
It'll never be passed in such a way. Legislation always favors the corporate and wealthy as they're the ones that write it. It's most perverse in finance and investment. There's been nothing favoring human investors since the breakup of Ma Bell.
It's totally inadequate to save the republic from the nearly-unmitigated, algorithmically-optimized capitalism that exists today. The biggest fish, corporations, would simply get bigger by eating their biggest threat: humans with a lot of resources, but not the most affluent.
The stock market is a tool. It's not the cause.
TL;DR:
The neolib's proposal is crap.
This isn't:
legislate away most of corporate personhood
restore the Glass-Steagall Act
repeal the Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act
In no part of your response did you make any sense or a rational point, demonstrating a clear lack of understanding and a wanton disregard for good-faith arguing. Troll gonna troll I guess.
I can't dumb it down any more. Perhaps another can do so.
You're wrong.
was that clear enough?
Good
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.
Or doing so, it counts the loan as income and is taxed accordingly. But seriously, the main aim itself can also be taxed. A house is...
You'd have to put some controls in there for that solution to work. Hitting new homeowners with an immediate tax on "earning" $1,000,000 to pay for their house seems a bit cruel.
The unrealized gains is for 100 millionaires or more. I don’t think there is anyone with 100million in unrealized home value.
I was talking for a hypothetical world where that law isn't a thing and simply paying capital gains in "realized" gains is.
Nut hey, yeah, sure, 100mil works too.
Capital gains are applied against a cost basis, in the case of your homeowner, their purchase price. Unless the house appreciates in value there is 0 capital gain, even if you made the mortgage a realization event and for some reason implemented this with no residence exemption or tax brackets. It's mad how this point has to be repeatedly explained through this thread.
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.
The government also told the public that the income tax was going to apply only to rich people, how'd that turn out?
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.
That was my thoughts as well.
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.
This.
Seems more reasonable than taxing unrealized gains, although I'd prefer if the debate was on how to cut absurd amount of spending rather than trying to find new tax streams.
I'd rather we went back to taxing the rich properly and stopped having crumbling infrastructure.