Comment by ajross
2 days ago
> There is nothing to tax until they sell some shares.
That's tautological. I mean, it's true under current federal tax law. It's obviously not true under new California law, which is what the article is about.
Clearly the government can tax non-cash assets, and they do all the time. People act like "wealth taxes" are some moral horror or logical impossibility, while tossing their mortgage statement into a big file and pretending to ignore the property tax line on the escrow account.
Are there practical problems like "wealth has feet"? Sure. Taxation is hard and all systems can be gamed. But let's not pretend that there's a greater principle at work here.
Just wait until you find out what $20b in necessarily liquidations does to Meta's stock price and your S&P500 ETF.
Did you have to liquidate your house to pay the property tax on it?
Edit to point out a subtlety: this is an argument at cross purposes. If the economic impact of all this personal wealth growth is so high that liquidating it would move whole markets, then very clearly it represents significant missed tax revenue.