These people are morons. If you start taxing unrealized gains, it will cause a few problems.
1) people will have to sell assets to pay the taxes on these unrealized gains
2) it will disincentivize investment in real estate by the bottom half of the country. How do you sell part of your rental property or commercial property to pay the tax man?
3) trumps NY trial will be the blueprint to ruin anyone on the wrong side of politicians. Who values properties that have a subjective value?
Finally, there is no forethought whatsoever.
If they tax unrealized gains, they are going to have to give credits for unrealized losses. And they won’t be able to carry forward deductions for losses like they do now. So the net is exactly the freaking same.
It just hurts the economy and feels good to say.
Liberals only care about having nice lives for themselves. They do not care about tomorrow and they do not care about anybody else but themselves.
To add to your point, liberals also want to end tax deductions because they consider that subsidies, without thinking that tax deductions is why businesses grow in America.
The dirty secret is that when they tax unrealized gains, they won’t give credits for unrealized losses.
They win, you lose.
Wasn’t this tried at one time and it was a total disaster for the reasons you gave?
Or was it the elimination of the step-up basis that was tried and became a massive failure.
And what about inflation causing “unrealized gains”?
Why would they give credits for unrealized losses? If they are going to initiate a wealth tax it is something totally innovative and they can structure how they will.
It would seem to me that as soon as they tax unrealized profits, it instantly devalues every asset. The only reason to do this is to destroy the investment industry. It’s a foolhardy attempt to redistribute income by people who don’t know the first thing about investing. It’s a combination of envy and power grabbing.