A top Kamala Harris economic adviser demonstrated a hilarious lack of knowledge of economics in making an argument even a business school freshman would realize is an apples to oranges comparison.
One of the most absurd policy proposals of Harris, of which there are few, is taxing unrealized capital gains. She wants a 25% tax on unrealized capital gains for individuals with more than $100 in net worth - and also an increase in the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%. In other words, if someone owns a stock or property that increases in $150,000 in value to $200,000 in a year, the $50k difference gets taxed regardless of if it’s sold.
While liberals are happy to remind us that this proposal is supposed to only apply to individuals worth $100 million or more -that’s just how it starts. Never forget that the first income tax only affected those making over $11 million in today’s dollars, and was a mere 7%.
CNBC host Becky Quick pressed Harris economic adviser Bharat Rama, telling him “taxing unrealized gains just doesn’t seem fair in any sense of the word. All you’re doing is pulling forward the taxes that would be paid later when someone actually sells the stock.”
“I think that this reaction to unrealized gains is a little funny, given that I bet that the majority of people watching right now are already paying a tax on unrealized gains. It’s called a property tax,” Rama absurdly responded, to an eye-roll from co-host Joe Kernen. Kernen then told him that the idea is “probably unconstitutional” and “never going to happen, probably.”
Watch below:
A property tax is more analogous to a wealth tax, not an unrealized capital gains tax, as it’s a recurring tax every single year on the value of a property - not a tax solely on the difference of a property value in a given year.
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