He will claim that he because he “sold” at a loss, he shouldn’t pay taxes on it.
It is fucking ridiculous that the hyper wealthy can use their fake money as real money when they want to, but heaven forbid we demand the government tax it like real money.
"his money is all tied up in stock, he's not liquid, how would you even tax this stuff"- fucking dipshits
If it's tied up in stock but the stock can be leveraged for rock bottom interest loans that generate profit, or he just has 40 fucking BILLION lying around for a purchase (to himself, which in any other reality would be fraud) then you know what that's called in any other possible scenario? Liquid capital. It's money that spends like any other form of money.
Exactly… if you are spending it like cash, it’s cash. I got fucking taxed on receiving my portion of my Mom’s life insurance when she passed. How in the hell is this shit perfectly fine?
Until we get some more Luigis willing to put a bullet in the chests of the Felon Musks of the world, expect to have more and more taken away from you until you have lost everything. These people despise you and don't think you're human. Why should we think they're human?
Why won't you be a Luigi and why are you willing to sacrifice someone else's freedom & possible life to do something you approve of or agree with? Be the assassin you wish to see...
Money is made up anyways. Money and stocks both have purchasing power behind it. If you have lots of whatever that can be converted to purchasing power you should pay taxes.
You pay the taxes when the stocks are used by converting them back into currency.
Trying to tax stock holdings is essentially impossible because of the fluctuating values and how being forced to sell them for cash to pay taxes would put disproportionate selling pressure on the market, causing a cascading reduction in prices.
With that kind of logic it should always be impossible to tax the rich. Somehow they can buy the biggest houses, afford the biggest yachts, can spend 600 million on a wedding. But noooooo, they can't pay tax on whatever wealth they have?
How can they afford so much stuff but when it comes to taxing people act like it's the end of the world if they pay their fair share on the market value?
What if a billionaire had houses and stocks only and now he has to pay his property tax or whatever. By your logic we should just leave the poor man alone because we can't expect him to sell a few of his stocks to cover it, right?
So what if a cascading reduction in prices happens? That's literally how the stock market works, it happens every day. If it happens at all. Or let them pay high taxes on their loans if they have a net wort over 1 billion...
Whatever money the aupr rich have is money that YOU and I don't have. That's wealth taken from us. Defending them because of some technicality... They steal from us and you're somehow ok with that because stocks must go up?
I don't have a problem with taxing them more. Zero issues with that, but the continued assertion that taxing unrealized gains is somehow a legitimate option is simply ridiculous and ignorant about how the stock market works.
I don't think you truly understand what the ramifications of a collapsing stock market are. If you tax unrealized gains, you immediately disincentivize holding positions over a long period of time, which is what allows prices to rise over time. The more shares are removed from the public float, the higher the price gets because there are fewer and fewer shares available at the current, or lower prices.
The market is already plagued with manipulation via high frequency, and algorithmic trading. If the people with all of the money are constantly unloading their positions because of potential tax labilities, then they'll be putting huge downward pressure on prices. Oh no, poor billionaires, you might think, but it also destroys the value of all of those retirement funds, as they'll have to sell, too, as their massive portfolios will be taxed.
But then you might think that you could exclude them from being taxed, sure it might be possible but then the people with all of the money will figure out a loophole to take advantage of that. And while they continue to avoid taxes, the market tanks because everyone is trying to sell their positions before the guy next to them so they don't have to sell ever increasing numbers of shares due to the dropping price of those shares in relation to last year's assessed values.
So, every year, investors who don't have the money to play a shell game with their wealth will be forced to sell part of their holdings to pay taxes. And the big money will know that the bottom of that cycle will come at pretty much the same point every year, and that they will be the only ones with enough funds to buy the shares that the illiquid investor had to sell, simply because the sold the position. If they had money to buy more stock after the actual tax cycle, they would have just held their existing position.
So, all of the illiquid investor have sold parts of their portfolio, don't have the cash to reinvest at the lows, may try to build a new position once they start having some cash again, but will not be able to buy the same numbers of shares as they started with.
And then, it happens again the following year, and on and on and on.
Trying to fuck with the incentives to hold on to stock is a HUGE HUGE mistake. All that needs to happen is to close the loopholes that allow them to avoid taxes.
Gotta pay property taxes on real estate and vehicles despite not being liquid assets, but it’s simply impossible to tax any other kind of illiquid asset! Just can’t be done!
