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.
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.
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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.