> fixing it without paying the cost at the same time may still be worse.
That's probably true if we're talking about a tax that's more than a rounding error on the total federal budget.
In an ideal world, you'd have a criteria for what makes a tax worth it.
For instance, some criteria might be:
1) Does the tax raise substantial money for the on-going operation of the government or to fund critical programs? (In this case, the answer would be "no" since $100M/yr is a fraction of a fraction of our federal budget.)
2) Does it incentivize a certain type of behavior that society has deemed "good" or penalize a behavior society has deemed "bad"? (In this case, penalizing people for working at a quickly growing but illiquid company doesn't seem like it benefits/hurts society one way or the other.)
3) Can the tax be paid without undue burden to the person paying? (In this case, the burden on gains that the employee doesn't actually have in their bank account could be $100,000+ on gains they don't have yet. I'd call that undue.)
I'm sure we could come up with more criteria too, but at face value, it doesn't seem like this tax has too many good legs to stand on.
> > fixing it without paying the cost at the same time may still be worse.
> That's probably true if we're talking about a tax that's more than a rounding error on the total federal budget.
Its true in any case; the fact that the total cost is very small compared to the budget means that, yes, the magnitude of any net harm from not paying for it is likely to be small (but, it also means that its also extremely easy to pay for.)
Disregard net costs because they are small means that large harms that you would block if they were proposed together become acceptable so long as they are broken up and spread out among separate bills.
That's probably true if we're talking about a tax that's more than a rounding error on the total federal budget.
In an ideal world, you'd have a criteria for what makes a tax worth it.
For instance, some criteria might be:
1) Does the tax raise substantial money for the on-going operation of the government or to fund critical programs? (In this case, the answer would be "no" since $100M/yr is a fraction of a fraction of our federal budget.)
2) Does it incentivize a certain type of behavior that society has deemed "good" or penalize a behavior society has deemed "bad"? (In this case, penalizing people for working at a quickly growing but illiquid company doesn't seem like it benefits/hurts society one way or the other.)
3) Can the tax be paid without undue burden to the person paying? (In this case, the burden on gains that the employee doesn't actually have in their bank account could be $100,000+ on gains they don't have yet. I'd call that undue.)
I'm sure we could come up with more criteria too, but at face value, it doesn't seem like this tax has too many good legs to stand on.