zlacker

>>southe+(OP)
I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign’s suggested policy of capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios. Worth thinking about what people are willing to do to not pay billions of dollars worth of taxes.

>>andy_p+ex
Unrealized gains taxes is an extractive and totalitarian tax. Someone is always risking 100% loss until they realize those gains. It's an affront to entrepreneurial risk-taking and it's capricious. It would be just as ridiculous to allow someone to write-off unrealized losses.

>>chrisc+fX
Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive.

>>kjkjad+5Y
> Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive.

This is emotional pleading, not a serious argument of any sort, based on the core premise of "this person has more money than me, and I don't like that, therefore I should get some".

>>throw1+Vv2
It's a very serious argument, and it's somewhat insulting that you consider it to be emotional and meritless.

Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society.

The ability for a single person to own over $100m in assets is not a human right. It's not a protected class or status. It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.

And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth. This completely insane $100 million figure is so small to those men that you would have to earn $100 million every single year for over 30 lifetimes to get to their level of wealth.

It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy. That's a shallow way to think about it. It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.

Think for a second what would happen to you if Jeff Bezos banned you from using all Amazon products. Would the Internet even work anymore for you? You know, every company has the right to refuse service to anyone. This one man can basically cut you off from television, e-commerce, Internet, employment (if you do engineering work on AWS), even Thursday Night Football.

>>dangus+qA2
By the philosophy under which the human right to property is defined, someone has just as much right to own a billion dollars without it being stolen as they do to have ten dollars.

>It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources

It's not a misappropriation; for a company founder, they _created_ those resources. Without them, the resource wouldn't exist. And if you punish them a lot, such people will all go somewhere else, and then you'll have no businesses or jobs and everyone's standard of living will be worse. This has been demonstrated historically countless times, every single case of the government mass-appropriating the wealth of the wealth led to extreme poverty; Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia.

>Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society.

Negative as defined by some left-leaning social scientists. Conversely, punitive taxation has been overwhelmingly shown by economists to lead to reduced growth in people's standard of living as measured by income and GDP.

>>logicc+IF2
> It's not a misappropriation; for a company founder, they _created_ those resources

Created, or taken the fruits of others’ labor? Obviously, no Amazon-sized company is the work of a single person. Was the pharaoh, sitting in luxury, more responsible for the creation of the pyramid as the architect or the common slave building it?