How private equity is changing housing

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.

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.

> 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.

We already do this for property taxes.

That's a very strange way of looking at property taxes.

I do not see the difference between property taxes on my home and property taxes on my stock portfolio. What makes wealth taxes bad?

Property taxes are use taxes. You're paying for the right to occupy an inherently limited resource, and for necessary services and infrastructure. It's not a wealth tax because it doesn't matter how much equity you have; it's the same whether you fully paid in cash or have an interest-only mortgage. It's also not a capital gains tax because the purchase price doesn't matter.

The total ownership of all public companies is also a limited resource.

Whether I have 0% equity or 100% equity in my home I still own it. The only question is how much I owe to the bank. "Oh I bought that with leverage" shouldn't change things for home ownership and it should change things for a wealth tax on stock ownership.