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[Igel]

37. Yeah.

Worth $200B at current valuations, but pay zero in income tax.

There's the rub.

My mother and father bought a house in 1996. A decade later it was worth a good $140k more. Then 2009. It reset to its 1996 value.

My mother wanted to know who stole her money. She had $300k in 2007, in late 2009 she had $160k. Somebody robbed her, clearly, and she called the police. They laughed. She called me. I tried to explain. Repeatedly. Over weeks.

In 2010 I realized the problem. My father killed himself in March of that year. I went as executor and my mother was a bit off. Calming her down when she came at me with a knife was the give-away. Checked medicine bottles, called doctor, said what happened, told the nice nurse that she came at me with a knife because I was evil and wanted to steal her house now that the bad man that was dead in the garage was dead (her husband of 50+ years), that she commuted from Arizona to Maryland every day for decades back in the '50s and '60s for her 8-hour shifts and that people were living in the AC vents, was 75 but born in and always had lived in the house built in 1996 and the nice doctor I was transferred to told me she had moderate-several fronto-temporal dementia and was delusional. And the doctor was very, very worried now that she was living alone, delusional.

So of course she didn't understand that an increase in valuation =/= taxable income.

Now, had my parents paid taxes on the $160 "earned income" from their house's appreciation, who'd have reimbursed them when the housing prices fell? The state and federal governments? Hell, my parents paid taxes on the "appraised value" for a few years when, you know, the state overbilled them on taxes because, in the end, the house wasn't worth $300k. That was a state-codified injustice.

Let's compound it by making it a federal injustice.

Federal and state law ignored the assets my mother and father had, as working class Boomers with a retirement fund, because they weren't taxed on "income" from unsold appeciated assets. A good thing. My mother and father both lost more than the average median income in 2009 from stock/bond problems. They never enjoyed the income until they sold the assets (upon which they were taxed). Nobody wants to argue that had they been taxed on appreciated value they should have been refunded that they should be reimbursed by state/fed government. (And, again, my mother was irate that somebody stole her money when her whatever-fund lost value--AIG went bust? Somebody stole the money. But, I explained, not AIG. AIG didn't sell her the stock, somebody else did--that person got her money, then it increased in value, then went bust. She earned no money from the increase, lost no money from the decrease. Just paper assets. Non-taxable, and justly, rightly, properly, so. Tax it? You're in junust, wrong, improper territory. Until it's money, it's not legal tender.)