Aug 29, 2024
Harris Faces WAVE Of Backlash
Vice President Kamala Harris's proposed tax on unrealized gains is dead in the water.
- 17 minutes
You are talking about taxing
unrealized gains at levels that we haven't
seen in the past, have never seen before.
Well, I'm glad you brought up
unrealized gains, because I think
it's an important clarification
because there's multiple proposals here.
The tax on unrealized gains applies only
to people with assets over $100 million.
[00:00:17]
And just to emphasize how small a group
that is, that's about one half less
than one half of 1% of Americans,
about 60,000 people in the entire country.
That was Bharat Ramamurti, who is an
informal, informal economic advisor to
[00:00:34]
Kamala Harris, confirming Harris's support
for a tax on unrealized gains.
Now, there are a lot of lies floating
around about Kamala Harris's tax plan.
And for the purposes of this discussion,
we're going to focus on the notion
[00:00:49]
of taxing unrealized gains.
But first, it's important to understand
what Harris has actually said
about her economic plan,
because the fact of the matter is,
she just kind of Cosigned to Biden's
economic proposals from earlier this year.
[00:01:05]
It's not like she put out her own policies
and I think that was a mistake.
Okay.
She needs to come out
with her own set of economic policies.
And so when Biden put out
his economic proposals, he wanted
to essentially tax unrealized gains,
[00:01:21]
specifically because of the fact that
tremendously wealthy individuals are able
to keep their money in the stock market
and essentially never pay taxes on that,
and instead use that stock market
investment or those investments
[00:01:36]
as collateral for personal loans.
They'll take out the personal loans,
which are not taxed, and they'll use
that for their spending in order to avoid
or dodge taxes on their unrealized gains.
Okay, so the Biden administration
proposed,
and Harris said she would support at least
a 25% income tax on certain people
[00:01:57]
with over $100 million in assets
that include unrealized capital gains.
Harris reiterated her support for a
provision included in the administration's
proposed budget for the 2025 fiscal year,
which would apply only to wealth
[00:02:13]
held by high net worth households.
So look, unlike the income tax,
you also have capital gains tax,
which is much lower.
It's taxed at a lower rate
than income that you earn by working.
So it's around 15 to 20%.
[00:02:30]
And so the proposed tax on unrealized
gains, though, would apply only to those
who have 80% of their 100 million plus
wealth in tradable assets like stocks.
In short, it would not apply
to most startup founders or investors.
[00:02:48]
If any group should be tweeting mad face
emojis, it's top hedge fund managers.
Okay, so I don't think that taxing
unrealized gains even for wealthy people,
is a good idea, because I do think
[00:03:03]
it's going to have a negative impact
on the stock market overall.
Some of you might think,
okay, who cares about that?
You should care about that.
When you think about ordinary working
people who have their 401 K's
invested in the stock market.
And by the way, I mean
this is just not going to happen.
[00:03:19]
It's been a nonstarter
as it relates to Congress.
They would need to pass legislation
in order to implement this policy.
But I am curious what you think, before we
get to all of the conservatives needlessly
lying about what this policy is.
Yes.
So I think they might have done the policy
just to get CNBC anchors yelling at them,
[00:03:40]
because that's good politics.
So when you have all these anchors
who are like, this is going to hurt
beloved corporations too much,
this is going to hurt the richest people
in the country too much.
She picks up votes.
So what's my opinion
on taxing unrealized gains?
[00:03:57]
I think generally speaking,
it's a bad idea.
Generally doesn't work okay.
If you're going to do it, though, this is
probably the way that you would do it
to minimize the damage that it can cause.
It does not affect small businesses.
It does not affect real estate.
So that goes to the Republican lines
you're going to hear in a second.
[00:04:15]
Right.
But so from a policy perspective,
I don't know that I would do this.
On the other hand, these guys
are getting away with murder, so.
Why not tax their personal loans.
So that's exactly what I was going to ask.
Oh, great. Okay.
[00:04:31]
Yeah.
So what they do is they'll say, like,
Elon Musk will have like $100 billion
in stock as an example, right?
He's like, I never sold a stock.
So but what he'll do is he'll go to a bank
and say, now give me $100 billion in loans
because I obviously am good for it.
You just take my stock
if you need as collateral.
[00:04:48]
Exactly right.
So but that doesn't get taxed
because it's technically a loan.
Okay.
