Taxes

Powerline’s Chart(s) of the Day

Stephen Hayward:

The Daily Chart: Kamala’s Tax Dream

So Kamala says her proposed tax on “unrealized” capital gains (which is just a wealth tax by another name) would only be applied to the very very rich. Who can afford it because as we know all rich people are fully liquid. But I digress. More to the point: does anyone believe this promise? For one thing, an unrealized capital gains tax on anything other than publicly tradable financial assets (stocks and bonds) will be extremely difficult if not impossible to implement—never mind the capital allocation distortions it will cause. So if progressives really want to generate revenue from unrealized capital gains, it will end up being applied to stockholdings, which means socking it to the middle class, which as always is where the real money is.

We’ve seen this progressive progression before. When the income tax was first proposed, opponents warned that the rate might someday reach 10 percent! Here are where the initial rates an income thresholds were set in 1913: