51–60 of 312 posts
My extreme political opinion is that no one (including corporations) should be allowed to own more than one property in which they do not reside.
Or - what if I own a 5-bedroom house, and rent the other 4 bedrooms to roommates?
I'm as pro capitalism as it comes but private equity should not be allowed to operate in the consumer housing market. They can develop and sell houses but cannot hold is my point of view.
It won't change anything. Private equity is always a nice scapegoat, but it just exploits the same market forces as any other economic actor. If you ban private equity, it's going to be mom&pop redevelopment companies doing the same. I give you an example of Vancouver. It banned foreign purchases: https://www.kelownarealestate.com/blog-posts/canadas-ban-on-... The impact was literally non-existing. The prices continu…
If you can afford to have one, or multiple, $2M+ condos that you just "park" your wealth in to leave them vacant, the presence of a $10K or $20K fee/tax a year is in the "chump change" category.
One of the issues the article doesn't mention is that these houses are effectively cheaper to purchase for corporate owners. Generally they can borrow money at a lower rate, but the ability of corporate owners to use depreciation on a new purchase to offset profits from previous purchases is more significant. Effectively they are redirecting money that would be paid in taxes into the payments on the new purchase.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wealth taxes don't work because wealth gets extremely fuzzy. For example, unsold stock that I bought 15 years ago; and then got a loan against. I'm wealthy... kinda? But I didn't sell the stock; I have unrealized gains, and you shouldn't tax me beyond income tax on borrowed money? Okay, tax me on my unrealized gains then - but then 2008 repeats itself, stock goes down 40%, do I get a refund? Of course not, I only pay…
What about a law where you couldnt use over a million dollars (to exclude normal people) a year of any asset as collateral for a loan unless you paid capital gains on it at its current valuation?
Wild idea... Maybe tax wealth instead of income? Tax break on single home ownership, but significantly increased tax on multi-home-ownership? It would be interesting to see comparisons between PE ownership in markets with property tax vs markets without.
Wealth taxes don't work because wealth gets extremely fuzzy. For example, unsold stock that I bought 15 years ago; and then got a loan against. I'm wealthy... kinda? But I didn't sell the stock; I have unrealized gains, and you shouldn't tax me beyond income tax on borrowed money? Okay, tax me on my unrealized gains then - but then 2008 repeats itself, stock goes down 40%, do I get a refund? Of course not, I only pay…
Wild idea... Maybe tax wealth instead of income? Tax break on single home ownership, but significantly increased tax on multi-home-ownership? It would be interesting to see comparisons between PE ownership in markets with property tax vs markets without.
So let me propose: a wealth tax on land! ("Georgism"). But not a tax on the "value of improvements," i.e, buildings. This disincentivizes single-family homes near train stations (widespread in the town I grew up in) and is very low-cost to collect.
I don't know where you're writing from. But here in California, the source of all evil (Prop 13) originated with single-family homeowners trying to *escape the property taxes that result from their opposing new development.
Given how spectacularly CA housing policy has failed, perhaps it's time to try the opposite: Let's abolish all income taxes and exclusively tax land instead! (Land taxes have the property of being extremely progressive wealth taxes that are dead simple to administer.)
Wild idea... Maybe tax wealth instead of income? Tax break on single home ownership, but significantly increased tax on multi-home-ownership? It would be interesting to see comparisons between PE ownership in markets with property tax vs markets without.
Wealth taxes don't work because wealth gets extremely fuzzy. For example, unsold stock that I bought 15 years ago; and then got a loan against. I'm wealthy... kinda? But I didn't sell the stock; I have unrealized gains, and you shouldn't tax me beyond income tax on borrowed money? Okay, tax me on my unrealized gains then - but then 2008 repeats itself, stock goes down 40%, do I get a refund? Of course not, I only pay…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wealth taxes don't work because wealth gets extremely fuzzy. For example, unsold stock that I bought 15 years ago; and then got a loan against. I'm wealthy... kinda? But I didn't sell the stock; I have unrealized gains, and you shouldn't tax me beyond income tax on borrowed money? Okay, tax me on my unrealized gains then - but then 2008 repeats itself, stock goes down 40%, do I get a refund? Of course not, I only pay…
Why do you assume such a law would not allow counterbalancing capital losses?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wealth taxes don't work because wealth gets extremely fuzzy. For example, unsold stock that I bought 15 years ago; and then got a loan against. I'm wealthy... kinda? But I didn't sell the stock; I have unrealized gains, and you shouldn't tax me beyond income tax on borrowed money? Okay, tax me on my unrealized gains then - but then 2008 repeats itself, stock goes down 40%, do I get a refund? Of course not, I only pay…
What about a law where you couldnt use over a million dollars (to exclude normal people) a year of any asset as collateral for a loan unless you paid capital gains on it at its current valuation?
This has the finance equivalent of feeling like cookie banners will actually do anything.
Political power will advocate for it's power, you have to go one level higher and interact at that level, not on tax law tweaks.
To give an example of where this has gone wrong already, look at the entire interaction between startup stock, ISOs and AMT and how it creates a horrible trap for startup employees, but not for founders and investors who get a lot of very nice tax benefits like QSBS, no AMT, so on. Because startup employees are diffuse, usually have unstable employment and are usually younger, this hasn't been fixed to this day.
While other countries like Israel have this fixed in a very elegant way, where you can exercise without tax bombs and only actually have tax liability when you actually can and do practically realize or liquidate the stock gains.