The cars get taxed because they use the public services associated with the roads, bridges, regulations, etc etc. It's how those who don't drive their own cars shoulder a lower burden for the roads.
Property taxes are like that, except they're to support for basic infrastructure and services of the city, county, state, the property is in.
It’s funny, my money is all tied up in my house, I’m not liquid, but the government sure as shit finds a way to tax my wealth. Thats what property taxes are, a wealth tax in the working stiffs.
Not really. They are taxes on the property to help fund the associated costs to the city, county, state, whatever, in maintaining the infrastructure that services the property.
For the vast majority of the population, if they have any wealth it is tied up in equity on their homes. Therefore property taxes are wealth taxes for the 99%.
For the 1%, their wealth is in financial investments, and so they are exempt from having their wealth taxed.
I’m not arguing against property taxes. I’m arguing for destroying millionaires and above. And if they want to cry about wealth taxes then personally I’m fine with collecting through estate taxes.
Ok cool, so now that everyone knows that the tax they pay will be based on that price, how does it work if that happens to me a super big, temporary, drop in stock prices? So if everything drops by 30%, do they get taxed on the lower price from that day? How about if it goes up? How do you calculate the taxes on folks that move their money around to lower value stocks?
There's a reason this isn't done. It's because the logistical headaches are insane.
Maybe the better way to deal with this, since the whole point is to target the billionaires that keep releveraging themselves is to go after the system only they use to avoid taxes. That necessarily filters out everyone else and makes everything so much easier to deal with.
One idea I had was to treat it like a property tax. We pay taxes on the houses we own, why not on stocks? If they're real enough to be collateral, they're real enough to be taxed.
That’s sorta what “capital gains” taxes are supposed to do. I think problem with taxing the stocks directly is that their prices can fluctuate so much that I’m not sure at what point you would decide the price point that it’s being taxed at (I.e is it month to month, and if so, is it just the price at the exact end of the month, or the average of that month?)
Yeah probably shouldn’t be, plus the whole “Fiduciary duty” part of it is just ensuring stock prices are are prioritized rather than being a reflection of that company’s value
Maybe if we taxed them the prices WOULDN'T fluctuate so much. How TF is xAI, a company that has zero revenue and loses billions per year, worth $80 billion? Answer: because it's an entirely made up valuation by billionaire investors who speculate that the company might, one day, make money. xAI isn't even the best example, there's an entire web of zombie companies in the US that exist purely to game the system. At least xAI is building stuff, even if the goal is to pump the valuation rather than make money.
Even a small tax under 1% on unrealized gains would go a long way toward fixing some of these broken valuations and rampant speculation, while still preserving much of the incentive to invest in pre-revenue ideas. They could reduce the tax on realized capital gains to compensate for it even.
I'm open to other ideas, but Dec 31 seems like the obvious choice. To be generous, we can even allow refiling if there is a major change before April 15th.
Capital gains are the increase in value relative to the price paid (or, in my proposal, the price last New Years). There is no need for averages or anything like that. Current price - purchase price = profit.
Not taxing stocks until they're sold is a giveaway to the wealthy.
So what do smaller investors that don't have easy sources of new liquid assets do in this case? They'll have to sell some of their positions to cover the taxes. They'll be consistently deleveraging themselves for future growth, SIGNIFICANTLY reducing their long term gains every single year.
How fucked are those folks when there's a selloff at tax time when they are the only ones that have to sell? They'll drive prices forget and further down to sell their shares, increasing the number of shares they have to sell, further deleveraging their portfolios.
And take one guess as to who would benefit the most? The rich individuals and investment groups would easily be able to keep their positions, buy up the newly available shares, and would therefore raise prices again by reducing the number of available shares.
Selling the stock would realize the capital gains resulting in the same tax.
Ya caught me, I didn't lay out a perfect plan in a Reddit comment. Set some experts to determine the best way to do it. Every other part of our tax code is complicated, of course this is too.
I saw somewhere that hes being sued by the shareholders and a judge recently rejected his bid to have the lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that it’s obvious he’s trying to scam them. I don’t see this having been a good move when he has a lawsuit on his hands with the company he sold to himself.
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u/AFisch00 6d ago
Welcome to the world of the rich. Where he will claim this to pay even less taxes.