Why should I be forced to sell shares of my company when no other individual that owns shares of whatever other companies is being forced to sell?! As you said, Bezos sells billion dollars worth of AMZN and pays taxes on that just as you and I would when we do. I am not sure I follow why we are trying to tax owning of shares of companies?! If you buy 100,000 shares of AMZN today, do you hope that IRS will come knocking on your door to take 1,000 or whatever number it is each year? If that is the case no one would ever buy any shares of any company...
> If you buy 100,000 shares of AMZN today, do you hope that IRS will come knocking on your door to take 1,000 or whatever number it is each year?
Yes, I would expect that if I had 100k shares of amzn (300 million dollars of net worth), and we implemented a wealth tax, the IRS would tell me "You have to pay us $300k or so" each year on that wealth. If that means I sell some stock, then sure. That means, btw, if I live 60 more years and gain zero more dollars of wealth, I still have 280 million dollars left of my original 300 mil. I still have plenty of shares left.
You clearly don't understand the point of a wealth tax or how the rate rises progressively with wealth it is if you don't understand why we'd be taxing ownership of wealth, and why this wouldn't negatively impact most people.
> If that is the case no one would ever buy any shares of any company...
I currently don't have over 50M of net worth. A wealth tax would not impact me, so I'd still buy stock just as I do now, with no difference. If my stocks did so well that I had millions of dollars, I'd now be able to pay a wealth tax, and have on problem with that.
I'd also keep buying stocks if they got me from a net worth of almost nothing to $50M, and all I had to do was pay a small percentage each year along the way.
That's a wealth tax of 0.1%. On that level, it's probably a net-loss to the government just from the bureaucracy. I think we are talking here about order a couple percent, so >10 times more.
The parent example was of "100,000 shares of AMZN... taxed 1,000", which matches 0.1%.
I used that number since that was the number the parent comment saw as being obviously too much already, so I didn't need to use a higher number.
I do think 0.1% would already be pretty appreciable. That's already several 10s of billions a year. The current budget for all of the IRS is on the order of 10s of billions now, so I really doubt adding that new tax would be a net-loss.
And, of course, once you have a wealth tax and the sky doesn't fall, tweaking the number up over time is easier.
