President Biden on Monday unveiled a new minimum tax targeting billionaires as part of his 2023 budget request, proposing a 20% rate that would hit both the income and unrealized capital gains of the wealthiest Americans.

at least it's only for billionaires because if they tried taxing unrealized capital gains of everyone, that would kind of ruin investing in crypto. for americans anyway. billionaires should be ok tho... but i got a feeling if they can push this crap through, it's just gonna flow downhill and be for everyone eventually.

satoshi could be in some real trouble. maybe on the irs top 10 list   at least then craig wright would stop pretending he is the man.

Tax is only useful to keep poor people poor and make them keep slaving..

Tax is completely unnecessary otherwise..

This is just lip service to appease sheep.

june 5: you buy 1 btc for $40,000 and don't plan to sell
at the end of the year btc was at $60,000
you owe capital gains tax on $20,000 worth of unrealized gains so lets just use 20% as the tax rate for that so you have to cough up $4000 in taxes. so that forces you to sell some of your btc or risk the following:
bitcoin slowly goes back down to $40,000 over the next year. you paid $4000 out of your own pocket for nothing.

in reality taxing unrealized gains on other types of assets is even more troublesome like a house. they can hit you with a big bill anytime they want. because they determine what they think it is worth. imagine owning a house and they say the value doubled in the last year so you owe $20,000.

               Finally! A decision that I can happily agree on within the biden administration(although there are good things already nut this is something that is worthy to really be recognised)! I have been waiting for something like this to be aanounced for a looooong time. I wish other countries would also implement such taxes to the overly rich since it will be able to help the country even more without having the low-class to the mid-class people suffer even more! At least these overly rich people can truly contribute to the economy. Just hope that these people won't pull some strings to block this decision.

The purpose of a wealth tax is to tax the ultra-wealthy, those who don't pair their fair share of tax through other means. If you want ordinary people to pay more tax, it's far simpler to just increase the income tax percentage.
If you own 1 BTC and the price goes up and you do nothing, no tax. There's an argument for taxation of PoS coins gained through staking, but that's income not capital gains.




"Let's tax the ultra-wealthy and no-one else."
"No, you can't do that, because you will change it and it will affect everyone."

That's not a great argument.




Not sure what you're saying here, but I'm aware that we disagree on some quite fundamental points, and I'm wary of getting into another essay-length debate.
With this statement, surely you are implying that either a) the ultra-rich are not getting richer relative to everyone else, because they pay their fair percentage share of tax, or b) the ultra-rich make most of their money directly from salary. I'd disagree on both points.




Yeah but Argentina did something different and it was different. Again, not a compelling argument.
Some people in Australia die from crocodile attacks.
There are some people living in Iceland.
Therefore people in Iceland need to be wary of crocodile attacks.

It starts with billionaires...  It won't be long before we're all subject to this insanity.  At this point the government is openly stealing from people.  Imagine setting off a massive inflation wave and then taxing unrealized gains...  This is the government saying that they're going to get your money.  It doesn't matter what you do.  Invest to try and keep up with inflation, taxes on unrealized gains will take you down.  Save to try and keep a good lifestyle, inflation will eat your savings alive.  I don't know if the government is run by complete idiots, if they're actively trying to bankrupt everyone to force a socialist society on us, or if they're just so greedy they want to take every penny they can any way possible to fun their appetite for government spending.  Most likely it's a combination of the three.

Yeah. Wealth inequality at the top end of the scale is utterly obscene. It's difficult to understand quite how much money these people have, as the numbers are far beyond what the human brain has evolved to understand.

Here's a decent visualisation, though, if you're interested.

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

Note that this is from 2021, so the numbers are a bit out of date. In particular, the wealth of the top 400 richest Americans has increased by 40% over the last year.

No, you haven't misunderstood. Someone doesn't like the idea of billionaires being taxed, so is arguing that it won't work because when they did something completely different in a different country some other time, they taxed people down to $32k. It's not the same thing at all. It's like saying that it's not safe to fly in a modern plane, because back in the 1920s they were made of wood and string.

First, thanks for posting in these P&S threads. I've had some great discussions with you in the past, and apologies if my posts come across as combative, because that is not the intent.

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But capital gains tax affects everyone with any assets, it's not restricted to the rich. Same as income tax. Normal people tend to pay these taxes, whereas the ultra-rich don't, because they are able to pay people to employ accounting sleight-of-hand and exploit legal loopholes, and also move money/assets between jurisdictions. It is difficult to get the ultra-rich to pay any form of tax. I'm sure they would try to avoid (or evade) a wealth tax, too... but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.




There is potentially a considerable difference between being "not very much against" and being "in favour"... but if as a theoretical game we assume that you want billionaires to pay more tax, what would you propose? A tax on assets above some astronomical threshold seems to me to be a good idea. But I would certainly be interested in hearing alternative approaches.




It's rare that we hit upon a point of difference that can be quantified, but here we have one. It is absolutely not the case that the middle class is where the money is. I think a part of the issue is that our evolutionary heritage means that human brains can't readily visualise big numbers. Please please do me the favour of scrolling across the data visual that I linked to above, you may be surprised - and it is always good to challenge our assumptions.

But if you really don't want to, then the screengrab below from this video may give a taster. It shows the ideal (apparently according to 92% of Americans) vs what they perceive as reality vs actual reality. It's 10 years old, and the situation is even more extreme now than it was back then.



It may surprise you that my personal ideal would actually be more unequal than the 'ideal' in this video. In principle I would not be overly averse to the perceived actual, if it could be adjusted slightly to move the lower end some way above the poverty line. But actual reality is just obscene.