How To Massacre The Economy, Guaranteed: Tax Unrealized Gains
Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
Having used up all of the rest of the batshit, insane, counterintuitive economic dirty tricks left in the "we'll literally do anything but cut spending" bag, the Biden administration is pushing what could be the most destructive idea for our country since prohibition: taxing unrealized gains.
As part of its budget proposal for the 2025 fiscal year, the Biden administration is trying to raise an addition $4.3 trillion over 10 years in the worst way possible: imposing a minimum tax equal to 25 percent of a taxpayer’s taxable income and unrealized capital gains less the sum of their regular tax, for taxpayers with wealth over $100 million.
Putting aside the fact that this high-risk idea only amounts to a pittance, $430 billion per year (25% of which we just sent to foreign nations over the weekend in one fell swoop of a pen and it’s only April), the introduction of taxing unrealized gains could be one of the worst slippery slopes we ever dare to roll our country’s economy down.
I mean, shit, we could save $1 trillion just by not sending $100 billion a year to other nations for starters. But I digress. For an outline of exactly what an unrealized gains tax is, here's the American Institute on Economic Research:
A tax on unrealized capital gains means that individuals are penalized for owning appreciating assets, regardless of whether they have realized any actual income from selling them.
If you purchased a stock for $100 this year, for example, and it increased to $110 next year, you would pay the assigned tax rate on the $10 capital gain. You didn’t sell the asset, so you don’t realize the $10 appreciation, but must pay the tax regardless.
Taxing unrealized capital gains contradicts the basic principles of fairness and property rights essential for a free and prosperous society. Taxation, if we’re going to have it on income, should be based on actual income earned, not on paper gains that may never materialize.
AIER notes that implementing such a tax not only deeply infringes upon personal liberty and private property rights — but I can’t help but think about how it also sets a destructive wrecking ball rolling down a slippery slope for the first time in our nation's history.
And, given the precarious state of our nation's finances, it doesn't seem like the best time to start spitballing about new risky ideas that may or may not catch on only because they sound like they are addressing the problem of a widening wealth gap that Federal Reserve policies created and continue to exacerbate to begin with.
If the administration really wanted to address the problem of wealth inequality, it would be setting its sights on the central bank that sacrificed price stability so it could spray trillions of dollars in "stimulus" toward financial assets, while cutting American families paltry checks of just $600, during COVID. When I did the math during COVID, the total amount spent to bail out the country when we decided to shut down the economy and have the Federal Reserve replace it with a fiat house of cards amounted to something like $17,500 per every citizen in the United States.
Except, again, only $600 of that went to each individual. The rest went to the financial sector, in turn widening the inequality gap further as billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos saw tens of billions of dollars added to their net worth in a matter of months.
And so now, rather than take tangible, decisive action to actually address the problem, the Biden administration is putting forth a plan that won’t just be negative for the country, it could very well be the hill that our country’s economy dies on...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE, FREE, HERE).
