[godelski]

> Capital gains from real estate

What percent of Americans buy and sell a property within a year? I bet it is pretty low.

> stocks

All the major players report this information.

> ETFs, crypto

The vast majority of people use exchanges like Coinbase and Binance. These already report.

So I'm not sure what your point really is. That there are edge cases? No shit. No one is even arguing against that. The argument for return free filing is that the vast majority of people will benefit from the system. Even if there are mistakes it is easier to look over something and correct it than do everything from scratch. The people that won't majorly benefit from this likely already have more than enough wealth to pay someone to do their taxes already and honestly I'm not concerned about them.

Don't let perfection get in the way of massive improvement.

[emaginniss]

You pay capital gains on any property sale where you earn income unless you reinvest the money in another property or use the one-time exemption. I don't know why you think the sale being within a year or not makes any difference. The major players know when you sell the stock and for how much, but they don't know the cost basis. The sale could be LIFO or FIFO and you might have transferred the stock into the brokerage without them ever knowing the purchase price. These are not edge cases.

[godelski]

Sorry, I looked at a bad source. But looks like so did you. Here's Investopedia:

> You can sell your primary residence and be exempt from capital gains taxes on the first $250,000 if you are single and $500,000 if married filing jointly. (once every 2 years)

> You can add your cost basis and costs of any improvements that you made to the home to the $250,000 if single or $500,000 if married filing jointly.

So I'll change my question:

What percentage of home owners are profiting >$250k (single)/ >$500k (married)? What percent of them do that more frequently than a 2 year period?

I'm willing to bet that these numbers are still very low. That's the entire point. I'm sure there's nuance I've missed as I'm not an expert. But my entire point isn't about specifics, it is that your argument against this system is about edge cases. If you can prove that these aren't edge cases, I'll actually side with you. If not, I still see return free filing as an extremely beneficiary policy to the vast majority of Americans, and especially to those with the least income. I already know that 90% of households take the standard deduction, so you're going to have to make some substantial claims.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/capitalgainhomes...