If you thought Kamala Harris’s price controls scheme was straight out of the Book of Nicolás Maduro, wait till you see what she has in stores with her proposal for a 25% tax on unrealized capital gains.
According to Americans for Tax Reform:
The Harris-endorsed budget calls for an annual 25 percent minimum tax on the unrealized gains of individuals with income and assets that exceeding $100 million. Once in place, it won’t be long before the threshold is lowered to hit more and more Americans.
Americans overwhelmingly oppose taxes on unrealized gains, by a factor of three to one, including 76% of independents. Americans know that a “gain” isn’t “real” until it is actually realized, in hand.
What that means is that if you bought a house for $60,000 in the 1970s, and saw its value go up to $1,000,000 on Zillow last year (which isn’t uncommon in places like California), you’d be on the hook for taxes on a million-dollar property, which would be more than you actually paid for the house, even though it’s the same ordinary house you bought in a middle-class neighborhood back in the ’70s and you haven’t changed residences.
The same could be said of any homeowner, you’d buy a house for $300,000, but as its value rises to $1.2 million, your tax bill would clock in for a $1.2 million property, and not the $300,000 tract home you bought a few years earlier. If the market value went down by the time you sold, to say, $250,000, you will have spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on taxes while actually earning just $250,000 on your investment.
The same could be said of stocks, or crypto, or any asset, it’s not just homes. You’ll pay the huge taxes, but if the price goes down, as it inevitably will on some assets, you’ll have gotten nothing but the huge tax bill already paid.
Hellbound and Down 