It makes zero sense when you consider that the stock market is how most people save for retirement.

What you're saying is people aren't allowed to save for retirement, and you have to tax them every step of the way, destroying that savings because they might be well off due to owning stocks. That's not reasonable.

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mikrl 7 months ago | parent [-]

In Canada we have two types of nonstandard tax accounts, an RRSP and a TFSA.

The RRSP is what I think is called a 401K in the USA: you put money in pre-tax and pay income tax when you liquidate/withdraw in the future.

The TFSA you put post-tax money into and pay no tax to withdraw, including CGT, though there is a maximum capacity.

I would imagine if this tax came to Canada, RRSPs and TFSAs would be exempt from it.

My brokerage lets me open RRSP, TFSA and a standard cash/chequing to buy securities, but CGT only applies to the cash account which I don’t use as I haven’t maxed out the others. If I was maxing out the others, I’d have enough slack to do the financial dance, at least in the governments eyes…

	▲	slowmovintarget 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		In the U.S. those are 401K and a Roth IRA. Both have contribution limits low enough to make them not enough to retire on. Did the lawmakers in Norway make such exceptions and adjust for this? Or are they just trying to keep people dependent? Why should we trust Canada or the U.S. to be any better if they tried to put this sort of law in place? There would be loopholes for the very rich (which includes the political class), and everyone else that didn't have the "capital" to leave would be screwed. If you really want to fix things, tax capital gains from financial instruments (stocks, bonds, options, and all the ridiculous leveraged instruments on top) as regular income, and tax loans taken against such securities. At the same time, tax owned but unoccupied buildings and land, and restrict foreign ownership of real estate (you need disincentives for rent-seeking behavior and land as investment). So you can still invest to your heart's content, but there's not a perverse incentive to hoard or leverage. If you can make more by building something do that. But, but, but... those rich people! Stop worrying about people being rich, and stop trying to hand the government ways to confiscate, because every new method for confiscation gets enshrined in perpetuity. Having them crossing this line into imagining what you maybe, perhaps, could have gained in some alternate reality where you took some action, and taxing you based on something that didn't happen is bananas.