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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.
It's definitely designed to take from enemies, but I think the primary goal remains to prevent people from escaping inflation by buying assets.
The government has liabilities to pay for and it will use its powers for financial repression if it has to. Anyone who has value anywhere is at risk.
"Taxing unrealized gains" is quite literally just confiscation. They just decide you owe them some money based on some fictitious number to pay for some value they think they can extract from you.
Now if someone whom the mafia already doesn't like happens to have things that can be stolen, that's even better. But it's not that complicated why they do it. It's the money.
The rates, mostly.
Pedantically it's not quite a property tax, it's a wealth tax. Paying for local infrastructure and redistribution are not morally the same. I don't like wealth taxes in principle because I do think they amount to confiscation and require the government to spy on everyone.
But while I can tolerate the Swiss doing it with their careful handling of the information and 0.5% per year, 25% unrealized + 44% realized is just straight up confiscation and essentially places a ceiling on personal wealth.
Combined with the ongoing monetary policy of the US and ensuing inflation, I find this highly problematic. And yes, that same monetary policy argument also applies to property tax.
Bold of you to assume I supported Clinton's tax policy or indeed welfare economics.
Just because there's some specifically defined ritual to divine the fictitious number doesn't make it real.
If a bunch of people behind desks decide my property has a certain subjective value to them and that I should pay them rent on that subjective value to have the right to continue owning things that may have a different value to me, I'm going to call that confiscation. Because that's all it is.
What's the moral justification for a wealth tax if not redistribution?
Well one reason is you got your basic facts wrong.
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