Wyden fills in details for 'Billionaires Income Tax'

...assets, not the nature of those assets themselves.

Maybe not a good analogy, but it's like taxing people who own Cadillacs and not people who own Chevrolets.

that is something for the legislature to pass laws on not the courts?

You live in a town that assesses property tax on every homeowner. This tax would asses a tax on property owners ONLY if their property was worth more than a certain arbitrary value. In other words, if someone has $999.999.999.99 in assets that person doesn't pay the tax. But if that person is walking down the street and finds a penny - BOOM! The tax kicks in.

Are working on a tax plan for the wealthy.

I would imagine that Americans in the bottom 50% of income wise probably don't own much stock outside of tax-sheltered retirement accounts.

reinvesting only after those gains have been reported as income for annual tax purposes with the exception of traditional IRAs and 401k’s which have annual contribution limits.

I have a modest (>100k/>1M) portfolio from my mom's estate that I take an even more modest monthly income from. My manager does some jiggery-pokey every year with taking short term losses that offset the realized gains from my income, regardless of what growth the portfolio actually sees - the end result being I owe $0 in taxes on that income. I can't imagine why it wouldn't scale, if I were the 1% with a portfolio 100x as large taking 100x the income it would still work exactly the same.

So then we get into changing the laws to not permit losses to be counted, which I'm not sure would get even the tepid support that taxing unrealized gains gets.

then they should also be able to take a loss on depreciation in value of assets even if not sold.

Annual capital gains need to be taxed regardless of whether they are taken as income or reinvested — with the exception of traditional IRAs and 401k’s which have annual contribution limits.

I’d also be okay with a straight wealth tax. Wealth accumulation was and is in part owed to public economic/financial policy which specifically and often intentionally favored wealth aggregation over labor or wealth distribution. Taxing the “rewards” of those public policies to achieve a sound and stable society is legitimate.

This isn’t rocket science. It’s fair. Society deserves a fair return for its investments.

Anyone who has more than $1 billion in assets or earns more than $100 million per year ALSO has a staff attorney who can set up shell corporations and other such legal flim-flam to shield those assets from the eyes of the taxman.

There's also the issue that if we require these people to pay capital gains on unrealized gains, they're going to buff up their portfolios with penny stocks, junk bonds and the kind of real estate Donald Trump buys - simply for unrealized loss.

No guys, if you want to increase taxes on the rich the most certain way to go about it is to reform the capital gains tax system. In the old days, we offered this preferential rate to encourage rich people to risk their money in ways that would help America. Today, it's a preferential income tax rate for people rich enough they can afford to wait two years to cash their paychecks. My idea is to allow people to use this rate on "one-owner" stocks - ones purchased directly from the company - because those represent a direct investment in the issuer. Buying stock from another investor benefits the company about as well as buying a 1953 Studebaker benefits the Studebaker Corporation.