Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
The Netherlands Nukes Its Economy! The Truth Behind the 36% Unrealized Gains Tax, NYC Tax Hike Madness: Why Mamdani's “Freeze the Rent” Backfired on Day One, World War III? U.S. vs Iran, Russia & China – What You’re Not Being Told | Weekly Recap
22 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Sad day in the Netherlands. The Dutch government is expected to pass a bill introducing a 36% tax on unrealized capital gains.
The Netherlands have basically decided to lay bare their own economic ignorance and nuke their economy in a single move by taxing unrealized gains This was a big blow up that people had with my take on Kamala Harris. And I'm telling you, it is as big as I have made this out to be. And this is the Netherlands attempt at reforming what they call box three. It's their wealth tax system.
Different people fall into different types of boxes. But the proposed system introduces a capital growth tax where not only regular income like interest or dividends, rent, things like that are taxed annually, but also realized and unrealized changes in asset value or tax. So the proposed rate is a flat 36% on all taxable income within box 3.
The bill was submitted in May of 25 and it's targeted to take effect on January 1st of 28. Just map out what this will do. The problem is the people proposing this either don't understand the logistics or they understand the logistics and literally want to destroy their own economy. Unrealized gains is just another word for potential gains, maybe gains, but not actual gains.
If you've got gains that are taxable by this law, to have enough money to pay that actual tax, you would have to sell the thing, typically a company or something like that, in order to pay the tax. Now there are important specifics to the proposal. I'll go through them because I want people to understand. I'm not saying what I'm saying because I'm confused.
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Chapter 2: What is the controversial 36% tax on unrealized gains in the Netherlands?
Like we stop people from hiding or doing tax evasion, whatever. This is how you begin to erode your economy because people aren't going to make long-term plans. Why would you ever invest in more than 5% of a company when you know that you could find yourself in this position? When Kamala Harris made that proposal here, I had the exact same reaction.
Let's say January 1st, 2028, you have 50 euros. The value as of January 1st, 2029 is 100,000 euros. Also on paper, your gain is 50,000. That's an unrealized gain. You didn't sell anything. It's been in the equity market the exact same time. You didn't do anything. It just went from 50 to 100. Boom, you quote unquote made 50,000 in unrealized gains.
Now you're married, you get the exception, 3,600. We do all the math. You have 4,600, 46,400 as your taxable amount. That's the exception minus your unrealized gains. Now, based on this tax bill, 36%, you would owe $16,000 in your tax bill from this unrealized gains. But now let's say the bill is due in May and the market falls. Now your new value is 60K.
So your portfolio is no longer worth that 100K, just like Bitcoin is going down as we've seen it. It went from 125 to 60,000, that's a 50% reduction. You were at 50, you went to 100, now you're back at 60. Your tax bill is still 16,000. So you would have to sell 16,000 in shares in order to pay your tax bill, and you would end up with 43,296.
So instead of appreciating, you are now going negative because you had to pay a tax bill on a gain that you never actually realized. So this is why unrealized gains it weird. What I propose is what everybody is saying is that, well, OK, let's look at Elon. He's worth a billion dollars on unrealized gains and he just takes loans from that and he doesn't get paid and he doesn't pay taxes.
So why don't we tax the loans against stocks or let's tax the money that actually hits his account? But taxing the phantom money in the market is where you're going to end up penalizing average investors as opposed to getting the big guys that you guys think this tax will do.
You would have to put very thoughtful restrictions around that. Otherwise, you get essentially double interest payments on that or double tax, however you want to look at it. But yes, it's going to completely change people's behavior and not in a way that grows companies, in a way that slows companies or stops the incentive to start a company in the first place.
Remember, most companies, most big companies, I should say, Most companies that get big, they don't start off bootstrapped. They start off raising capital. And if you're raising capital, this is going to completely change that. And so the current world that you're living in is brought to you by the ability to aggregate capital.
All the big, beautiful buildings that you see, all the safety that you enjoy, all of that is a result of the ability to aggregate capital. Now, if you really want to pressure people to do the right thing, you would press them on making money sound so that you can't print money and steal it from the poor and working class. So you could stop the K-shaped economy.
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Chapter 3: How could taxing unrealized gains impact investors and the economy?
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Mamdani had a rude awakening over in NYC. Okay, on this one, I'm really trying to just keep my sobriety because boy, do we walk up close to a litany of I told you so's here. But it took Zoran Mamdani exactly 47 days to propose a tax increase on the very people he promised to protect. 47 days from freeze the rent as a chant to a 9.5% property tax hike on 3 million homes.
Now to understand just how absurd this is, you've got to understand the specifics. New York City's budget in the year 2000, okay, so just 26 years ago, in the year 2000, New York City's budget was $36.5 billion, okay? It's a lot of money, but Understandable. That covered all 8 million people living in the city at the time. That's roughly $4,500 per person.
Yesterday, Mamdani unveiled a $127 billion preliminary budget for all of the people that now live in New York. And how many extra people have they added in the last 26 years? Did it go up by the same roughly 3.5x that the budget went up by? No, there are currently roughly 8.5 million people living in New York.
That's an increase of roughly half a million people, which is a population growth of only about 6.5%. The budget, however, grew by a staggering 248%. That is a ludicrous $14,941 per person. Spending per person didn't keep pace with inflation. It tripled. So everything must be three times better, right? In 2017, 51% of New Yorkers rated their quality of life as excellent or good. Today,
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