Senator Warren’s “Nutty Idea” to Tax Unrealized Capital Gains November 7, 2019 by Dan Mitchell

Last month, I accused Elizabeth Warren of being a “fiscal fraud” for proposing a multi-trillion dollar government takeover of healthcare.

She then unveiled a plethora of class-warfare taxes. As I discussed yesterday on CNBC, she even wants to tax capital gains even if the gains are only on paper.

By the way, I’m disappointed that I forgot to mention in my final soundbite that school choice would be a very specific and very effective way of helping poor people climb the ladder of opportunity.

But let’s set that aside and focus on Senator Warren’s radical proposal.

Because the idea would be such a nightmare of complexity, I joked in the interview that the Senator must own shares in firms that do tax accounting.

That’s not a novel observation on my part. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal opined why this was a bad idea. Not just a bad idea, a ridiculously foolish idea.

Under current law, long-term capital gains are taxed at rates up to 20%—plus a 3.8% ObamaCare surcharge on investment income—only after the asset is sold. Mr. Wyden calls this a loophole. …Mr. Wyden…proposes an annual “mark to market” scheme… As an asset rises in value, its owners would pay tax each year on the incremental gain. This would create an enormous new accounting burden. Mr. Wyden may say that his mark-to-market rule will apply only to the top 1% or 0.1%, but it would still be a bonanza for tax attorneys. How will people in the top 2% know whether they’ve passed the threshold, and how far will they go to avoid it? …Mr. Wyden’s plan would tax gains that exist merely on paper. …And what about illiquid investments, such as private companies or real estate? As with Ms. Warren’s suggested wealth tax, no one knows how Mr. Wyden would go about valuing them. …Would the owner of an apartment building be asked to revalue it every year? Will an art investor be told to mark that Picasso to market? Good luck.

I’ve already written about Senator Wyden’s proposal.

It’s not just absurdly complex. It’s also bad tax policy, as the WSJ noted.

…there are good reasons to tax capital gains at preferential rates, which is why the U.S. has done it for decades under Democrats and Republicans. The lower rate…reduces the harm from double taxation after corporations already pay income taxes. …A lower tax rate is also a matter of fairness. If investors have capital losses, they aren’t allowed to deduct more than $3,000 a year. There’s no inflation adjustment either: If $100 of stock bought in 1999 is sold for $150 today, the difference is taxed even though much of it is an illusory gain caused by dollar erosion.

The final sentence should be emphasized.

Under the Wyden – now Warren – plan, you can have illusory gains that only reflect inflation, and then you can get taxed on those illusory gains even if you don’t actually get them because you haven’t sold the asset.

David Bahnsen, writing for National Review, says the idea is simply nutty.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon is the top-ranking member of the Senate’s tax committee... And his recent policy proposal to tax unrealized capital gains is just as extreme, silly, impractical, dangerous, and inane as any of the aforementioned policy whiffs floating around in the leftist hemisphere. …The problems here are almost as severe as the problems with getting a wind-powered ride across the Pacific Ocean in the Green New Deal. First and foremost, the compliance costs would be the biggest boondoggle our nation’s financial system has ever seen. How in the world is illiquid real estate that has not sold supposed to be “valued” each and every year, let alone illiquid businesses, private debt, venture capital, and the wide array of capital assets that make up our nation’s economy but do not fit in the cozy box of “mutual funds”? …Another problem exists for this delusional plan: How do smaller investors pay the tax on an investment that has not yet returned the cash to them? …Underlying all of the mess of this silly proposal from Senator Wyden is the Democrats’ continued lack of understanding about what is most needed in our economy — business investment. The war on capital is a war on jobs, on productivity, on growth, and on wages. Taking bold actions to disincentivize productivity, investment, risk-taking, and capital formation is akin to discouraging diet and exercise for someone trying to lose weight.

Amen.

I’ve repeatedly tried to explain that it is economically self-destructive to impose high – and discriminatory – taxes on income that is saved and invested.

Which is why the right capital gains tax rate is zero.

In other words, instead of worsening the bias against capital, we should be copying nations such as Switzerland, Singapore, Luxembourg, and New Zealand by abolishing the capital gains tax.

For more on that, I recommend this video.

P.S. Don’t forget that Senator Warren also has misguided proposals on many other issues, such as Social Security, corporate governance, federal spending, corporate taxation, Wall Street, etc.