Kamala Harris Will Raise Taxes On Unrealized Capital Gains Above $100 Million… Hell Yeah!
Want muscular liberalism to continue Biden's historic Build Back Better accomplishments? Tax the megarich!
Kamala Harris supports Joe Biden’s revenue proposal for 2025’s budget that imposes a 25% tax on total income specifically targeting unrealized capital gains, and, before lying Republicans can confuse you into thinking this might affect you, casual reader, the budget proposal explicitly applies to taxpayers who make over $100 million. Hell yeah to progressive taxation.
The debt is huge, and Republicans have spent decades blaming it on and trying to sabotage what little safety nets and social spending the US government has compared to most other developed democracies. But with the drastic economic inequality hoarded by the megarich in America, the megarich are gonna just have to start paying higher taxes for a bit. Sorry. If you’re a patriotic billionaire, you should want to help solve your country’s debt problem, and maybe only get a new yacht with a smaller yacht inside of it every other year, instead of every single year.
It’s politically unfeasible for Republicans to meaningfully pay off the debt saving relative pennies by screwing over the poor and kicking the prevention-of-people-dying-in-the-streets funding can down the road for when downstream civic and personal costs are dramatically higher… such as when sick people are in the hospital with no insurance… or a whole town’s next generation is poisoned from lead in their water… or disadvantaged youths are arrested and imprisoned and literally living off the government for the rest of their lives. If conservatives want government to act like an efficient business, their method of demonizing any and all preemptive social assistance leads to awful governmental business.
Besides, massive capital gains above the $100 million threshold is not the type of profit that comes from wholly honest, active labor. It’s largely passive wealth generation that comes from manipulating existing, stationary wealth. Or trickled-up profits extracted from the labor of a bunch of employees who are not getting the raises they deserve so the company can do a stock buyback and draft bigger golden parachutes for the next C-suite suits who will run the company into the ground sacrificing long-term health in favor of maximizing self-destructively short-term, quarterly growth, all while professing fiduciary loyalty to shareholders venerating greed as a moral virtue of the religion of corrupt capitalism.
Maybe that’s poetic, maybe I’m being simplistic abstracting demonography of greed, but I just fundamentally don’t care at all about billionaires or their increasing net worths. I have not been convinced billionaires need to exist.
As the joke, what’s the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars? …About a billion dollars. It’s just so much fucking money I literally don’t give a fuck if the government flat out takes every penny above a billion for worthy goals like achieving universal Pre-K, universal medicare, high-speed rail, new American battery and computer chip factories, or child tax credits. Billionaires could be heroes just traveling around everywhere renovating schools, preventing medical bankruptcies, and replacing lead pipes, but they don’t, so necessarily the government has to exist and do that, and I don’t care at all if it means no one will ever get to be a trillionaire.
And remember that excessive net worth is not just an implicit result of human exploitation somewhere along the requisite labor or input procurement chains, it’s also an increasingly common occurrence in our culture that great wealth is a result of reality-warping financial nepo baby inheritance.
Another reason raising taxes on the megarich is patriotic is because their corporate empires are only possible thanks to the utterly priceless valuation of the government’s efforts and expenses building at cost and maintaining roads, highways, ports, public education, clean food and water, military protection, free trade shipping lanes, and virtually endless other conveniences of living in a nation and society as developed and free as ours. It’s an ecosystem that must be maintained with progressive taxation, and the general vibe on both ends of the political spectrum is that capitalism in America has run a bit amok.
Besides, $100-millionaires won’t let this tax hike on their excessive income slow down their warpath to profit, or quiet the musical cacophony of the ringing net worth registers in their heads. If anything, higher taxes will challenge these megarich to even greater olympic heights of financial heroics. Let’s trickle-down with progressive taxation on unrealized capital gains above $100 million by using the megarich’s insatiable appetite for cash to continue investing in America and building back better. Thanks, Joe Biden!
I’m for higher taxes on the unrealized capital gains of the megarich who make more than $100 million, and I’m for Kamala Harris.
One more time: Republicans will claim this will affect every taxpayer, but Harris is only calling for taxing above a $100 million threshold.
Imagine how much a million dollars would change your life. Now imagine you had one hundred of those! Are you really not willing to pay proportionally higher taxes AFTER you have $100 million?
It’s like a civic psychopath test.
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This reminds me of back when I first began to make more money annually than the Social Security tax cap. I was first surprised when my net income was higher than it had been the prior pay period. And then over time I thought to myself, why do we stop paying Social Security tax just because we make more money? It makes no sense. And I wouldn’t even miss it if it was taken out, because I was already making such a wonderful net income. We were a modest family of five in those days, and even with (now) ex-spouse’s penchant for spending on herself and the kids, we felt like we were livin’ the dream. So, hell yeah, tax the $100 millionaires. They will probably find more ways to make more money, no doubt on the backs of the middle-class, but hey, them’s the breaks.
YES!