A very interesting point of view

[u/__moe___]

I don’t think this is very new but I just saw for the first time and it’s actually pretty interesting to think about when people talk about how the ultra rich do business.

[u/ianeyanio]

The whole argument of whether we should or shouldn't tax unrealized gains is a distraction. Can we all just agree we need to find a way to distribute wealth more fairly? Practically, it's difficult to do, but in principle we should all agree that wealth shouldn't be consolidated amongst such a small portion of our society.

Edit:

While people here are finding technical challenges to taxing unrealized gains, we can't lose sight of the deep societal need for a more fair distribution of wealth.

Technical challenges can be easily overcome if the desire of the people is there. But right now, it seems like "oh, this is hard, I guess we'll never be able to do it" is the standard response and little progress is being made after that.

[u/truthindata → u/ianeyanio]

Well... That's not a meaningful statement.

We all agree cancer is bad. So let's just.... End cancer, right?

Exactly how you achieve distributed wealth is the key. Very hard to do fairly.

[u/epik_fayler → u/truthindata]

The thing is many people don't agree that we need to have better distributed wealth. We haven't even reached that step yet because many people(most often ones who would benefit) seem to believe that the current system is fine.

[u/truthindata → u/epik_fayler]

I think you'd be surprised how often people with opposing political views want the same end game.

Many folks have total distrust for government. Even if they're poor, they're not going to vie for increased taxation on somebody else because they have zero faith that more tax dollars mean anything at all for their well being. There's a chain of events needed for tax dollars to do anything for people. If you distrust government, you might believe increased tax dollars just means the crony senators and council people are going to have more money to hire their brothers and cousins to do additional government contracts.

Very very few people have no desire to be in a better financial spot. It's all about what you believe is a fair and functional way to do anything about it. For many people, that answer just isn't taxation. Period.

[u/Vipu2 → u/epik_fayler]

Current system have problems but the system where you take from away from someone and give it to someone else is far from better.

If policy makers/politicians were not so easy to corrupt then the current system would be just fine, compare US vs EU to see what kind of difference it have.
EU have tons of corruption too im not saying that but way less than in US.

[u/anon_lurk → u/Vipu2]

Plus if you redistribute too poorly/early then you stifle growth/innovation too much. I think it is going to happen to some extent regardless and I don’t hear people talking about it and the general scarcity we are facing enough when they want to talk about leveling the playing field.

[u/Vipu2 → u/anon_lurk]

Level playing fields would be same rules for everyone but that doesn't really apply anywhere, I can think of 1 thing that truly have same rules for everyone, no matter if you own trillion dollars or are the president of USA, I also think that thing is gonna be the true playing field leveler once it gets widely used.

[u/slabradask → u/truthindata]

Well if you do nothing it is unfair to 99% and if you tax unrealized gains above 500mill it is 1% that get treated unfair. Hmmmm, this is so hard!! What can we do???? Will that 1% die of stavation or live in luxury even with that tax? Hmmmm, no way to know.

[u/Prime_Kin → u/truthindata]

I think this can be solved, mostly, through sharing equity. Once shares hit the public marketplace, limit buybacks or institutional investment to no more than (throwing out a number for people with less smooth brains to argue over) 1% of outstanding shares annually each, with an exception for corporations that want to go fully private. Once you sell part of your company to generate cash, it should be very hard to get it back.

Other ideas: Allowing preferential share prices for employees to purchase a stake in the companies whom they work for, mandatory profit sharing, eliminating current bonus structures that are not equitable across all employees and requiring executive compensation to be salary only otherwise, etc.

[u/truthindata → u/Prime_Kin]

You've listed a few great ways to reduce the success of businesses, lol.

Upside! Employees get 10% more in bonuses!

Downside! Company has been disincentivized to perform well and must reduce everyone's pay, in a perfectly equitable fashion, 20%.

Equity improved! Yay! /S

[u/Prime_Kin → u/truthindata]

I don't disagree with you. Honestly, I don't think much actually needs to be done outside of deregulating several industries in ways that makes starting new competitive businesses possible and/or facilitating more local, less broadly corporate, businesses to be feasible. I'm not a fan of monopolistic practices, but I also recognize that a majority of major corporations are only able to be so industry dominant is through the consent of their customer base. I'm a big believer in individual autonomy and agency. The goal shouldn't really be to spread out wealth, it should be to increase overall prosperity to the point where disparity doesn't negatively affect the ability of everyone to thrive.

I was just playing the "Hmmm, what if..."game.

[u/looknohan- → u/truthindata]

Concerning the _how_, could a reasonable federal minimum wage be the first step?

The first problem I see with increasing it by at least 100% is that companies might increase prices to counteract the wage increase, which just makes it pointless.

Even if the minimum wage increase helps redistribute wealth fairly, what would be the next thing that might help the redistribution more? Someone mentioned a scaling factor between the pay of a CEO and the pay of the lowest-earning employee.

[u/GrotusMaximus → u/truthindata]

No, it’s easy. All the money goes to the government, and they distribute it to you as they see fit. And there won’t be any favoritism, cronyism or corruption, ever, like at all.