Did I say mandatory? I meant optional! You’re “free” to die in a cardboard box under a freeway as a market capitalist scarecrow warning to the other ants so they keep showing up to make us more!

  • Goodie@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    I think a law stating you can’t borrow against unrealized gains would be sensible.

    You can keep your unrealized gains forever, live of your dividends for all i care, and pay no tax. But realizing them, either through selling or borrowing against, triggers a taxation.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      How are you going to enforce that? The Bank can cite whatever they want for giving the loan.

      If we just tax them then it’s easily enforceable and it’s done.

      • Goodie@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        It can just be flipped on it’s head;

        How are you going to enforce taxing on value, the person can just cite whatever value they want for the asset.

    • SkyNTP
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      6 hours ago

      Mhm. There’s two very good reason unrealized gains aren’t taxed: volatility and cash flow. Are you and the government expected to swap cash back and forth everyday to correct for changes in the market? No that’s silly. Should people go into debt because they don’t have the cash to pay the taxes of a baseball card they happen to own that is suddenly worth millions? Also silly.

      For that same reason, using unrealized gains as security is dangerous, just like the subprime loans market was!

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        We’re talking about the stock market. And it would be quarterly or annual. Please stop exaggerating.

        • Mcdolan@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          Yeah owning a baseball card worth money sure whatever, if you pawn that card sorry, pay taxes. You use that card a to secure a loan with lower interest rates than you’d get without then sorry, you are realizing gains whether or not you want to admit it. This goes along one of the lawsuits against Trump. He lied to get favorable interest rates by overvaluing his assets to get better interest rates. If that’s against the law why the fuck is that not counted as a “gain” to use assets to secure favorable interest rates?

      • Goodie@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        There’s a very good reason they should be taxed; half a dozen people are richer than god, and basically never pay any real amount of tax.

        • SirDerpy@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          This would effectively lock out every small investor from the stock market due to the liability of both success and failure.

          • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            No it wouldn’t. The proposal out there right now has a floor of something like a million dollars. Most of us will never need to worry about that.

          • Goodie@lemmy.world
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            5 hours ago

            How so?

            “Oh no, I made money, better put a small percentage of my gains away for tax season, just like I do with all of my income, because I’m American and lack a good PAYE system”.

            • SirDerpy@lemmy.world
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              4 hours ago

              You’ve likely made a false assumption of stable value. Questions probably demonstrates best: Individuals are to pay taxes on value at what point in time? What if it was worth much more just previous to the time? What if it’s worth much less immediately after that time?

              The time will probably be Dec. 31st. A small investor can get wiped out by poor holiday earnings. Or, far more likely, stocks will be artificially shorted by hedge funds in January to create the same situation. With options shenanigans and asymmetric rules, it’s trivially easy for the big fish to immediately eat everyone else.

              • Goodie@lemmy.world
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                4 hours ago

                Someone here has made a false assumption. In fact, I’m pretty sure we both have made several. The question is who has made a fatal false assumption? Let’s go.

                My root comment, at the top of all of this, was my idea that perhaps we should consider gains “realized” when they are sold OR used as a collateral in a loan.

                Your assertion is that it would wipe out small investors.

                I would question how many small investors are using their small investments as collateral in a loan?

                • SirDerpy@lemmy.world
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                  3 hours ago

                  Anyone doing more than DCA retirement has collateralized their holdings for margin, prerequisite to options.

      • Goodie@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        “Yes*”

        *As with all rules, it can vary by country. As I understand it, the US tends to double tax dividends, which is a rabbit hole of why the US market chases valuation so hard

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        Dividends paid out to taxable accounts are taxed.

        Dividends that pay into non-taxable accounts can accumulate until they are withdrawn.

        So, for instance, if you own $100 of Exxon in a regular brokerage account and $100 in an IRA, the $5 dividend you get from the first account is taxable but the $5 from the second is not.

        This gets us to the idea of Trusts, Hedge Funds, and other tax-deferred vehicles. If you give $100 to a Hedge fund and it buys a stock in the fund that pays dividends, it never pays you the dividend on the stock so you never have to realize the dividend gain. You simply own “$100 worth of Citadel Investments” which becomes “$105 worth of Citadel Investments” when the dividend arrives.

        • deo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 hours ago

          I think dividends in a tax-exempt accounts, like a traditional IRA, are only not taxed if you reinvest the dividend or just leave it in your brokerage account. If you move money from your IRA account to, say, your checking account, that’s when you pay taxes (and there are generally fees for moving money out of tax exempt accounts without meeting certain conditions, like being of retirement age).

        • Wwwbdd@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          Not sure if it’s the same everywhere, but if I pull a dividend I don’t pay tax initially, but when I do my income taxes it’s part of my income and I’d have to pay tax on it then

          • Goodie@lemmy.world
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            6 hours ago

            Where I’m from, we don’t do that. All dividends come with an “imputation credit,” which basically says “this money’s already been taxed.”

      • doctordevice@lemmy.ca
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        47 minutes ago

        Homes are taxed based on assessed value. They are already a form of taxing unrealized gains.

        Most of the population either has:

        1. no unrealized gains
        2. gains in a retirement account that we can’t borrow against
        3. gains in real estate that are taxed, but can be borrowed against
        4. a combo of 2 and 3

        I think it’s fair to ask that the rich play by the same rules. You can either borrow against your gains and pay taxes on them, or not pay taxes and not be able to borrow against them.

      • Goodie@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Depends on the exact implementation, but sure, you could happily write a version where an initial home loan isn’t hit, and only “top up” loans against the INCREASED value of your home is targeted.

    • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Or doing so, it counts the loan as income and is taxed accordingly. But seriously, the main aim itself can also be taxed. A house is…

      • Goodie@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        You’d have to put some controls in there for that solution to work. Hitting new homeowners with an immediate tax on “earning” $1,000,000 to pay for their house seems a bit cruel.

        • Pacattack57@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          The unrealized gains is for 100 millionaires or more. I don’t think there is anyone with 100million in unrealized home value.

          • Goodie@lemmy.world
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            5 hours ago

            I was talking for a hypothetical world where that law isn’t a thing and simply paying capital gains in “realized” gains is.

            Nut hey, yeah, sure, 100mil works too.

    • C126@sh.itjust.works
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      6 hours ago

      Seems more reasonable than taxing unrealized gains, although I’d prefer if the debate was on how to cut absurd amount of spending rather than trying to find new tax streams.

      • Goodie@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        I’d rather we went back to taxing the rich properly and stopped having crumbling infrastructure.