There appears to be no Biden-Harris policy proposal too cuckoo-for-cocoa puffs for the well-oiled Soros machine to spin as a stroke of genius to manipulate its media coverage in a positive light.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), fueled with $6,230,000 by leftist billionaire George Soros between 2016 and 2022, pathetically attempted to swat down opponents of the Biden-Harris unrealized capital gains tax proposal for the 2025 budget. “Arguments Against Taxing Unrealized Capital Gains of Very Wealthy Fall Flat,” read the Sept. 11 CBPP headline. If that wasn’t bad enough, the CPBB played word games by spinning that the middle class is “often taxed on unrealized gains” to make the ludicrous proposal appear mainstream.
As noted by the Tax Foundation, the problem with this bonkers and novel proposal is that it would add “new compliance burdens for taxpayers and administrative challenges for the IRS while weakening the US economy by raising the tax burden on saving and entrepreneurship.” The proposal is — the Tax Foundation summarized — a “changing” of the “definition of taxable income,” no matter how much CBPP tries to spin it.
The whole push to legitimize the Biden-Harris proposal hearkens back to when Soros himself joined other prominent leftist donors calling on 2020 presidential candidates to institute a wealth tax on the rich. CBPP is apparently keeping that Soros wish-list item afloat. And as is the case with Soros-backed entities, CBPP’s influence on the media narrative is palpable. Just 12 days later, Politico, for example, cited the Joint Committee on Taxation in a Sept. 23 piece for not recognizing unrealized gains as income when determining that the affluent pay fairly “robust” amounts in taxes, as if that was a legitimate criticism. “For instance, Marty Sullivan, the chief economist at Tax Analysts, essentially said that JCT goofed by not counting unrealized gains as income, something he argued was the prevailing thought for most economists and many regular people,’” the outlet bleated.
In a similar vein, Mother Jones, just two days after the CPBB released its mind-boggling analysis, also tried to dismiss fears about the downstream effects of the policy by falsely arguing that it’ll only affect the rich: “Worried About Kamala Harris’ Plan to Tax Unrealized Capital Gains? Don’t Bother.” Here’s an exercise in rhetoric: How can you consider something taxable “income” if it is — *checks notes* — “unrealized”?
Economist Dan Mitchell told MRC Business, “Taxing unrealized capital gains is absurdly complex since it would require intrusive evaluations of the net worth of taxpayers, including for assets that are difficult to value (everything from privately held businesses to stamp collections).” Making an unrealized gains tax sound like a new and noble method to get at the rich is a chilling case of déjà vu, Mitchell suggested, because that’s exactly how the snake oil of the income tax was peddled: “Politicians like Harris claim the tax applies only to the rich, but that's exactly how the income tax started (only 1/2 of 1 percent of households were hit at first, but then it became a nightmare for everyone else).”
But the media dishonesty surrounding this nutty proposal is exactly what happens when you have Soros-funded think tanks injecting nonsense into the media ether to be obediently regurgitated.
CBPP, true to form, tried to dismiss the Biden-Harris critics as being detached from reality; yes, really: “Claiming that unrealized gains are not ‘real’ is akin to claiming that individuals such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are not rich unless they sell their companies’ stock.” The group then tried to equate the middle class owning homes that increase in value to large companies’ owning volatile stocks: “Homes and retirement accounts account for relatively small shares of the income and wealth of very wealthy households, who tend to directly own large amounts of corporate stock or other capital assets.”
But this is a false comparison. As Forbes argued in an Aug. 30 item, “The price of an asset is unknowable before it is sold, and the government would be incentivized to manipulate valuations to the upside by the desire for tax revenue.” In essence, wrote Forbes, “How can one accurately value assets that haven't been sold? It is impossible to do so.”
But CBPP proceeded to bend its faulty logic into a pretzel:
Requiring very wealthy people to pay income taxes on their unrealized gains and ending their ability to permanently avoid income tax when they pass appreciated assets to their heirs would thus constitute a reasonable reform.
But this line of reasoning also “falls flat,” to pull from CBPP’s ridiculous headline. Wealthy income individuals in the top tax brackets would still maintain the ability to move their wealth around and minimize exposure should a new unrealized gains tax be imposed, as Forbes noted. “It has happened before and it would happen again.”
Ah, but for the Soros-funded henchmen at CBPP, a tax on unrealized gains would not only help constitute “a fairer tax code[,] but would also raise revenue that is badly needed to meet the nation’s commitments to seniors, make high-value investments that will improve well-being and broaden prosperity, and improve the fiscal outlook.”
Talk about waiting for the punch line to an incredibly bad joke.
As Former Kansas City Federal Reserve President Thomas Hoenig wrote in an April 2022 column ripping apart the logic behind an unrealized capital gains tax:
It doesn’t take much imagination to see where the proposal might take us from there. It follows a familiar pattern that we’ve seen before: Introduce a new tax only for the wealthy and over time, as the Congress looks for more revenue sources, apply it to a wider portion of the population. It’s a tried-and-true approach.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Politico at 703-647-7999 and Mother Jones at (415) 321-1700 and demand they stop trying to legitimize an economically harmful tax on unrealized capital gains.
