Pirate's Cove

Democrats trotted this idiocy out last September, and it went nowhere, and a big part of this is un-Constitutional. Also, it’s not just on billionaires

Biden to propose minimum tax on billionaires in budget https://t.co/XOfUBLNG6g pic.twitter.com/zFM3V6OZne

— The Hill (@thehill) March 27, 2022

From the link

President Biden will propose a new 20 percent minimum tax on America’s wealthiest households as part of his fiscal 2023 budget, according to a White House fact sheet released on Saturday.

The White House said that the “billionaire minimum income tax” Biden will propose would apply to the top 0.01 percent of American households, or those worth more than $100 million. More than half of the revenue raised by the proposed minimum tax would come from households worth more than $1 billion, according to the fact sheet.

“President Biden is a capitalist and believes that anyone should be able to become a millionaire or a billionaire,” reads the fact sheet describing the tax proposal. “He also believes that it is wrong for America to have a tax code that results in America’s wealthiest households paying a lower tax rate than working families.”

Did you notice that this billionaires tax starts at $100 million?

The new proposal would require wealthy households to pay 20 percent in taxes on their “full income,” including standard taxable income as well as unrealized income like gains from stocks.

It will be interesting to see the way this works. It would, first, have to essentially disallow deductions in the tax code that bring the taxable income level to below 20% of what they made that year, as well as increasing the capital gains tax. The big part is the quiet part, though: unrealized income. Do Bill Gates and Elon Musk have access to their billion plus? No. Quite a bit of that is on paper. Until they “cash out”, if you will, it’s unrealized. If your house is work $200K, it is an unrealized asset. Would you like to be taxed on it? You aren’t until you sell it.

And the last time they brought this up, it was pointed out it was un-Consitutional, and there have been court rulings on this. Even the Washington Post noted back then the problems

To start, not all assets are as easy to value as publicly traded stocks. Privately held companies, such as Charles Koch’s Koch Industries, are notoriously difficult to value. Rare but valuable items are even more difficult to fix an annual price. Someone who owns a Leonardo da Vinci or Picasso artwork likely paid more than $100 million for it at auction, but it’s almost impossible to assess what a unique work of art would sell for at the end of each tax year. Billionaires are precisely the people with the motive and the means to hire the best tax lawyers to fight the Internal Revenue Service at every step of the way, surely subjecting each tax return to excruciatingly long and expensive audits.

And to sue over this law. Not that it will pass. It’s questionable if the Democrats will even try in the House, where they can pass it easily. Getting it through the Senate is iffy. Especially since politicians, including Democrats, are beholden to uber-rich folks. Lets say that it manages to be deemed Constitutional: where does all that unrealized income go? How quick do this rich folks move their assets out of the U.S. and stop investing in the U.S.? Why build a resort here in the U.S., for instance? On paper, it might be worth $50 million, but, only generates $1 million of realized income yearly. Who wants to pay on that property as unrealized, when they could build in another country? How many businesses do not get built? How many small businesses would no longer get seed money?

If Congress does have that power, however, it will only be a matter of time before lawmakers apply the tax to ordinary Americans. Anyone who owns a house or has a retirement account has unrealized capital gains. Billionaires get all the attention, but the real money is in the hands of the broader public, as the collective value of real estate and mutual funds dwarfs what the nation’s uber-wealthy hold. The government would love to get 25 percent of your 401(k)’s annual rise, and our nation’s massive annual deficits and cumulative debt means it will need that money sooner rather than later.

That’s what they really want, and Democrats have talked about going after 401(k)s before. Most likely, Brandon is just trying to whip up his unhinged base, because Dems have been taught that the Rich are evil and should have their earned money taken and given to the base.

Read: Biden To Trot Out “Billionaires” Tax Or Something »