Personally, I’d like to abolish the stock market altogether. But this is an attractive, actionable policy

  • njm1314@lemmy.world
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    30 days ago

    It’s an absurd notion that you cannot tax unrealized gains. We already do when it comes to property taxes.

      • RamenJunkie@midwest.social
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        28 days ago

        “Worth” Dec 31 - “Worth Jan 1” = Total Annual Income.

        Tax that.

        Easy, done.

        All these billionaires like to throw around their worth, fine, but if Elon Musk (for example) is worth 1 Trillion at the end of the year, and he was worth 300 Billon at the start, tax that 700 Billion difference as income.

        No wrote off bull shit either at that level.

      • WaxRhetorical@lemmy.world
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        30 days ago

        A lot of property tax systems require you to pay a percentage of the estimated value of the property every year in tax. Which is exactly the point, unrealised gains being taxed in the case of your property appreciating while you live there.

        • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          28 days ago

          Wouldn’t that bite people when housing prices go up? I mean someone having a 600k house isn’t really having access to that money.

          Tax the rich though!

      • Nollij@sopuli.xyz
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        29 days ago

        Importantly, at least around here, your property gets reappraised (estimated) every few years. It usually doesn’t take into account the condition or any upgrades, but it does account for market conditions. If you disagree with their estimate you can get a full appraisal, which will account for those specific changes.

    • Artisian@lemmy.world
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      29 days ago

      I found this counter argument pretty compelling: the trouble is that investments are extremely mobile, and fairly cheap to obfuscate. Incorporating a big effective business is not. Property is not.

      • njm1314@lemmy.world
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        29 days ago

        We are already spending billions upon billions spying and monitoring the American people. I’m betting we can turn a bit of that onto tracking investments.

        • Artisian@lemmy.world
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          29 days ago

          I mean, we already do. It’s not all that effective afaik? Preventing foreign ransomware from extracting money from american(-businesse)s via bitcoin is clearly within the state’s mandate and incentives, has reliable bipartisan support, and seems like a pretty similar situation. We can’t track and protect funds on a public ledger as it stands, and journalists struggle to track PAC political funding. I’m not sure the spy-state is up to it tbh.