With corporate tax off table, U.S. Democrats turn to billionaires

Re:With corporate tax off table, U.S. Democrats turn to bill... by AnimalMuppet on Monday October 25, 2021 @04:26PM (#28992705)

Don't they have to spend it for a VAT to take effect? The idea of this tax was that the billionaires would get taxed even on unrealized gains (maybe not the exact correct term). That is, they couldn't just sit on the money. With a VAT, they can.

But Pelosi shows that this runs into the usual problem of big-spending plans - they run out of other people to take the money from. Eventually, they have to take the money from you, no matter how much they promised the wouldn't...

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Re:With corporate tax off table, U.S. Democrats turn to bill... by legitster on Monday October 25, 2021 @06:23PM (#28993928)

If the problem is that billionaires are taking out loans against their unrealized gains, at least with a VAT you are taxing them on everything they are buying with the loan.

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Re:With corporate tax off table, U.S. Democrats turn to bill... by AnimalMuppet on Monday October 25, 2021 @06:51PM (#28994176)

No, I don't think that's the problem[1]. It's the unrealized gains, whether or not they take out loans. And I suspect (with no data) that by far, most unrealized gains have no loans against them.

[1] There are two versions of what "the problem" is. The first is that people can accumulate assets, completely untaxed, in the form of unrealized capital gains. The other problem is "we [Congress] don't have enough money". For either problem, VAT doesn't really address it.

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