Let's play the rich get everything. The rules are the rich get everything. participation is mandatory.
Did I say mandatory? I meant optional! You're "free" to die in a cardboard box under a freeway as a market capitalist scarecrow warning to the other ants so they keep showing up to make us more!
I think a law stating you can't borrow against unrealized gains would be sensible.
You can keep your unrealized gains forever, live of your dividends for all i care, and pay no tax. But realizing them, either through selling or borrowing against, triggers a taxation.
*As with all rules, it can vary by country. As I understand it, the US tends to double tax dividends, which is a rabbit hole of why the US market chases valuation so hard
Dividends that pay into non-taxable accounts can accumulate until they are withdrawn.
So, for instance, if you own $100 of Exxon in a regular brokerage account and $100 in an IRA, the $5 dividend you get from the first account is taxable but the $5 from the second is not.
This gets us to the idea of Trusts, Hedge Funds, and other tax-deferred vehicles. If you give $100 to a Hedge fund and it buys a stock in the fund that pays dividends, it never pays you the dividend on the stock so you never have to realize the dividend gain. You simply own "$100 worth of Citadel Investments" which becomes "$105 worth of Citadel Investments" when the dividend arrives.
I think dividends in a tax-exempt accounts, like a traditional IRA, are only not taxed if you reinvest the dividend or just leave it in your brokerage account. If you move money from your IRA account to, say, your checking account, that's when you pay taxes (and there are generally fees for moving money out of tax exempt accounts without meeting certain conditions, like being of retirement age).
Not sure if it's the same everywhere, but if I pull a dividend I don't pay tax initially, but when I do my income taxes it's part of my income and I'd have to pay tax on it then
Careful with that. If you're not making estimated tax payments on your dividends (or other capital gains) every quarter or increasing your withholdings from wages to compensate, and you owe too much at the end of the year, you can get hit with penalties and interest.
For most people the quarterly dividends in their brokerage aren't enough to trigger that, but as your savings grows and quarterly dividends become significant they might.
Mhm. There's two very good reason unrealized gains aren't taxed: volatility and cash flow. Are you and the government expected to swap cash back and forth everyday to correct for changes in the market? No that's silly. Should people go into debt because they don't have the cash to pay the taxes of a baseball card they happen to own that is suddenly worth millions? Also silly.
For that same reason, using unrealized gains as security is dangerous, just like the subprime loans market was!
Yeah owning a baseball card worth money sure whatever, if you pawn that card sorry, pay taxes. You use that card a to secure a loan with lower interest rates than you'd get without then sorry, you are realizing gains whether or not you want to admit it. This goes along one of the lawsuits against Trump. He lied to get favorable interest rates by overvaluing his assets to get better interest rates. If that's against the law why the fuck is that not counted as a "gain" to use assets to secure favorable interest rates?
"Oh no, I made money, better put a small percentage of my gains away for tax season, just like I do with all of my income, because I'm American and lack a good PAYE system".
You've likely made a false assumption of stable value. Questions probably demonstrates best: Individuals are to pay taxes on value at what point in time? What if it was worth much more just previous to the time? What if it's worth much less immediately after that time?
The time will probably be Dec. 31st. A small investor can get wiped out by poor holiday earnings. Or, far more likely, stocks will be artificially shorted by hedge funds in January to create the same situation. With options shenanigans and asymmetric rules, it's trivially easy for the big fish to immediately eat everyone else.
Someone here has made a false assumption. In fact, I'm pretty sure we both have made several. The question is who has made a fatal false assumption? Let's go.
My root comment, at the top of all of this, was my idea that perhaps we should consider gains "realized" when they are sold OR used as a collateral in a loan.
Your assertion is that it would wipe out small investors.
I would question how many small investors are using their small investments as collateral in a loan?
I said investors, not zero-effort DCA into a managed fund. My "degenerate" ways bought my freedom. I didn't have to beat the big fish, just people like you who think they're the smartest person in the room.
This would effectively lock out every small investor
But sure, now we're just insulting each other, I'm going to ignore that and try to answer your point.
TBH. US tax is weird as fuck, and I don't know nearly enough about it to have more than a high level discussion on it. In my head, this would simply change when you're paying taxes, as opposed to how much.
But.... Nope. Tried to reason about it, can't think of a nice clean way out. It's friday afternoon. I'm out.
What is your alternative solution to the over all problem?
Homes are taxed based on assessed value. They are already a form of taxing unrealized gains.
Most of the population either has:
no unrealized gains
gains in a retirement account that we can't borrow against
gains in real estate that are taxed, but can be borrowed against
a combo of 2 and 3
I think it's fair to ask that the rich play by the same rules. You can either borrow against your gains and pay taxes on them, or not pay taxes and not be able to borrow against them.
Depends on the exact implementation, but sure, you could happily write a version where an initial home loan isn't hit, and only "top up" loans against the INCREASED value of your home is targeted.
You'd have to put some controls in there for that solution to work. Hitting new homeowners with an immediate tax on "earning" $1,000,000 to pay for their house seems a bit cruel.
No they actually can't. In stocks the price is publicly listed by a third party. In real estate an assessor gets involved. For commodities like cars they have to be unique or nearly so before there isn't a third party listing it's value.
For edge cases, especially large real estate, we could always make a second law, one that says the government can buy your building at the value you gave the IRS if it's significantly below market rate on dollars per square foot for it's type (office, industrial, residential, etc), or that it's represented as a higher value in investment reports or bank loans. We'll frame it as a bail out, helping them offload toxic assets. Then the government sells the building on the open market. That way when someone like Trump decides his buildings are suddenly worth less than all of the surrounding buildings we can keep him from going bankrupt again.
Seems more reasonable than taxing unrealized gains, although I'd prefer if the debate was on how to cut absurd amount of spending rather than trying to find new tax streams.