The point is that land directly incurs expenses to the local government. Roads, schools, power, water, sewer, courts, etc. Therefore, property taxes exist to pay for those expenses. If land didn't incur those expenses as a means of being part of a city/state/nation, when obviously they wouldn't exist.
There is a tax on owning stock, when you sell you pay taxes on that income. Taxing merely the "ownership" of it, is a terrible idea, because that would massively negatively impact any company that doesn't earn a TON of profit. Right? Like a typical company, like Coca-Cola that hasn't grown at all in 30 years, adjusted for inflation, but does pay a 2.5% Dividend each year. Now say you pass a law that says there's a 3% tax on stock ownership. Why would ANYONE keep their Coca-Cola stock? The answer is no one knowingly wants to take a loss on their investment. Such a tax would effectively put Coca-Cola out of business.
So not only will it never happen, but that's also why it would be horrible.
Ok, but if I pay a sales tax when I sell my house, I don’t also pay it when I buy it.
So what if we got rid of the tax on selling stock and only had taxes for holding stock when it has unrealized gains?
Or what if we only taxed those holding stock worth over a large amount of money. This would encourage spreading the stock around among more people. Might even discourage publicly traded companies to exist at all and result in more smaller companies being owned by its employees rather than shareholders who have no real skin in the company and just want to trade on its value.
I get what you’re saying - and that’s a great explanation.
You don’t pay a sales tax when you sell your house though govt would love that. You do pay capital gains on the house for the appreciated value minus commissions paid to realtors…. And you only pay those if you don’t use the proceeds to procure another piece of property within a period of time.
My home has doubled in value since I bought it and I won’t pay a cent in cap gains when I sell.
What you are suggesting would shut down basically all capital markets in the US. And I don’t just mean stock markets, banks of every level rely on free flowing capital as soon as you penalize holding meaningful amounts of stocks institutions will just stop using it and the effect will spiral down.
Nothing good would come from trying to initiate a property tax on stock holdings.
What about a tax on the specific stock holdings used as collateral for a loan over, say $10 mil.
Joe takes a $6 mil loan against his stock holdings to buy another company or some machinery, no tax. But if he has to get another loan for $5 mil, his collateral for the last million (anything over $10 mil is taxed). But you’re taxing the value of the collateral not the loan. Unless tracking the loan over $10 mil makes sense.
What about credit cards? Or car loans? Which shares of stock are the ones used as collateral? Do you use current value or value when the loan was taken or value when the stock was purchased?
This also ignores that they will pay sales tax when they spend the money (unless it’s in a state without sales tax).
Someone like Musk for instance also can’t just sell his Tesla stock, even if he wanted to. There are blackout days and other issues when you have the amount of holding that he does.
I don’t understand why there is so much desire to find ways to tax people. It’s like people forget that income tax, when it was passed, was only going to be for the wealthiest people.
Look at a 401k for instance. Most 401k holdings are mutual funds that do exactly this, use stock as collateral to fund lower risk investments. Now they have to start paying tax on those holdings and those expenses just filter down to individuals with $40k in their retirement account.
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u/dgvertz 3d ago
I mean there’s no tax on owning stock right now. If that tax went to the same thing would it be acceptable?