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115 points harambae | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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stock_toaster ◴[] No.46208576[source]
Wild idea... Maybe tax wealth instead of income?

Tax break on single home ownership, but significantly increased tax on multi-home-ownership?

It would be interesting to see comparisons between PE ownership in markets with property tax vs markets without.

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gjsman-1000 ◴[] No.46208673[source]
Wealth taxes don't work because wealth gets extremely fuzzy.

For example, unsold stock that I bought 15 years ago; and then got a loan against. I'm wealthy... kinda? But I didn't sell the stock; I have unrealized gains, and you shouldn't tax me beyond income tax on borrowed money? Okay, tax me on my unrealized gains then - but then 2008 repeats itself, stock goes down 40%, do I get a refund? Of course not, I only pay when stock goes up and never down, which is not exactly a fair incentive.

Now imagine artwork I bought 15 years ago from Banksy. Or imagine my video game collection I bought on eBay that contains some rare titles. Or what about my wine collection? Now imagine I'm Elon Musk, on paper worth $400B, but if I sold even 20% of my stock, that paper valuation would be shredded from an excess of liquidity driving the share price down, so you can't tax me on what is physically impossible to realize.

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1. EricDeb ◴[] No.46208726[source]
What about a law where you couldnt use over a million dollars (to exclude normal people) a year of any asset as collateral for a loan unless you paid capital gains on it at its current valuation?
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2. gjsman-1000 ◴[] No.46208771[source]
If I pledge $10M in stock for a $2M loan, what's the taxable event? The full $10M valuation, or my $2M loan? What if the stock is in a company worth $40M, but the sale of $10M in stock causes it to be worth $5M afterwards and the private company's value is reassessed to $20M, after I got the loan and after my pledge?
3. novok ◴[] No.46208822[source]
You create a lot of other side effects that destroy a lot of valid activity and thus cause a large economic depressive effect, or you will start needing to provide a lot of other counterbalances that will be even worse or cost the government a lot more.

This has the finance equivalent of feeling like cookie banners will actually do anything.

Political power will advocate for it's power, you have to go one level higher and interact at that level, not on tax law tweaks.

To give an example of where this has gone wrong already, look at the entire interaction between startup stock, ISOs and AMT and how it creates a horrible trap for startup employees, but not for founders and investors who get a lot of very nice tax benefits like QSBS, no AMT, so on. Because startup employees are diffuse, usually have unstable employment and are usually younger, this hasn't been fixed to this day.

While other countries like Israel have this fixed in a very elegant way, where you can exercise without tax bombs and only actually have tax liability when you actually can and do practically realize or liquidate the stock gains.