Doing a bunch of Finance equations about a single investor and a single investment and a made up tax rate is not an Economic model, it's just Accounting. Throwing out the term Basic Economics like it proves anything at all relevant to this debate when you don't even know what Basic Economics is is problematic. They don't even start throwing Taxes in to economic models at any basic level of learning it, because it is entirely to do with assumptions, and introducing taxes requires the introduction of a whole bunch of other complicated shit. But like your example, and like your quotes from that article, you find it nice and easy to leave out the stuff that's hard or negates your point. Like the fact that most investment in anything innovative/risky is done by those with a wealth level under the mark where this tax will take affect. Or pretending that losses don't provide any taxable benefit to these people claimed against their income. And not realizing that in your example, the risk associated with that investment does not actually change regardless of what level of tax you introduce, especially relative to all other investments, which has to be considered to anyone who actually knows anything about Economics as a broadly generalized attempt to model "everything" not just one flip of a coin, which is way too specific to be called economics.