Kamala Harris has promised to tax unrealized capital gains and increase tax on realized capital gains in her new economic plan.
This would be a doozy! It means that if you invest in something and it increases in value, you will pay a tax on that profit, whether you have sold the asset and received that profit or not. It also means that if you invest in something and sell it, you will pay almost half of that profit in taxes.
The kick in the pants is that you could not take a loss if your investment loses value before it is sold. It is a strategy that benefits the government but only in the short term because it would discourage investments and harm the economy, hurting us all in the long term.
It is unlikely Harris would ever pass this law while Congress is divided along partisan lines but it is still a terrifying prospect, especially during an already-bad economy.
Economist Carol Roth says this about this plan: "'Unrealized capital gains' is not a thing. Do not normalize it. Call it out for what they are proposing: unlawful seizure of personal property."
