a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
b_b  ·  869 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The billionaires are angry

    ...it will grow to affect more people with time.

You sound just like Elon!

Here are the top two headlines from the New York Times, as of right now, 11/10/2021, 10:51 am:

    Inflation Surges, Dashing Washington’s Hopes That Price Gains Would Slow

    Rivian’s I.P.O. price valued the electric-vehicle maker at $70 billion, a market worth that approaches that of Ford.

(For the uninitiated, Rivian has built and sold exactly 0 cars to date, though they have contracts with Amazon for delivery vehicles.) Do we maybe think those two things are connected? Stopping the market pumping has never been more important. Tesla is now worth as much as literally every other car maker combined, and that's a symptom of a disease, not a sign that Tesla will one day out earn all of its competitors.

I have no idea if taxing unrealized gains is the optimal way to go, but it would at least stop, to a certain extent, every CEO's mad drive to pump his share price as high as it can go. Somehow we need a return of stock prices being tied to business fundamentals, and while I agree that the government is hugely to blame in the problem, we should also disincentivize the mad drive one the owners' side to always grow the price. I don't think taxing loans solves that problem. And I also think that taxing loans is highly problematic, because most loans are liabilities, and therefore are actually tax write-offs. This is a good thing for investment purposes, so you'd have a hard time disambiguating between personal income and business investment--at least it would probably create as many troubles as trying to tax the unrealized gains.