But if those skyrocket in price from tax, they'll be more subtle about convincing banks they're good for the money and pay a slightly higher rate for unsecured loans.
Or maybe they'll just treat the asset securing the loan as having the pre-gains price. Get the bank to agree it's worth at least what you paid, with no further analysis.
If you try to plug those loopholes you lose the "much easier to do because there is no disputing the assessment since the person implicitly agrees to the valuation" factor.
>treat the asset securing the loan as having the pre-gains price
That’s no different than if the asset had no unrealized gain at all.
>they’ll be more subtle
It only takes a small rise in interest rates before it’s cheaper to pay the tax—assuming the tax isn’t outrageous.
Unsecured are much riskier because of the way unsecured creditors are treated in bankruptcy, so they already have higher interest rates.
It would be very easy to tweak bankruptcy laws to make unsecured loans over a certain amount a bit riskier to increase the delta even more.
We also already have regulations governing how banks assess creditworthiness, and the percent of their capital they can lend unsecured based on risk. As well as the amount of unsecured loans they can make to signal individual. If necessary tweak those values.
Another easy way is to add a surcharge to large unsecured loans where the loan amount exceeds the taxpayer’s assets based on acquisition price by some large margin.
None of those impact implicitly agreeing to the valuation and they are all pretty easy to do.
> That’s no different than if the asset had no unrealized gain at all.
It lets you get loans based on 100% of your pre-gain money with zero taxes paid, which I think is too generous. You wouldn't do that if it was actually all your money. It mostly fits the idea of only taxing the "used" money, but not entirely, and I don't really favor that idea in the first place.
> It only takes a small rise in interest rates before it’s cheaper to pay the tax—assuming the tax isn’t outrageous.
15% tax is pretty big. And if we put capital gains back in line with income tax it would be double that.
> Unsecured are much riskier because of the way unsecured creditors are treated in bankruptcy, so they already have higher interest rates.
If the unsecured loans only go up to 90% of the post-gain asset value, that's not much riskier, is it?
> We also already have regulations governing how banks assess creditworthiness, and the percent of their capital they can lend unsecured based on risk. As well as the amount of unsecured loans they can make to signal individual. If necessary tweak those values.
Yeah okay we could stop unsecured loans from happening. That seems awkward though.
> Another easy way is to add a surcharge to large unsecured loans where the loan amount exceeds the taxpayer’s assets based on acquisition price by some large margin.
>It lets you get loans based on 100% of your pre-gain money with zero taxes paid.
You already paid taxes on the money you used to buy the asset. You aren’t using any part of the unrealized gain.
>You wouldn’t do that if it was actually all your money.
People take out loans secured by assets that haven’t appreciated all the time, they even put up assets that haven’t appreciated depreciated as collateral.
>only to yo to 90% of the post—gain asset value
Unsecured creditors come last in bankruptcy. They routinely end up taking pennies on the dollar. That’s the extra risk of making an unsecured loan vs a secured loan and the reason interest rates on unsecured loans are generally somewhere around 20% higher.
It would be very easy to some tweaks to bankruptcy law to increase the difference.
>stop unsecured loans from happening
We don’t have to stop them, but I think stopping unsecured loans over some large value would be a lot less problematic than taxing unrealized gains.
>15% tax is pretty big
It shouldn’t be the same rate as capital gains. You’re not getting the same value as if you’d sold the asset because you have to pay back the money with interest.
Even at 15% you only need to get the delta between a secured and unsecured loan to 3 points before the additional interest costs more than the tax.
But if those skyrocket in price from tax, they'll be more subtle about convincing banks they're good for the money and pay a slightly higher rate for unsecured loans.
Or maybe they'll just treat the asset securing the loan as having the pre-gains price. Get the bank to agree it's worth at least what you paid, with no further analysis.
If you try to plug those loopholes you lose the "much easier to do because there is no disputing the assessment since the person implicitly agrees to the valuation" factor.