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Unrealized gains taxes are a pointless hassle. Much better ways to tax the rich

There are much better ways to tax the rich. We don't need this one.

They want to toss out some economic populist red meat — a reasonable enough impulse — but they make it overly wonky and then get lost in the weeds. More fundamentally, it doesn’t make sense to go inventing completely new taxes — doing stuff that even Scandinavian social democracies have never done! And the downside of this campaign tactic is that fancy, newfangled proposals like this tend to rile up both rich businesspeople and lots of wonky intellectuals (like me).

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