In defense of Trump’s tariffs, I’ve seen a lot of Trump supporters doing a whataboutism saying that Kamala supported unrealized gains which would have been way worse than tariffs.
Other than obvious whataboutism, what exactly is this about?
In defense of Trump’s tariffs, I’ve seen a lot of Trump supporters doing a whataboutism saying that Kamala supported unrealized gains which would have been way worse than tariffs.
Other than obvious whataboutism, what exactly is this about?
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In defense of Trump’s tariffs, I’ve seen a lot of Trump supporters doing a whataboutism saying that Kamala supported unrealized gains which would have been way worse than tariffs.
Other than obvious whataboutism, what exactly is this about?
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It’s a bad idea to try and prescribe logic to the illogical. That being said, I think they are talking about proposed taxes on things like stocks. Aka strategies the ultra-wealthy try to use to pay as little tax on their income as possible.
Such proposals would not have been bad for anyone (the people they impacted will never spend the money that might have been taken in taxes).
I also support unrealized gains. I wish I had more of them.
It’s a pathetic attempt to rationalize trump’s economic disasters by pointing to harris’ proposal that never happened.
Harris proposed a min tax on unrealized gains over $100 million wealth in order to make a wealth tax on the super rich.
Meanwhile Trump actually fucked the market with his sweeping tariffs that hurt everyone and even tiny Antarctic and Indian ocean islands with no people. Because Trump is that dumb and evil.
Wealthy individuals can take out loans against stocks. This avoids a capital gain tax.
A tax on unrealized gains over a threshold would recover the lost tax income
Oh, taxing unrealized gains is bad for the ultra rich which is why the poor are against it – obviously.
Edit: Sarcasm aside there are a bunch of negatives with taxing unrealized gains but only if applied over the board. Unfortunately it’s super easy for the wealthy to scare monger the middle class into being against it based on this.
Normally investors are taxed on their realized gains. Kamala wanted to tax investors for any unrealized gains. So if Warren Buffet owns stock in company that grew by 30%, this means that he has an unrealized gain of 30%, and is added to his total net worth. It only becomes a “realized gain” when he sells his stock and gets the money. At this point the realized gain is taxed. But many billionaires have found a loophole around getting taxed by not selling their stocks at all and just borrowing money with their stock holdings as collateral. Kamala supported the idea of taxing people who have a net worth of over $100 million. I’m using stocks an example but the investment can be anything like a house that you havn’t sold.
I don’t know the full implications of a tax like this, but it’s already been proven that tariffs has a negative effect on growth.
At least that would’ve required approval from congress and probably wouldn’t have passed in the form Harris proposed, if at all.
Unrealized gains are basically increases in wealth due to asset values rather than money. If you hold your wealth in assets and they aren’t taxed, you conveniently can grow and hoard wealth without paying more taxes. Thus some people view this as a sort of tax evasion loophole.
Taxing unrealized gains is not even remotely comparable to starting trade wars with most of the developed world because you don’t understand trade balances not being 1:1 doesn’t mean you’re getting ripped off given not all countries are equal size, etc. Mostly it would impact wealthy people rather than affecting every consumer in the way increased prices on basic goods as a result of tariffs does.
But they just always have to find some sort of whataboutism, and conveniently picking policies that weren’t implemented lets them imagine they would have been horrible without any pesky empirical falsification.
There are some countries (Canada, UK, Germany IIRC) that tax unrealized gains without any major issues resulting, usually only specific types though, such as real estate and foreign investments.
I have no idea what the correlation between taxing unrealized gains and tariffs are. There seems to be none.
But extremely wealthy people can live off loans taken against unrealized gains and the interest payments are far lower than the tax bill. So a lot of people would like to see unrealized gains taxed, especially if used as collateral on a loan.