# Billionaire minimum tax

By [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com) · 2023-12-05

billionaire-minimum-tax, bloomberg, business-income-taxation, centi-millionaire, economics, finance, matt-levine, president-biden

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If you're looking for a rough overview of how US business income taxation works -- and who isn't really -- [this is an interesting article by Matt Levine](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-12-04/whose-income-do-you-pay-taxes-on). He has a knack for making this stuff a lot more interesting. The real purpose of the article, though, is as a lead up to talking about Biden's proposed "billionaire minimum tax". At the highest level, [here's the idea](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-04/biden-s-billionaire-tax-plan-at-risk-over-trump-era-supreme-court-case):

> _His most recent budget would require taxpayers worth more than $100 million to pay a minimum of 25% on their capital gains each year, whether they sold assets for a profit or continue to hold them._

The way things work today is that unrealized capital gains are not taxed. Meaning you can own something like a stock for a really long time and not pay any capital gains on it, until of course you sell or realize the gains. So this is a philosophical kind of change. And in Matt's words, it is both "jarring" and "possibly unconstitutional".

But I guess it doesn't affect _that_ many people. There are, [according to CNBC](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/10/number-of-people-with-100-million-has-doubled-since-2003.html#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20is%20still%20the,more%2C%20according%20to%20the%20report.&text=Countries%20with%20the%20most%20centi,China%3A%202%2C358), somewhere around 10,660 centi-millionaires in the US. I wonder why it's not called a centi-millionaire minimum tax, though. (I know why.)

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*Originally published on [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com/billionaire-minimum-tax)*