.
You probably saw the ProPublica piece that came out a couple of months ago, noting that a few uber-billionaires have paid little in the way of income and capital gains tax in recent years.
Of course, a lot has been written about the Sanders/Warren "wealth tax" idea, although there's wide disagreement on whether the plan would even be likely to pass constitutional muster.
As if on cue, along come left-wing professors Saez and Zucman, pushing a plan they suggest would be easier to implement while not risking any serious constitutional challenges.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlo...-billionaires/
I love this excerpt:
"Economically, a tax on the stock of unrealized capital gains is an ideal tax, because it doesn’t distort behavior. The gains, after all, have already been made: Billionaires cannot go back in time and try to become less wealthy. Therefore, the traditional argument that taxation discourages effort and innovation becomes moot."
[End of excerpt]
Wouldn't distort behavior? Seriously?
Sure, they have a point about
past behavior. But what about entrepreneurs' and investors' future plans?
When thinking about policy proposals, I sometimes wonder how the great classical liberal thinkers of days gone by might view stuff.
Bastiat, for example.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Bastiat.html
He wrote that we must always consider the
unseen as well as the seen.
Easy enough to observe would be the tax revenue collected from assessments applied to unrealized gains.
Not so obvious would be the damage caused by incentive-distorting effects that could result in founders, VCs, and investors eschewing the publicly-traded markets in favor of private equity, where arriving at taxable valuations would of course be far more difficult, as well as subject to continual tax court challenges.
The U.S. economy depends a great deal on liquid equity markets which benefit not only entrepreneurs in search of capital, but individual investors who have the opportunity to earn excellent returns in their 401(k) and other accounts -- greatly improving their prospects for a comfortable retirement.
In 1990, when pressed to accede to tax increases, George H. W. Bush famously said that when the big spenders started talking about taxing "the rich," it might a good idea for middle-class Americans to hang onto their wallets. (One of those taxes was the so-called "luxury tax," which backfired in embarrassing fashion and was deep-sixed by the Clinton administration in 1993.)
The senior Bush had a pretty good point.
.