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Notes -
Personal opinion I would say taxing unrealized gains is illegal according to the letter of the law.
But it is legal to tax earnings at a different organization level. I shouldn’t have to pay taxes because I own Apple stock and they have earnings but Apple can be taxed on their earnings. The difficulty is figuring out the regime of tax shelters and taxing those things correctly. Which is admittedly hard but I think doable.
Taxing unrealized gains from an economic perspective has a lot of issues. If markets had clear forecasts of future income streams and could then apply proper discount rates then taxing unrealized gains could maybe work. But markets aren’t anywhere close to that efficient.
One example I’d give is I had a friend who was a former employee of a start up. It got acquired by a SPAC. She had a paper networth of $3 million and change (at the spac $10 price). By the time she had the ability to sell she had like $60k. Her wealth tax would have been like 500k and she would have negative gain on that whole thing of 440k.
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