Do I smell austerity for the working class?

  • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    If you make $1M in a year from capital gains, just tax it 100% as income.

    Capital gains don’t accrue until you actually sell your shares. If you try to tax people like this then they’ll just never sell the shares. Instead, they’ll use their shares as collateral for loans and lines of credit if they need cash.

    Extremely high taxes lead to very low tax revenues since people do everything possible to avoid paying them. Conversely, lowering a tax rate can and does increase tax revenue as people start paying the tax instead of trying to get around it (often because the cost of getting around the tax makes it no longer worth it).