I hate that CEOs make 325x more than an average worker whereas is 1965 they made 21x. But whenever I see something about taxing unrealized capital gains, it makes me wonder: are we also going to give tax credits for unrealized capital losses?

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tancop 17 hours ago | parent [-]

It's really a proxy measure on a couple tax evasion strategies, like the one where you borrow against your shares and default on purpose letting your bank take them. There is no taxable event because legally you're not selling anything. You're just turning shares into money at the market rate.

If you tried to ban all of the known strategies they would just come up with new ones. That's why we need more general solutions like unrealized gains tax.

Of course for the long term it would be better to replace traditional shares with time limited ones that give you a percentage of profits for 5 years but no voting rights. Power stays with workers and no one gets unlimited returns on a one time investment. And enforce pay equality where no one can get more than 20x median total comp. But I think that's too radical to pass anywhere today.

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hunterpayne 16 hours ago | parent [-]

"That's why we need more general solutions like unrealized gains tax"

The problem with this is that is a good reason we don't tax unrealized gains. Yes, there are people using this as a loophole. But if you tax this, everytime home value goes up, there is a huge wave of bigger tax bills for every home owner and business owner. Which would crash the housing market overnight and probably kill 90% of the job creation in the economy. I'm sure you could make some carve outs for it, but if you do that, you probably won't collect much in tax revenue.

The biggest thing you don't seem to understand is that there is an economic concept called the Laffer curve. It relates tax rates to the total amount of tax a government takes in. And we are already at or near that tax rate. Increase taxes and the government won't take in more revenue. Growing the economy, that increases government tax revenue. But increasing tax rates past the optimum rate DECREASES not increases the tax revenue. Even ignoring the increased rates of tax avoidance, it constricts economic growth which reduces the employment tax revenue.

Basically, you can't tax your way to pay for your desired programs. Either allocate the budget you have or cancel the programs.

PS 1/2 of the federal budget is social spending, 1/6th is military (1/4 of which is the VA), 1/6 is interest on the debt and 1/6 is everything else the government does.

	▲	pnut 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't know who "we" is to you, but this article (page 11) plots out position on the Laffer curve for 27 OECD countries, and indicates that the USA can handle a significantly higher tax burden before it becomes revenue optimised or counterproductive. https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1148666/FULLTEXT0...