Comment by Professorozone@lemmy.world on Let's play the rich get everything. The rules are the rich get everything. participation is mandatory.

Did I say mandatory? I meant optional! You’re “free” to die in a cardboard box under a freeway as a market capitalist scarecrow warning to the other ants so they keep showing up to make us more!

Ummm I didn’t know they could be used as collateral. I’ll have to research that. It doesn’t sound right to me for the same reason they definitely should NOT be taxed. How does that even work? You buy stocks and you hold them, then, what the government taxes you every year until there ARE no gains. Or perhaps the stock plummeted and you have a loss, but it’s ok, you lost money on the investment AND to the government. Until you sell an investment you haven’t made any money on it and it should NOT be taxed. If you have a 401k this would affect you too, not just rich people.

This isn’t common sense. It’s stupid. Please explain how it works.

It’s simple, if you’re a billionaire prepare to get soaked

That sounds like a very compelling argument.

Haha ty. But in seriousness, I do think there is a level of wealth that one can attain that becomes political.

Like civil servants, attorneys, judges, healthcare workers, etc, are held to different standards and subject to different rules (same laws ofc), because of the power they may wield over others.

Oligarchs individually can affect the lives of millions of people. That’s the kind of power we put checks on.

Absolutely, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about creating a tax on an unknown number that will apply to a lot of not rich people. And then taxing it again later for I -don’t-know-how-many times.

How about instead, we make a flat tax and remove loop holes in or any number of ways that apply across the board.

I don’t have a problem with people wanting to be rich or even being rich. I have a problem with how they get there and what they do when they get there. It’s completely unfair and oppressive, crushing people who dare stand in the way, forced labour, buying politicians, etc. I’m sorry but I’m not a communist. Just arbitrarily deciding anything a rich person does should be illegal because a rich person does it is just silly.

Ultra net worth individuals, especially ones like Jeff Bezos with a lot of his net worth tied up in one company, can take a personal loan using his stock as collateral to keep up his lifestyle without needing to sell (and be taxed on) anything. It’s only really available for the 1%

And you can do the same thing. He got a loan using his stock as collateral. The stock has value. The bank can use that value to issue the loan as they see fit within federal regulations. They can do the same with your less than $100m portfolio.

How about we just make things fair so that the ultra rich pay their share? This is not the way. It literally makes no sense.

They can be used as collateral because they are assets that have value. You can use your car or house as collateral too, and neither requires payment of federal income tax.

There isn’t a federal tax on most assets. It’s income that’s taxed. If your assets gain value they can be sold, at which point you pay taxes on that income, though often at a reduced rate (e.g. Capital Gains Tax for selling stock at a profit).

Except most state/local governments do have property taxes on houses, land, and cars. Not unrealistic to apply the same towards other assets. Specially since taxing homes and cars is counterintuitive because you’re taxing necessities, while taxing monetary/investment assets like stocks would make more sense to encourage more spending instead of just hoarding the money.

Most states don’t tax cars outside of sales tax.

They may have registration, but that’s different than tax and only applies of you use the vehicle on public land.

Property tax is usually school districts and municipalities, and is well-under 1% most planned.

Anyone can buy stocks in a margin account and then borrow against it as margin, and use that margin to make more money. If you can open a brokerage account, you can do this.

Shit can turn on you real fast though and you can lose a lot of money since you’re borrowing against the value of a fluctuating asset.

E.g $1000 stocks let’s you buy $400 on margin, but if that $1000 becomes worth less than $700 you gotta pay back that $400, but now you gotta sell at $700 or pony up more cash and that $400 you bought is also only worth $200, so you sell $200 of your $700 and suddenly you’ve lost 50% of the value

I’ve never made 6 figures before, but was asked to show my investment portfolio value when applying for a mortgage as it was part of my assets. Assets the bank could seize if I didn’t pay my bill.

TIL I’m the 1%.

That’s strange. I’ve had a few mortgages now and have never been asked to show my investment portfolio. Where are you and what bank asked for the info?

Canada. All of the banks I applied at asked for total assets, including TD and Scotiabank.

TIL I can use my stock as collateral in a mortgage

I still think anyone can do that, just on a smaller scale. Either way, sounds risky. Stocks sometimes go down as it turns out.

There has to be hedging requirements right? If you have 100 million of growth stocks for example, surely you’d need to have put option contracts for that loaning insitution to accept the risk of unrealized assets to secure a loan of that size?

Anyone know how that works? Im sure each loan is reviewed thoroughly for its risk at that level.

Put options are a specific investment vehicle. The OP is just making a blanket statement about unrealized gains. Many, many NOT rich people have unrealized gains. And there literally is NO value to tax. The investment could go bust and there is a loss, no gain at all. At what point in a long term investment is the tax assessed?

But the point of a put contract would be to lock in the strike price for a duration determined by the expiration date. If put contracts were purchased for the duration of the loan, the potential risk of being unable to pay the bank due to depreciation would be mitigated.

Like how farmers buy puts on their commodity to protect themselves from a bad year.

It costs money to buy a put contract to protect the loan.

So if you need a 1mil loan, now you also gotta buy puts that’ll protect a downturn of 1mil. So now you gotta sell stock which will be taxed. It’s less than 1mil so you’re taxed less, but you will have taxes.

Edit: you could zero cost collar (puts + covered calls) your investment to protect it’s current value, but you’ll give up potential gains as well to get the zero cost part. But this would be a way to protect the value without selling. If the options get exercised though, you’d then have some taxes to pay.

I’d say, when it is used as a vehicle for any financial transaction. If an employee exercising stock options pre-IPO has to pay tax on something that they are unable to get any financial value out of for at least 6-12 months, there is no legitimate reason that unrealized gains used as collateral should not be taxed. It’s just another way to shift tax burden onto people who actually work.

Ok. How much tax do they pay? And later when that stock quadruples and they sell, do they pay again or get a free ride for the extra it’s gone up because they’ve already paid? How many times to they get taxed on it?

I’m not ultra rich, but I have stocks that I’ve been purchasing for decades. I’ll be damned if it’s fair that I be taxed on a stock for a company that may go out of business before I ever see any profit. Why do we even assume it will go up? How about we assume it goes down and I get to write that off my taxes now and sort it out later if the assumption is wrong.

You’re literally trying to tax people on an imaginary number.

Except they are using it as collateral to accumulate excessive amounts of wealth, essentially replacing their income, tax free.

Which is why the first commenter mentioned the tax should be used on unrealized gains that are used as collateral. Not just the unrealized gains themselves.

Also, yea, when they sell, they pay a tax. Just like everyone else. That is a completely separate instance of wealth accumulation that is unrelated to the wealth accumulated by using those gains as collateral.

Don’t like it? Don’t buy stock and earn your money through income from a job instead. It’s that simple.

Though tbh I think this entire discussion on share and stock is pointless. Profit paid to shareholders is wage that should have been paid to a worker; if you don’t perform labor for that company, you shouldn’t have any entitlement to the profits made from that company.

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