Ok, I’m just going to go ahead and pitch an alternative and then you can weigh in on the relative merits.
In my mind, the issues aren’t the loans themselves, it’s that they’re secured by shares. Billionaires are able to realize real value from those shares without paying taxes in them.
I think if you want to use shares as collateral, you need to pay the taxes on them.
You wanna use shares to back a loan, fine, but the instant you do, all taxes on those shares are due at FMV.
This isn’t without precedent: when an employee has unvested shares with a company and meet a companies retirement eligibility criteria, the IRS sees that those shares are “no longer at substantial risk of forfeiture” and several social taxes are due, despite the shares not being sold or even technically owned by that person.
We can extract fair tax values from securities even before they’re sold. We already do.
Tax the assets used to secure the loans and it gets the taxes into the system without removing voting rights. Win/win, and it’s a scalpel directly targeting the root.
Ok, I’m just going to go ahead and pitch an alternative and then you can weigh in on the relative merits.
In my mind, the issues aren’t the loans themselves, it’s that they’re secured by shares. Billionaires are able to realize real value from those shares without paying taxes in them.
I think if you want to use shares as collateral, you need to pay the taxes on them.
You wanna use shares to back a loan, fine, but the instant you do, all taxes on those shares are due at FMV.
This isn’t without precedent: when an employee has unvested shares with a company and meet a companies retirement eligibility criteria, the IRS sees that those shares are “no longer at substantial risk of forfeiture” and several social taxes are due, despite the shares not being sold or even technically owned by that person.
We can extract fair tax values from securities even before they’re sold. We already do.
Tax the assets used to secure the loans and it gets the taxes into the system without removing voting rights. Win/win, and it’s a scalpel directly targeting the root.