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April 2, 2019
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, announced today that he would soon release a proposal to eliminate massive tax breaks enjoyed by the wealthy on their capital gains income. If successful, the proposal would ensure that income from wealth is taxed just like income from work.
His plan, which he has promised to flesh out in a white paper in the coming weeks, would tax the appreciation of assets owned by the very wealthy as income each year, an approach known as mark-to-market taxation. It would also subject that income to ordinary tax rates rather than special, lower income tax rates that apply to capital gains.
https://itep.org/sweeping-reform-would-tax-capital-gains-like-ordinary-income/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-democrat-proposes-annual-tax-on-unrealized-capital-gains-11554217383
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Sunday April 07 2019, @06:22AM
I agree: tax HFTs. But I would go farther, and have a scaling tax on stock sales. As other posters have pointed out, one really wants to encourage long-term investment, as opposed to short-term gambling. The squawks of the HFT companies that they are "adding liquidity" to the market is crap - the stock market worked just fine before they existed. So, a scaling tax: Hold an asset for less than a minute: pay 100% tax on the transaction value. Hold an asses for less than an hour, pay 50%. Less than a day, 25%. Anything held for a year or more has no transaction tax at all.
That said, Ryden does have a point: If you are rich enough, you can live off of your wealth while paying virtually no taxes. There is a genuine argument that multigenerational wealth needs to be broken up. If you, yourself, manage to make $billions, more power to you. However, what benefit does society have, by allowing your wealth to establish a dynasty? If he can figure out a way to break up multigenerational dynasties, more power to him. However, it isn't likely - at that level, the dynasties establish trusts and "charities", or just move their wealth to overseas tax havens.
Unfortunately, it is far more likely that Ryden's idea will simply be a sneaky way to tax people's retirement accounts, thus nailing the middle class yet again.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.