[AnimalMuppet]

What this does to John Smith, Dirt Farmer, is that his land went up $500/acre, and he's got 1000 acres, and now he's got an "income" of $500,000 this year, which he can't actually get until he sells the land, which he doesn't want to do until he retires. So the options are:

- He sells some of the land to pay the taxes.

- He takes out a loan to pay the taxes.

- We make a special carve-out for people in that situation so that the tax doesn't apply to them.

The third solution seems kind of fake to me. "We don't like the results of this set of rules, so we're going to make exceptions for all the results that we don't like." Maybe it's telling us that the rules aren't all that great?

> money now is worth more than money later. Letting people defer paying taxes on unrealized capital gains is VERY generous tax treatment.

They don't have the money yet. Charging them tax on money they haven't even received yet seems like very ungenerous tax treatment - abusive, even. It only makes sense if you have already defined unrealized capital gains to be income - but that's begging the question.

[nautilius]

> - We make a special carve-out for people in that situation so that the tax doesn't apply to them.

Tax law does that all the time. Maybe you've heard of tax brackets. It's so that people who earn less pay a smaller tax rate. I don't see the trouble with that. It's applied in the other direction as well, e.g. with a maximum dollar value with medicare.

[JumpCrisscross]

Zero chance a wealth tax goes into effect in America without excluding farmland. That or the Electoral College does.

[nautilius]

Oh, I'm not talking legislative probability. I was responding to the comment that it's somehow an unfathomable thought to have different 'carve outs' for different people in tax law (or anywhere, really) when that is standard practice in reality already.