Now you can create a law that says,
well, maybe he should get taxed
if you're doing that kind of trickery.
Right.
And so there's a way to,
to maybe propose this in a way
[00:05:06]
that is more narrowly tailored
and gets at the crux of the problem.
Now, when you see everybody
yelling on TV with their Republicans
or CNBC anchors, none of them ever say
that there's a problem.
Like they they just pretend there's
no problem at all and for no reason.
Communist Kamala Harris is coming here
to take away your gains, etc..
[00:05:24]
No, you're hiding all of this money,
literally hundreds of billions of dollars
from any taxation.
That's a giant problem.
The billionaires in this country,
on average pay 8% tax rate.
If you're middle class,
you're paying 40 or 50% in some cases.
[00:05:41]
That's unbelievably unfair.
So the politics of it is good.
But bottom line is, is Kamala Harris
going to do this when she gets in office?
I've got it at approximately 0% chance.
Yeah, 0% chance. It's not going to happen.
And if it were to be implemented
in the way that it's proposed
[00:05:57]
in Biden's economic policy proposals,
I do think it would have a negative impact
on just ordinary working Americans
who are invested in the stock market,
whether it's just, you know,
they bought shares whatever of a company
or more importantly, their
retirement accounts would take a hit.
So I do like the idea of instead taxing
the personal loans that these tremendously
[00:06:18]
wealthy individuals take out with
their stock investments as collateral.
Okay, now, with that in mind, now that we
understand what the proposal actually is,
let's go to the first clip featuring Sean
Hannity falsely claiming on his radio show
that this policy is basically targeted
toward ordinary people.
[00:06:36]
Let's watch.
Apparently, if you have a 401 K
or retirement account of any kind,
guess what?
You're going to pay taxes
on unrealized capital gains.
Oh well, my my stock portfolio
this year went up a whopping 35%.
[00:06:52]
Okay, you don't sell your stocks,
but you have to pay tax
on the gain on those stocks.
And she wants to raise, you know,
the capital gains tax
to an enormous Rate, you know, up to 40%
wants to more than double it.
- That will destroy all investment.
- Hey, don't scroll away.
[00:07:11]
Come back, come back.
Because before the video continues,
we just want to urge you
to lend your support to TYT.
You power our honest reporting.
You do it at t.com/team
and we love you for it.
Okay, if you are worth $100 million
[00:07:28]
and the majority of that wealth
is invested in the stock market,
then yeah, under this plan you would have
to pay taxes on those unrealized gains.
- But the majority of people are not.
- Yeah.
It's always hard to tell with Hannity
on whether he's actually that dumb
[00:07:43]
or if he's lying to you on purpose.
But I think in this case, he's
pretty clearly lying to you on purpose,
because the plan is clear.
It's under it's people are under
$100 million are not affected.
So he's just making it up that it's,
oh, your 401 K if you're middle class,
[00:08:00]
she's going to do that to you.
Just flat out lying
because that's what Sean Hannity does.
He does propaganda
for the Republican Party.
That's what he gets paid
really good money for.
And that's what he's done his whole life.
He's a giant, giant liar.
By the way, the economic proposals
that Biden is putting out there
[00:08:17]
and Harris has cosigned to also would
increase taxes on realized gains.
So once you sell stock, right, and you
actually have that money, it's liquid.
They want to increase
taxes on that as well.
Households making over $1 million.
The top 0.3% of all households
[00:08:35]
will pay the same 39.6% marginal tax
rate on their income, just like
a high paid worker pays on their wages.
Because remember, wages are taxed
differently from capital gains wages.
You work at a job, you get paid.
[00:08:52]
You get taxed at a higher rate
than when someone sells stock
and gets to enjoy the profits
that they made from their investment.
Yeah So, look, capital gains
could affect me one day.
And I'm going to be honest anyway.
[00:09:09]
No, it makes no sense that they pay
a lower rate for capital gains
when you work your ass off,
and then you got to pay the full tax rate.
And what they're doing is investing.
And look, guys, I mean, in a sense,
I invested in this company, right.
And it's been brutally hard
over these last 22 years.
[00:09:26]
ET cetera. ET cetera.
But would I have done it if the tax
rate was higher on capital gains?
Of course,
because I wanted to do this business.
And Warren Buffett
has said this many times.
Nobody goes,
oh, I'd make a profit on that.
