Comment by UncleMeat
12 hours ago
My house is already taxed on its current value rather than the value I purchased it for.
There are small edge cases for "the thing I own is worth a gazillion dollars now but I never want to sell it." Those edge cases already exist with the "I grew up in this house and I am emotionally attached to it" situation. It sure seems to me like people having unrealized gains in equities is, you know, vastly more common than finding out that the weird knick-knack that reminds you of your mom is actually a valuable collectable worth millions.
> “My house is already taxed on its current value rather than the value I purchased it for.”
That’s what California’s Prop 13 was supposed to address.
And this is a widely criticized policy that it not the norm across the rest of the country.
The difference is that land is not produced by anybody and taxing it comes with zero negative effects - it can't dampen production to raise costs, as usual with taxation, because land was produced by nobody. That differs from taxing wealth in things that are produced very differently, because that comes with side effects of discouraging production