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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Tax loss harvesting isn't "avoiding" paying capital gains any more than deducting expenses "avoids" paying tax on profits.

If one of your stocks goes from $10 to $20 and the other from $20 to $10, you haven't actually made any gains for the governemt to tax

Little slips like this convince me the whole thing is an excuse for seizing all assets that aren't owned by blackrock or NGOs.

I keep saying it: somebody is going to have to pay for the black holes that are state budgets because interest on debt is reaching critical levels.

Since all the value is piling into investments to avoid inflation, now governments are trying to seize those investments. Property taxes and seizure of government backed pension schemes have both been floated already.

property taxes... have been floated already.

I have bad news for you...

I meant wealth taxes, my ESL ass keeps tripping over taxation jargon somehow.

somebody is going to have to pay for the black holes that are state budgets

State budgets, in the administration department, are generally themselves welfare schemes. People who benefit from that will never vote for a party that promises to put the brakes on that, which is why the Democrats are the interest party of those people. They have to be.

Will public employees' voting power to make sure they keep receiving those benefits outrank the voting power of the old (though young men are increasingly catching on) to not pay them? Well, stay tuned...

Usually, in cases like these, the two interest groups put their heads together to do something both stupid and evil, and this is called compromise.

This compromise is likely to be inflation.

If one of your stocks goes from $10 to $20 and the other from $20 to $10, you haven't actually made any gains for the governemt to tax

From the pro-tax perspective, if you make $10 on one stock you should be taxed on it; if you lose $10 on another stock, too bad so sad. Why would they give up the tax on the first stock just because you lost money on some unrelated stock?

Because we have an income tax; not a takings

It's already the rule that gains in certain categories can't be offset against losses in other categories. I have no doubt making it so each and every financial instrument one owned had to be treated separately is the kind of thing people who like taxes would put in place.

Yes capital losses can’t offset OI. But by and large we have a system where we look to net income.