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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29424 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Better yet, just close the loopholes on capital gains taxes.

If you buy $100 mil of stock and it grows to $1.1 bil, you have capital gains of $1 billion. Someone needs to pay capital gains taxes on that $1 billion. Figure out exactly how each wealthy family is paying less tax, and change the laws so that that process results in an identical tax burden. If you sell the stock, you pay tax. If you give the stock as a gift or inheritance, have the tax burden stay attached to that stock and then when they sell it, it gets taxed. If people take out loans using the stock as collateral, make sure the tax burden stays attached to that stock, which deflates its value because eventually some day it will be sold and whoever sells it owes the tax out of the proceeds. The only way the tax never gets paid is if the stock crashes in price, in which case the stock didn't actually generate a real profit that needs to be taxed, and nothing was dodged.

Inheritance and estate taxes shouldn't be relevant here, just tax the profit directly when it's realized, no matter who is currently holding the bag.

The only loophole is there is a step up upon death. Get rid of that and someone pays the tax on an exit.

You're taxed on income, the business is taxed on profit, then you're taxed again on dividends or capital gains...

Yes?

It's awful because a large percentage (sometimes more than 100%) of those gains are just inflation.

So what?

It's all in the numbers.

Inheritance and estate taxes shouldn't be relevant here, just tax the profit directly when it's realized, no matter who is currently holding the bag.

Operative term is "shouldn't be". Step-up and all that.

Well yeah. My point is, fix that directly. You don't need to do weird esoteric things with estate taxes to try to balance it out, and probably create more loopholes along the way. Just fix the actual problem.

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