by Steven Levy at WIRED
What potential national disaster—one that threatens to destroy the United States—keeps you awake at night? For some it might be the climate crisis, as record heat and storms show us that the clock is approaching midnight on saving the Earth. Others are distressed by the precarious state of our democracy. Still other citizens are haunted by issues of crime, immigration, race relations, or income inequality.
But if you are billionaire venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, apocalypse looms in another form: a proposed tax on unrealized capital gains that affects households worth more than $100 million.
I’ll explain in a second why the cofounders of Silicon Valley’s preeminent VC firm insist that their opposition to this idea isn’t totally self-interested, and why their analysis on how it would destroy the country is alarmist twaddle. But it’s significant that in the tone-deaf 90-minute podcast they released this week, they cite this part of Joe Biden’s budget proposal as the “final straw” that led them to support Donald Trump for president. Far from a clinical analysis of the issues that separate the two leading candidates for America’s top job, their take on Biden’s policies actually provides a useful window to explain why certain wealthy Silicon Valley luminaries previously known as Democrats are suddenly leaning Trump. (That list also includes Chamath Palihapitiya, a 2020 Biden donor who recently cohosted a huge fundraiser for the former president.)
According to Andreessen and Horowitz,…
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