Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic policy proposal to tax unrealized capital gains is not good despite being a campaign surrogate.
Khanna said, “Let me tell you why I don’t think a blanket tax in unrealized gain is a good thing. Let’s say you’re an entrepreneur, you create a company, it gets to $100 million or $200 million on paper. Now if you’re taxing that, you’re probably going to force that person to sell it. They’re probably going to sell it to private equity. Do you really want the entrepreneurs to be forced to sell their companies to larger institutions and to decline in value? I don’t think that’s what you want for a startup ecosystem.”
Host Joe Kernen said, “Jeff Bezos wouldn’t have to do that. They’re going after these very, I think the whole policy is demagoguing to go after these people that they say pay less of a tax rate than their maid does and have billions of dollars.”
Khanna said, “I get why. This is not the right way to do it, and also 90, 95% of investments in startups fail and so you’re going to disincentivize investments in those startups.”
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