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.