No, it doesn't. For example, if I'm super rich and take out a loan using unrealized assets as collateral, then I could be taxed on the loan amount received. There are several such strategies that either force the sale of unrealized assets or tax other portions of the transactions when those unrealized assets are used as collateral.

What is bizarre is that somehow people making less than $200,000 a year can be heavily taxed while if you're a multi-millionaire or billionaire, suddenly things become so drastically difficult that you couldn't possibly be taxed on anything you do with your monopoly money.

The example you gave is, quite frankly, pointless in the context of discussing billionaires. Discussing real estate assets far less than $2 million is completely irrelevant to a discussion about people with net worth exceeding hundreds of millions of dollars, if not tens of billions of dollars.

> It is not wealth until you have it.

If that's true, then stop allowing people to turn it into wealth, which they do all the time.

With some good estate planning there is probably no tax to pay ever.

I don't get that tax back if I end up selling my house for half what it was taxed for last year. But I can appeal the evaluation for this year.

If my house is worth $1M in 2022, I pay tax on that $1M of value. If it goes down in value to $500K in 2023 (and is reassessed), I'd pay tax on $500K value in 2023.

If I own $1B of AMZN in 2022, I'd pay wealth tax on my $1B holdings in 2022, if the market tanks and AMZN is worth $50M in 2023, then I'd pay the wealth tax on $50M in 2023.

Just as with property taxes, a wealth tax is generally annual based on current assets.

speak for yourself! a property tax makes sense in theory: you're contributing to the entity that ensures your land is safe in the first place, but basing it on valuations instead of something like flat rates based on sqft is preposterous.

I'd go so far as to say that the degree to which the knowledge of such a tax affects your decisions relating to the property is enough to constitute a violation of natural property rights.

But let’s take your premise. The more valuable the land, the more an entity will spend to procure it (bigger army etc), and the more you thus have to spend to defend it, thus the more it costs.

Not quite. I can see what I’m getting back from the city for the property taxes on my home (or on my office).

It’s less clear to me what the city or government contributes to my company. I’m more inclined to say that its existence is a public service.

When the equivalent power of millions of people can become concentrated into a single person, you get all sorts of weird consequences! Most of them not good for the public as a whole, and often with a corrupting influence on liberal democracy. It is indeed fitting then, that a solution targeted at this very rare and specific problem would look a little weird; even though it's extremely similar to the existing property tax that every home owner pays.

I think that’s more being paid for having given someone a whole bunch of money up front, that they can now use to more quickly earn enough money to pay you (loan in a different name).

In San Francisco there is a 2.5 month window to appeal your property tax assessment. I did that for 2020, and was successful (the hearing was like a year+ later) and they gave me a refund.

I failed to do it for 2021, because I was under the mistaken assumption that they'd they'd also adjust my 2021 assessment after my appeal. They didn't. I guess that's on me?

I just sold that property for a loss and 15% less than my tax assessment, and I'm well past the appeal period for 2021/2022 sales tax year. So I think I'm out of luck. I just over-paid by 15%.

The places cost the same per month. But in SF, almost all of that was going to the premium/interest.

In Chicago, a massive amount was going to taxes and HOAs.

But I'd recommend selling enough of your BTC to pay taxes so you're not underwater if it goes down in value.

why do we need to keep growing gov't and adding more and more rules/programs/etc.? Certainly we don't need to keep spending more and more, cut it off and some point and stop growing it for some period..

Here's one good reason -- decades of underinvestment in infrastructure. The top tax bracket in the 1950's when the Interstate highway system was funded was 90% - now it's 37% and even that is mostly avoided by the most wealthy.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/state-us-infrastructure

Another reason is the impending climate disaster -- former arable land will become unfarmable, many coastal areas will become uninhabitable or need expensive flood control, etc. This is going to cause huge costs and will almost certainly require government assistance.

And carbon reduction will also be expensive.

Perhaps too we can stop irrigating desert and grow things like almonds (and actual food) in places like Iowa (with the most class 1 farm land in the US), instead of Iowa growing animal fodder and ethanol.

Most of these "crises" are self-inflicted crises in management.

A really interesting read on the rust and cost is the book "Rust: the longest war." It outlines how quickly costs escalate over time when something as simple as Rust is not dealt with and it left to build up.

Also, 90% top marginal tax wasn't really paid. Look at our historic tax revenue vs GPD. it's remarkably consistent, around ~17-20% no matter what policies we have floating around.

I am certain that we could reduce billions in spending to find money for actually important things. we do not need to keep increasing spending/revenue. we need to decrease spending and keep the same revenue. that's the easiest path.

We tax real estate because it can’t be moved out of the jurisdiction.

