Ben Shapiro falsely suggests a proposed tax for households with $100 million in net worth would apply to everyone

Shapiro: A tax on the ultrawealthy somehow “bankrupts half the companies in existence”

Written by Casey Wexler

Published

Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro pushed misinformation about the Harris campaign’s proposed tax on ultrawealthy Americans — people with a net worth of more than $100 million — because the tax includes unrealized capital gains, which the podcast host also falsely suggested would apply to a typical homeowner or entrepreneur.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign recently outlined some of her proposed financial policies, among them an endorsement of a wealth tax provision already included in the Biden-Harris administration’s proposed 2025 budget.

The Biden administration and the Harris campaign have proposed a 25% income tax on the wealthiest 0.01% of American households with over $100 million in assets including unrealized capital gains, or increases in value of a company, property, or other asset that has yet to be sold. The idea is that wealthy Americans, including some of the highest paid CEOs, sidestep taxes by keeping a lot of their wealth in untaxed stocks and other assets. This policy would tax those assets, closing that loophole.

This tax proposal would only affect a tiny fraction of the population (it would include Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump), but that didn’t stop The Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro from ranting against the policy, which he called “psychotic” and “insane.” Shapiro also claimed without evidence that the policy would sink entire companies, such as his own Daily Wire, by assessing a tax against their hypothetical valuations — the proposed tax policy would affect individuals, however, not corporations.

From the August 21, 2024, edition of Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show

BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Now here's the most psychotic thing that they want according to, again, the budget proposal put forward by Joe Biden and now endorsed by Kamala Harris. A 25% tax on unrealized capital gains. That's insane. Let me explain what that means, an unrealized gains corporate tax or capital gains tax. What that means is that if you have a house and your house has accrued in value since the time that you bought it. Let's say you bought it last year. It was 500 grand. Now it is 600 grand. The federal government wishes to tax you $25,000 for the increase in the value of your property even though you haven't sold it. That's what it means. If you're a business, you're a private business, and let's say that you're privately held, you've never gone to market, you've never sold your actual stake in the company. So let's say that you own a company and you started, say, 10 years ago, and now that company is worth a billion dollars, but it's never actually been sold for a billion dollars. It's quote-unquote worth a billion dollars.

Now let's be realistic about this. Daily Wire, we're a privately held company. That means that we have not gone to market. We're not publicly traded. Nothing like that. We can't even borrow against our stock because we're a privately held corporation, and the actual material assets of the company are not borrow — you can't borrow against those material assets of the company in the same way. There's nothing to actually seize, for example. There's nothing to foreclose upon because we don't actually own a giant physical property, for example. But let's say that we're a billion-dollar company for the sake of argument. We're more than that, but let's say we're a billion-dollar company for the sake of argument. If we're a billion-dollar company, that means the federal government would come in and levy a tax on us for not selling the company of $250 million. The annual gross revenue of our company last year was $220 million. That's crazy. It bankrupts half the companies in existence. It's insane. It's patently crazy.