But why? Oh, yeah, out of spite.
[00:09:43]
I won't because you
raise the tax rate, right?
Look, the argument in favor of keeping
taxes lower for capital gains
is this notion that, look, we want
to encourage people to invest in companies
to invest in the stock market.
And if the taxes on capital gains
end up being taxed similar to what you
[00:10:02]
would get taxed for your wages,
it's going to discourage you
from investing in the stock market.
No, it's not going to discourage you.
It's what are you going to do,
not invest at all?
What do you just take your money
and put it under your pillow?
You're not going to do that.
You're going to find an investment.
And once you make a profit, you're going
to pay a certain percentage of the profit.
[00:10:20]
And it's either going to be 20%
or 44% or whatever the number is.
But no businessman goes, oh yeah,
I'm not going to do business.
I'm not going to do investment.
That's just not a thing.
Then you have no profits.
How does that help you?
So you talked about the probability
of Kamala Harris and Democrats
[00:10:40]
passing a tax on unrealized capital gains.
What do you put that number at
or percentage at when it comes
to increasing taxes on realized gains?
Zero. Same.
Same. It's not going to happen.
So guys keep it real.
Yeah. So let me give you a context here.
But then I also want to tell you
about a tax cut that Trump proposed.
[00:10:58]
That would be an epic disaster.
And I can't believe
people aren't talking about it.
So but in this regard
Why do we say things like that?
Because I've been covering politics now
for over a quarter century.
So you see these patterns
and they're not complicated at all.
That's why we tell you things like this
ahead of time because.
[00:11:16]
So you can see oh when she goes in.
Oh they were right.
She didn't do that at all.
We said that about Biden,
all these different proposals.
And we were 100% right.
So the reason is in order to win
elections, Democrats are the good cops.
Republicans are the bad cops, right?
[00:11:31]
Democrats come and go, oh, we're going
to stick up for the average man,
and we're going to go get
those no good companies and corporations
that are robbing you blind.
And they get in office.
They're like, it doesn't matter.
We're going to be called historic
no matter what we do.
We could pass, like, hey, Wednesdays
are now in the middle of the week
and they're like historic Democratic
president with incredible reforms.
[00:11:50]
Right.
So that's what mainstream media does.
So they never have any accountability.
And we've seen a thousand times
they not only do they not do it,
they do the opposite.
I'll give you a quick example.
So Barack Obama comes in and says, oh my
God, I'm going to get those corporations.
What does he do?
[00:12:05]
Instead, giant bank bailouts
gives the bankers everything they want,
takes nothing in return,
doesn't even limit their bonuses.
Okay.
Which is an outrage. And then.
Oh, he got something in return, Jake.
You know what he got in return?
He got tons of campaign cash.
Yeah, right. So. And in.
[00:12:21]
And then Joe Biden,
his vice president at the time, went
and negotiated a deal with Mitch McConnell
where they made over 90% of the Bush
tax cuts for the rich permanent.
Yep.
Which Bush couldn't do
because the Republicans are the bad cops.
They're like, oh, we got to pass this
for the economy, blah, blah, blah.
[00:12:38]
But they can't get it to be permanent
because the Democrats push back
as if they're on this, as if they're
fighting them as part of this theater.
But while you're not looking
when the Democrats are in charge,
they're like, oh, yeah, you guys want to.
Yeah.
Right away. Right away.
Here, give everything to the rich.
And when what happened?
They called Obama and Biden historic
anyway, and they pretended they were
[00:12:55]
for the middle class as they gave a giant
tax cut that was permanent to the rich.
So I can go on and on.
And guys, when we see something
that is the exception we pointed
out and go nuts over like so.
When Biden actually did
a 15% minimum tax on corporations,
[00:13:12]
we were like, Holy cow, that's amazing.
They never do that.
And we gave Biden
a ton of credit for that.
I found out later,
and that's my bad that I didn't know it
at the time that it passed.
No, it turns out that OECD, that's
the collection of developed countries,
[00:13:28]
had done a rule altogether to take away
the tax loopholes that they were doing,
like the Double Irish and the Double Dutch
and the Irish sandwich
or whatever the hell it was.
Right.
No, they literally
called these goofy names.
And so they all had a rule, and they
made America have a 15% minimum tax.
[00:13:46]
Otherwise Biden wasn't going to do it.
Damn. Thank you.
International community. Good looking out.
