this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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I don’t know that there’s a fair way to do that, since they are unrealized: people can’t really use that wealth yet.
However, let’s worry about taxing capital gains: why is that rate so much lower than income tax
Let’s worry about hiding wealth through corporations to lower tax rates
At one point there were reports that Donald Trump managed his real estate through a network of over 500 companies. While I don’t know anything beyond the news articles, I find it believable that it could be both legal and could be used to hide both income and expenses from taxes and lenders. We need to use things like this as an example of what not to allow
While I completely agree on your later points, we do have a system already in place for taxing unrealized gains. They're called property taxes. I'm sure we could create a similar system for taxing other types of assets.
You can just literally take the ownership of a portion of the stocks and investments off them and place them in control of a government run sovereign investment team instead. It's not exactly hard to figure out what these are worth at any moment anyway, realized gains or not, that's what the stock market tracks for us and what they use to estimate worth and use as collateral for loans with banks. If banks trust this way of doing it then so can we.