Thread by @BasedMikeLee

🧵 1. Kamala’s proposed tax on unrealized capital gains would be unwise, harmful, and unconstitutional. It’d be a direct tax which, under the Constitution, must be apportioned among the states based on population.

https://twitter.com/geiger_capital/status/1825993653350789127

2. Any apportionment requirement would make such a tax essentially impossible to implement. Such a requirement would essentially force states with zero billionaires to contribute revenue from this tax, which isn’t possible if no one there has unrealized gains.

3. To be sure, a direct tax need not be apportioned if it’s a tax on income, as that is allowed by the Sixteenth Amendment. But it’s effectively (and constitutionally) impossible to count a gain as income if it hasn’t been realized.

4. Even if that were somehow possible to count an unrealized gain as income—which it isn’t—imagine the chaos that would ensue from such a policy! The government itself, rather than the market, would ascertain the value of an investment relative to the initial purchase price.

5. That simply wouldn’t work. No one can truly know for certain what an investment is objectively worth until it’s sold. That alone would make this unworkable. And it’s practical in workability only underscores the fact that an unrealized gain simply is not income.

6. A tax on unrealized gains would, moreover, have a severe chilling effect on investment in America. That, in turn, would chill job growth, innovation, and economic growth.

7. Such a tax might create a short-term, economic windfall at the outset. But any benefits would quickly be replaced by a severe drag on the economy, resulting in less revenue flowing to the government.

8. Like nearly all of Kamala Harris’s policy ideas, this one would be a disaster—especially for America’s poor and middle class, the very people Kamala tries to appeal to when she shortsightedly proposes bad ideas like this one.

9. This would, of course, make America’s progressive Democrats happy, as it fulfills the Marxist aim of fomenting class conflict, culminating in the forced redistribution of wealth.

10. But herein lies Marxism’s inexorable weakness: it doesn’t work—for many reasons, including the simple reason that Marxist policies so dramatically reduce the total amount of wealth, that there’s less for literally everyone.

11. Reject Marxism. Reject the Harris-Walz campaign’s empty promises of a socialist utopia. Elect Trump!