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!
What’s crazy is to calculate the average US income the census folks of the US government exclude billionaires because it would skew reality so much that people would call bullshit on the average with billionaires in the mix.
so they get to be excluded from the “average wage per family” calculations made and distributed by the government.
Could I see the numbers?
I’ve never heard that, would be wild if that’s truly how they do it, I wonder what the average would be if they included the billionaire family’s.
I think you’re conflating average and mean. When it comes to income average is typically median, which does include billionaires but wouldn’t skew the data due to their inclusion.
Average and mean are the same thing (sum of everything divided by total number of things). Median is the middle number.
Colloquially, average is the mean. Mathematically, average can be either mean, median, or mode.
You’re “free” to die in a cardboard box under a freeway
Actually… They made that illegal. You’re free to rot in prison for being homeless, though!
If it’s one homeless guy dieing under the bridge it’s a capitalist scarecrow sothat other people work harder.
If it’s a hundred homeless guys dieing under bridges the people understand that the problem is not them, but capitalism. That’s illegal.
Sitting here, watching every town council around my area pass a homeless ban after that SCOTUS ruling. Even the newspaper suddenly switched and said popular opinion swung 180 degrees in the last six months.
What the fuck does one do at that point? It’s obviously manufactured consent. It’s blatantly unconstitutional to tell people they can’t exist on public land. It’s a human rights violation to be stuffed into a shelter that demands you be a better human than people who already have housing in order to get house money. At this point we’re just turning the homeless into the new scary minority.
Three hots and a cot is better than nothing…
Well then there’s the forced labor.
Yeah, unfortunately.
So how does taxing unrealized gains work. If I purchase stock X at a specific price. If the stock goes up and I now am holding 150% of my original value. Let’s say it hovers there for 3 more years. After 3 years it tanks and is now worth only 50% of my original purchases. Are people suggesting that I pay taxes on the unrealized gain of 50%, even though I end up selling at loss and have realized negative value. Doesn’t that mean I am being taxed on losing money? How does that make sense?
The moment you use them as a collateral, they should be taxed as money.
You took a 10 billions loan with the actions you have as collateral? You pay taxes on these 10 billions.
Right now, the system is rigged because the richs get to transform their collateral into liquidity while paying 0 taxes on that, and they can even write off the interest on the interest incurred.
I guess that’s whats lost in the meme. Just because you “can” use something as collateral doesn’t mean you “are” using something as collateral. The language should be more accurate to describe actual use vs hypothetical.
It’s not. Unrealised gains is basically an item in your shelf that hasn’t been sold, you can tell other people this item worth X now and you can get a loan with that item as a guarantee, but since you haven’t sell it and turn it into money, you still have $0 and an item that worth X. These people failed basic economic.
“can” vs “do” are different things. The meme quote describes hypothetical use, not actual use, as being something that should be taxable.
Can’t have unrealized gains in a system that doesn’t have stocks. Abolish the stock market.
I wouldn’t be a huge fan of taxing unrealized gains if we hadn’t been cutting taxes for the rich for 50 years. How else are we ever going to recover from that? These guys COULD have done the right thing and supported sensible taxation policies, but they didn’t, so fuck 'em. At this point it’s either this or the guillotine.
About 70 years.
Would they be able to use unrealized losses and just end up paying less in taxes then they do now?
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
What if the government finds out about the science experiment in the back of my fridge??? Somethings brewing back there and I’m telling you it’s going to be valuable.
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.
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.
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.
Wouldn’t that affect things like Home Equity loans?
No because the mínimum for this to apply is 100 million.
Homes are taxes based on assessed value. They are already a form of taxes unrealized gains.
Most of the population either has:
- no unrealized gains
- gains in a retirement account that we can’t borrow against
- gains in real estate that are taxed, but can be borrowed against
- 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.
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.
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!
We’re talking about the stock market. And it would be quarterly or annual. Please stop exaggerating.
if you secure debt against them, they should be taxed?
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?
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.
This would effectively lock out every small investor from the stock market due to the liability of both success and failure.
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.
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”.
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.
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?
Anyone doing more than DCA retirement has collateralized their holdings for margin, prerequisite to options.
Good
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…
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.
The unrealized gains is for 100 millionaires or more. I don’t think there is anyone with 100million in unrealized home value.
