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
We all earned the money. Nobody makes 100M in a vacuum. That sort of profit only comes from taking full advantage of a country's infrastructure, its educated population, its safety from invasion. We all provide the society that allows someone to amass that much wealth, and we all deserve a piece of the pay out.

>>coffee+Kc2
> That sort of profit only comes from taking full advantage of a country's infrastructure, its educated population, its safety from invasion. We all provide the society that allows someone to amass that much wealth, and we all deserve a piece of the pay out.

This is such a goofy argument. The US 2% of its budget on infrastructure. It spends 4% on education (yet literacy rates are only marginally higher than they were before compulsory education). Military spending is 20% of federal spending, and could be 1/4 of that without any risk whatsoever of invasion.

You don't need more tax revenues to pay for the stuff that makes business possible.

You need it to maintain your patronage system.

>>marcus+gO9
There is a broader definition of "infrastructure." For example, Medicare is infrastructure that is directly related to the success of any company in the United States.

Has Tesla ever received a check from Medicare? Probably not. But the fact that Medicare exists means that Tesla's factory workers don't need to be paid at levels that reflect they need to 100% self-fund their retirement.

Has Salesforce ever asked for regulation or assistance from the FDA? Probably not. But because the FDA exists, Saleforce's employees don't have to spend time verifying their medication is authentic and does what it claims to do, so they can spend more focus on their work for Salesforce.

Even beyond government: how much do you think a Ford or Chevy have benefited from the US's culture? They certainly don't sell many large consumer trucks Europe or Asia. That profit exists because of the ideals and beliefs Americans have about how they should live their lives and what type of car they need to do that. Yes someone made the truck, and the truck maker should reap most of the benefits, but some of that profit should feed back into society that supported it.

Sure, we probably spend too much on the military and there exists some cronyism that we should strive to stamp out, but make no mistake that anyone with 100M in investable wealth has earned it with substantial help from the society we have all built together.

>>coffee+P3a
> Medicare is infrastructure that is directly related to the success of any company in the United States.

That must be why there were no successful companies in the United States before 1965.

> But the fact that Medicare exists means that Tesla's factory workers don't need to be paid at levels that reflect they need to 100% self-fund their retirement.

Tesla is paying them that much, because Tesla--and all employers and employees--are funding Medicare via earmarked taxes on income.

> There is a broader definition of "infrastructure."

"The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have already held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. Adn the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but to change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer, and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language." ~Hayek