Of course size is not the only factor, which makes it complicated. Land or property value is probably a good proxy. If you house is >$1M it probably means you are wealthy.

Now you get one of two things in each individual case: Either people downsizing (good, frees up property for other people) or people paying tax (good for society).

The other side of every "family was forced to sell" is "another family was very happy to move in".

There is a point where I think it's okay to factor an unexpected large housing market increase into the equation. To raise a community's property tax unrealistically because a mass influx of buyers are willing to overextend their credit doesn't make much sense to me.

Also, I think this applies even more to our current situation and the fact that a lot of these communities had nothing to do with the politically charged economic decisions our politicians made with close to zero debate, and ultimately, the economic fallout it has created.

In my home state in the Midwest I have always thought a better way to go about it in the future would be to factor median salary and wages into the mix. That, along with an unrealistic housing market increase. I'm not sure what unrealistic would be defined as, but median value increasing 2x in five years is definitely unrealistic. At the very least things like this should be debated.

And being forced to sell to some degree is by design. One elderly lady hogging the land that could house 100 apartment dwellings in the middle of a city for example.

“Owning Land” is a human construct.

And it would be no worse than compulsory purchases by government for infrastructure.

Or someone leasing where the landlord wants more rent so they get kicked out.

I know six million American households who lost their homes to foreclosure in 2008 that might disagree with that one.

The S&P is down 20% in the last 3 months.

Massive wealth doesn't operate in income or even in typical capital gains advantages you're referring to. It operates at a scale where the value of the assets are so great, banks compete to give loans to them, which are not taxed like income.

It's totally absurd to argue that loans from assets isn't income. It's used to purchase more assets, to purchase tax favorable legislation, to buy media to keep us thinking this issue is about paying capital gains on your retirement portfolio.

If Bezos will "never get that money unless he sells stock" was a true statement, then where do all the yachts and houses and other assets come from? How does he buy them? If the IRS suddenly recognized loans taken against asset wealth or any exchange of assets as income, the tax rates of the super wealthy compared to the average American would suddenly look sane.

That seems kinda whack to me. If I get a $500k mortgage, it's not like I received $500k of income that year-- the house belongs to the bank, and I'll be making payments for 30 years. If I stop paying my mortgage, I'll lose "my" house and have nothing to show for it except an insane tax bill (just like Elon would have to give up some of his Tesla stock if he gets margin called)

The collateralized loans trick was really only semi-viable because of historically low interest rates. SOFR will climb up to the more standard rate of 5-15% APR, which we saw with LIBOR back in the day. At that point, the one-off 23.8% capital gains tax on selling stock becomes more competitive.

I don't think the loan and tax rates are particularly preferential.

Thanks to his twitter deal, he's had to publicize some info about how he gets his money. The interest rates on his loans range from SOFR+3% to SOFR+10%. Those rates aren't that low— even as a non-millionaire I could get similar ones from my bank (https://www.schwab.com/pledged-asset-line).

I pay 2.75% interest on my mortgage. So even Elon's best loan has an interest rate well above my mortgage. By the end of the year, his interest rate is on track to be around 3x higher than my mortgage! And like my mortgage, his loan has a large upfront payment and a minimum amount that must be repaid every year, it's not free money forever.

My effective federal tax rate is 20%. That's lower than the rate that a typical billionaire would pay on capital gains (23.8%).

Constant borrowing isn’t a free money machine, eventually you have to earn more to service the debt (income tax) or sell assets to pay it back (capital gains).

Have you ever taken a loan?

Ignoring the hyperpreferential tax treatment of capital gains, I assume? (LTCG are taxed far less than generic income, which in turn is taxed less than labor income.)

> You never got the income

It's not an income tax, so who cares?

Assets deliver utility while held; income isn't the only utility they deliver.

That's literally the point of wealth taxes.

If you own a $1 million house with an $800k mortgage, you pay tax on $1 million of property, but you only have $200k of wealth.

Billionaires are the world's biggest whiners. Even a tax burden that's proportional to what normal middle-class people pay is the end of the world.

The point of wealth taxes (see Texas real estate prices) is to disincentivize rapid asset appreciation.

Texas and California are different in many ways and this is the main one (California income tax vs Texas real estate tax).

California showed (shows) that income taxes only sort of disincentivize inequality, whereas Texas shows wealth taxes very much disincentivize inequality, so much so that the government has to actively lobby to get truly high paying jobs there.

It's the only realistic option to provide a UBI: in a world where human capital is quickly depreciating, provide people with financial capital so that they can still be a part of the resource distribution and consumption game.

If you need to unlock the equity you can get a HELOC. More generally, if you own an asset with a well-known pricing model you can use it as collateral for a loan.

To your second point I believe you do carry over tax losses for some time.