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Theory — the new unrealized capital gain tax is designed (or will have the effect of) forcing people like Elon Musk to surrender control of corporations resulting in PMC control instead of founder control.
As some detail, there is a proposed 25% tax on unrealized gains for the super wealthy coupled with a 44% tax on realized gains. So let’s say you own 10b of a 100b company. If you do nothing you will owe 2.5b of tax. But if you sell 2.5b, you’d actually owe more! So you end up having to sell a pretty big chunk of your stake. This means that before companies get really large founders have to sell a big chunk of their equity preventing super wealth. It also changes incentive structures for founders making them more likely to cash out.
Once they cash out, PMC will take control. PMC coexists with modern democratic policy. Therefore, the democrat tax proposals help ensure corporations are run by allies.
What evidence exists for this that doesn't support the simpler and more obvious theory that dems support higher taxes and taxes on the wealthy to fund redistribution, and this is an increased tax on the wealthy so they support it?
Why do something that's new and very hard to implement when you can just raise income taxes, which already have an infrastructure set up and aren't as tricky to get non-market valuations on?
I don't actually think it's a conscious attempt to separate Musk from his companies, but it's also clearly not just a way to raise revenues, since existing channels could work at least as well and likely better.
Because the goal isn't just to raise the funds, the goal is to get votes for raising funds, and get attention within the party / progressive ecosystem! An unrealized gains tax just sounds more interesting than a number increasing from 44 to 47.
There are also other object-level reasons, like how borrowing against your unrealized gains avoids capital gains tax. They're not really convincing imo, but the progressive policy ecosystem (not claiming conservatives are better) is already teeming with bad ideas that don't even accomplish their stated goals, so there's not much to explain about another one.
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