Regarding "moral compromise," many in this thread are missing the forest for the trees. The trees are taxi drivers and airbnb noise complaints, the forest is a policy environment that is absurdly tilted towards capital:

- Ordinary income has sky-high taxes compared to capital gains, and you don't even have to pay the taxes on capital gains if you don't realize them!

- Inelastic labor supply mismanaged into increasingly soggy demand, mathematically tanking wages

- Attributing credit for job creation to capital without attributing blame for job destruction to capital

there are more, but these are all Political Economy decisions that didn't have to be this way. They are this way because people with money and power wanted them to be this way and were willing to morally compromise to get them this way.

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inigyou 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I think it's necessary that capital gains are only taxed when realized - anything else would be an accounting nightmare full of loopholes. However we could define more things as forms of realization - using it as collateral should count as realising it, and maybe casting certain shareholder votes that affect you financially

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smallmancontrov 6 hours ago | parent [-]

If I can pay property taxes on the unrealized value of my house, a notoriously illiquid asset with a notoriously subjective and noisy valuation, then billionaires can pay property taxes on their galactic piles of unrealized gains, which are more liquid than a firehose and easier to value than a $2 bill. This could crash the economy if done too aggressively, but the same can be said of every important economic decision ever made.

We've been pushing all the money into the capital economy and all the taxes into the labor economy and this can't go on forever.

	▲	inigyou 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Property taxes are a completely separate kettle of ill-considered fish.