You know what else was a "great idea" that was supposed to be only for the wealthy class? The income tax [1]. 100 years later and all of a sudden everyone is paying it.
Maybe if you stopped with the sarcasm and thought about this critically you'd see that the solution isn't taxing everyone to death, but reducing the out-of-control government spending. Because at the rate the government is spending money, you will be paying this "capital gains" tax in 2 decades on a much smaller balance.
A new type of tax on the absolute wealthiest of the wealthy is not "taxing everyone to death." I'm sure there are some great ways we can reduce/improve government spending, but that is completely separate from the idea that the mega-rich should be paying more.
His point was that a tax on unrealized gains can one day be applied to less wealthy people.
I can explain it to you with a simple example:
Imagine, for instance, you're making 50k a year and have a brokerage account that has appreciated by 100k and that you're being taxed 20% on unrealized gains in year x. In year x+1, say your account falls back to where it was before. You paid 20k plus another 10k, and you will need to set aside another 10k. In essence, your income has been reduced to 10k, which could make daily life impossible for many people making 50k annually, especially those with families.
My point was that just because we impose a new tax on unfathomably wealthy people, it doesn't mean that we are inherently going to impose that tax on normal people. We can't be so scared of our own shadow that we are paralyzed into inaction. So scared of new taxes imposed on ourselves that we don't try to tax the uber wealthy. At the end of the day this is a democracy (obv with flaws, but still a democracy.) If politicians start taxing your 100k investment fund the way they are taxing a 100M investment fund, vote them out.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/the-income...