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.
Are dividends taxed?
“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
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.
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).
Yes
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
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.”
That was my thoughts as well.
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.
I’d rather we went back to taxing the rich properly and stopped having crumbling infrastructure.
But that means rich people will be slightly less rich. That will never happen.
I think the real solution is not to lend on fake money. Tax or no tax, it wasn’t taxes that caused the market crash in 2008.
That doesn’t work. It’s not enforceable.
Not enforceable as a law, but not bailing out those who do it is a great way to put an end to it.
All money is fake money, though.
Thank you. Even if they pass something it will be written by a bureaucratic bean counter and will be riddled with loopholes.
Simply don’t allow loans on stocks. Keep it simple.
OK. I’ll sell the stock, buy a home, then use the home equity to secure a loan to buy the stock.
That’s nothing. Late stage capitalist finance allows all sorts of ridiculous.
Ok but then you’ll pay taxes on that sale so there’s no problem.
That’s only for you humans. We corporations only pay if we net a profit. Also, if we loose money, we can carry it over to next year as a tax exemption. Good luck, ugly bags of mostly water.
Eh so… If you lose money you also can carry the tax rebate over to the next year in the US…
Yes. But, not humans. Only corporations.
The asymmetric trading rules in the US are far worse than this. And, rules enforcement for corporations is a joke.
Yes, humans as well.
Same as companies, just a different maximum amount per year and what’s left can be applied to the next year and the next and the next…
By pay check is unrealized gains. I still have bills to pay. Stop taxing me.
You’re not on the level of wealth this thread is about so you have nothing to worry about. Besides, your income is already taxed and in some countries it is deducted by the employer before you ever see your salary.
You keep using that word, but I am not sure that you know what it means.
Taxes on unrealized stock gains are fine as long as I can get my money back from the government when the stock market goes down.
Property tax is already an unrealized gain tax.
Property tax is already an unrealized gain tax.
It certainly is. Now, note how the only thing akin to stocks that non-rich people can play games with the worth of is taxed. That’s because non-rich people need property as well. If property was only owned by rich people, you’d get a credit on your taxes for owning it.
You would! Unrealized losses could be used to offset gains. If one stock goes down and another goes up, you would pay tax on the net gain, and you could take a deduction on the net loss.
The tax could also be structured so that it only applies when borrowing against the gains, so it could be rolled into the cost of the loan.
Yeah, treat tax on collateral as advance on capital gains tax
The entire market can go down. There’s no offsetting when your total value is down.
The tax could also be structured so that it only applies when borrowing against the gains
That’s fine and completely different from paying a tax on something when it has gone up but not getting the money back when it goes down.
If your total value is down, you aren’t going to be able to borrow against the gains, anyway. So no taxable event.
Let’s be clear, this is a loophole that rich people take advantage of to avoid paying taxes on income. By borrowing instead of selling, they get the profit without incurring a taxable event. It’s one of many ways capitalists siphon profit from the system while providing nothing in return.
This isn’t about borrowing against assets. I’m fine if that’s taxable.
This is about holding a stock and paying tax just for owning it despite it might be worthless when you go to sell it.
But you can already deduct losses from your taxes, up to $3,000 per year and if you have more than that, you can carry it forward. If it’s worthless when you sell, you can deduct all of the loss from your taxes.
Property tax is a wealth tax, not an unrealized gain tax. You still pay if your property value goes down, you just pay less.
Unrealized stock gains are companies that have been shorted into bankruptcy, so the value doesn’t change.
Could you explain what you mean? This isn’t about shorting into bankruptcy.
This is about you buying a stock in a company and it goes up like crazy (Game Stop). You now owe thousands in taxes that year. The next year it goes down to less than you paid and you need to sell the stock. You paid taxes for losing money
Investors short a company. As the value drops, the value of the short increases. When the company goes bankrupt, the short play reaches full value, since it costs 0 to buy the shares. It also means that gain is unrealized and has permanent value until the short is exercised, which they never do because it’s a taxable event.
That has absolutely nothing to do with buying a stock, it goes up crazy for a year. Then you owe a huge tax bill despite the stock being worthless the next year when you need to sell it.
Thousands of companies go up one year and go down the next. They aren’t bankrupt.
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