It's strange that people always make this argument for wealth taxes, but you rarely hear it about property taxes. If "net worth is not real" neither is equity in real estate.

The actual mistake is pretending like they can't leverage those shares to access fiat, for example securities-backed loans. The proceeds aren't taxable income, the bank gets its interest, and the latter is typically substantially cheaper than realizing the shares and paying capital gains tax. Meanwhile, they keep the assets, which on average continue appreciating.

That’s just a decision we made about what is taxable.

Purely an accounting artifact. We can pass a wealth tax tomorrow and it’ll suddenly be taxable.

Net worth is real money, and is usually a very accurate measure of what people can realize. There are a few outliers who own so much that they’d move the market if they sold it all. Selling 2% to cover taxes? Not going to move the market very much.

> Net worth is not real.

Good way to find out it this is the case: take it away. Not real, right? Why would they mind?

You are ignoring the most common approach, borrow against the asset. In that case the sufficient assets turn into essentially unlimited untaxed cashflow. Especially with how the market has been lately, the gains erase any burden of the loan. Sounds like a broken tax system to me.

Yeah, it's all illiquid illusory non-wealth when they have to pay taxes, but when they want to buy a newspaper or social network they suddenly have 40 billion in hand.

Forced liquidation hurts more than the sticker price, but with billionaire taxes, that's a feature, not a bug. They make the most sense as a check on concentrated power rather than a revenue driver.

Try this - go to a bank and say “I’d like to borrow money using my 401k/Roth IRA as collateral. If I fall behind in payments you can liquidate the entire thing, including penalties, and make yourself whole.”

You’d think they’d jump over each other to lend money against such a stable, secure asset right?

Except they’ll say “sorry, this isn’t allowed. IRS treats borrowing against an untaxed retirement account as an early withdrawal, even if the asset itself stays untouched.”

Turns out the government fully understands the concepts of stocks, gains, unrealized net worth and more, and has laws on the books to make sure you are being taxed appropriately for them.

Meanwhile billionaires have convinced you – through their machinery of media, influencers, politicians and more – that this exact same reasoning absolutely cannot be applied to their own wealth. Because it’s “paper money”. It doesn’t exist. There’s nothing to tax. Just cannot be done, or it’ll bend the laws of spacetime.

>Net worth is not real.

You wont mind if we tax it then will you?

You do, of course.

p.s. liquidity != wealth. try not to confuse them.

I dont know why it's so complicated to just say "Money is Money when it's Liquid, tax it then". Any loans on wealth should be taxed..nationwide.

But even in California's case this doesn't feel like anything anybody would object to. Given how much California Billionaires liquidate using loans on their wealth, I bet, they could do a middle class tax cut too to offset it a little bit too.

I am little baffled as to why the politicos haven't latched on to this whole-heartedly. You can still proudly say you're taxing Billionaire wealth. Because you are! Just more sensibly.

I’d be willing to take some of the “not real” money.

Another thing with taxing unrealized gains is that no one in the government is willing to return any money if the unrealized losses happened. Somehow it's all hunky-dory when someone loses 1M in stock value, but as soon as someone's stock went up 1M they all want to tax it right away.

Simply let them pay the tax with shares. Problem solved!

Absolutely ridiculous statement, it's not an accurate measure but it's definitely a good measure of money.

If you have 100B to your name even if it's post IPO stock in a possibly ponzi company that's your current wealth and you can easily convert a staggering portion of it into material realized wealth depending on several factors.

If I use cash to buy 1B dollars in Microsoft shares today, am I not worth a Billion dollars...?

The value may not be exactly convertible agreed so let's just force everyone to book all gains every year, and force sell a net percent of your share.

Not 100B$ of share, but 2% of 100 Million units of stock that you own. Why does this not work?

If I take 2% of your shares why can't it work the same way? I can then pick and sell it over the next year or two however I see fit, in case of govt they can slowly sell back this share to not affect the prices too much.

I am baffled by the fact that we have a tractible quantity and people call it hard to use to measure money.

Paintings, Jewels, etc. are what's truly the hard part of the wealth equation not the stocks, which is over 99% of what a wealthy billionaire owns.

I am not even considering pro or against taxes on billions people make but it's ridiculous to say stocks aren't money? Then what is money really... Currency is also traded, it's value can also go up or down....

I hate this argument.

Would you rather have 1M dollars in cash or 10B in stock that you can't sell?

Nah, just make them pay taxes when it's valued as collateral and it's over a certain amount. Anyone saying you can't do that is lying to you.