Comment by jdm2212
2 days ago
When your job pays you a dollar, you get an actual dollar. Your job never claws that money back. Unrealized capital gains are not money, and they routinely get clawed back. Unrealized capital gains just means someone in New York traded GOOG/GOOGL at a higher price than they did yesterday.
And, sure, super-rich people can in theory use the appreciated stock as collateral for loans and not pay taxes, but in practice Larry and most other centi-billionaires actually sell loads of stock and pay a lot in capital gains taxes because having your status as super rich dude who owns a huge yacht be totally dependent on Google's stock price is a dumb risk to take on, and it's worth paying some taxes to eliminate that risk.
> When your job pays you a dollar, you get an actual dollar.
No.. many cents of it are withheld, by law.
Elon uses his vast wealth to influence, intimidate, and generally get away with lawlessness. He effectively took huge loans from banks to buy a giant bullhorn in Twitter. Those loans are collaterized by unrealized capital gains. And more generally, billionaires have the ear of politicians because of what they could do with their money. So you don't need to realize gains (gains which are taxed at a more or less flat rate!) to make use of your wealth.
Though like I said, Larry is not really a bad guy in the world of billionaires. I would only support taxing him more than I would support levying additional taxes on w2 income assuming CA actually had a provable need for more money. (Right now I think they waste most of the budget.)