Yeah, exactly. Amazing.
- Wow.
- Yeah.
So the Democrats will not actually do
anything they say against corporations
unless they're absolutely forced to,
because those are their top donors.
[00:14:02]
And if you feel like, well, that sucks.
I'm stuck because the Republicans
are worse than the Democrats
don't actually mean anything.
Welcome to American politics. Yeah, a lot.
Of people are stuck in that situation,
and that's the reason why, for, I don't
know, past few decades, Democrats have
decided to lean in on the culture wars.
[00:14:21]
And like, the culture wars have
kind of been front and center
of like the political debate in America
when behind the scenes,
you really do have a lot of agreement
in both parties in regard to policies
on taxation, policies on regulation.
Sure.
[00:14:36]
You'll have Biden put out, you know,
few bullet points on whitehouse.gov about
how he'd like to tax unrealized gains.
I don't believe for a second
anyone's actually going to fight for that.
So, yeah.
And guys so but if you're saying, okay,
so should I get despondent
[00:14:52]
and not vote no, no, no no Trump.
There are still giant differences.
There's not necessarily any good guys,
but there's definitely bad guys.
Trump cut the corporate taxes from 35
to 21. That costs us trillions of dollars
that we're going to have to pay
as the average American,
[00:15:07]
that is class warfare
against the middle class,
and it's now impossible to undo it because
the Democrats don't want to undo it.
By the way, Biden promised the same exact
thing that he'd move it up to 28%.
Never even came close to delivering
the accountability on that was zero.
[00:15:23]
But once the Republicans move it down,
we can't move it back up.
And the Republicans always move
to move it down.
So let me get to the disastrous one.
Trump is proposing ending
the payroll tax for Social Security.
That will 100% guaranteed
kill Social Security.
[00:15:42]
Exactly.
That's how Social Security
is mostly funded.
Yeah. So what?
No, no, you can't vote for Trump.
He's going to end Social Security.
Yep.
That proposal is a way of absolutely,
positively killing Social Security
without saying, hey, I didn't propose
killing Social Security.
[00:15:57]
I just proposed
taking away all its funding.
Right. And why?
Because corporations pay half of
that payroll tax and beloved corporations
always have to be protected.
So I want to now go to Greg Gutfeld,
who also, like, totally lied about
[00:16:14]
the proposal to tax unrealized gains.
Let's take a look.
An unrealized gain
is the house that your parents live in.
You know, the one that they hoped
would would gain in value.
Well, if it does gain in value,
25 to 50% of that increase
goes to the IRS every year.
[00:16:30]
And they don't even sell the house,
which means the money
actually comes out of their pocket.
How is that not theft?
And they're going to say, but we're only
going to do this to really rich people.
But as you know, sooner or later
we run out of really rich people.
Then it's rich people, then it's not
so rich people, then it's poor people.
[00:16:46]
Let's go to graphic two.
Again, I just want to reread
what the policy actually is.
The the proposed tax on unrealized gains
would apply only to those
who have 80% of their 100 million
plus wealth in tradable assets, i.e.
[00:17:02]
Stocks.
In short, it would not apply
to most startup founders or investors.
If any group should be tweeting mad face
emojis, it's top hedge fund managers.
So this is not about equity on your house.
This is about people who park
most of their wealth in the stock market
[00:17:19]
and intentionally keep it
in the stock market in order
to dodge ever having to pay taxes,
and instead fund their life through taking
out personal loans that are not taxed.
That's what this is about.
It's specifically
cannot touch real estate.
Even if you had a $200 million home,
it can't touch real estate.
[00:17:36]
It's not a liquid asset.
So Greg Gutfeld, are you ignorant and have
no idea what the proposal was, but decided
to run your mouth on TV anyway?
Or were you lying on purpose?
Yeah.
The whole is he stupid or a liar thing?
[00:17:51]
I think oftentimes both apply
to the people in the press.
If you enjoyed this video,
that's because of our members.
They make us independent, they make
us strong and they make us honest.
Become a member today
by hitting the join button below.
Now Playing (Clips)
Episode
Podcast
The Young Turks: August 29, 2024
Hosts: Cenk UygurAna Kasparian
- 14 minutes
- 9 minutes
- 7 minutes
- 7 minutes
- 10 minutes
- 17 minutes
- 10 minutes
- 7 minutes
- 9 minutes