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
Nobody with assets over 100m has a "pile of gold", as you put it. Those assets are always productively invested in some form or another. But you would prefer that those investments be pulled, because the government are clearly much better at employing those assets productively?

>>this_u+i41
Its not a question of who is better at managing money but more who needs benefit in our society. The government supports welfare programs. Someone throwing 100m in the market does not unless they are taxed to do so.

>>kjkjad+mb1
Totally agree, it doesn't matter who earned the money, only that the government needs it for welfare

>>muayti+JN1
Or to, you know, build roads and trains and stuff.

>>treyd+4c2
The US government, both at the federal and state level, is extremely inefficient at building infrastructure, in terms of value per dollar spent.

Proposing that we should continue to throw more money at infrastructure, before diagnosing and fixing the problems that are causing that inefficiency (at which point, sure, double the infra budget - as long as we're getting good value, the absolute amount can go up as far as I'm concerned), is straight-up malicious.

The only people who make the argument to keep increasing the infrastructure budget before fixing the problems are those generically interested in throwing more money and power at the government, not those actually concerned about infrastructure (who will seek to fix the problem first).

>>throw1+ex2
What private company in the US is building infrastructure more efficiently than the government?