I have mostly skeptical about tax plans like this one that tax non-liquid assets. It seems odd to me to tax a person’s illiquid holdings in a company for example. Do we force people to sell pieces of their property to pay the taxes on that property? (In short, for many types of property, yes, but it still has always seemed strange to me)
That said, the more I read about the low or no interest loans against investments that seem to be the primary “income” of the mega-rich, it seems more and more that something needs to be done here.
Do we force people to sell pieces of their property to pay the taxes on that property?
You answered your own question, but to add more context the answer isn't "For many types of property" but for most people the answer is an emphatic yes. For the vast majority of people the only piece of property they own in this sense is their home, and if they cannot pay the property taxes on that, the state sells it on tax sale. So yes, absolutely, we already do this.
The fact that ownership of businesses is exempt from this is part of the inequitable structure of our laws that benefits the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Because the primary property of the wealthy is currently exempt from property taxes (we only tax the gains, not the assets themselves), but the primary property of the middle class is taxed.
I have an LLC. Taxing it (more) would be catastrophic. Why should we tax the assets and not the gains?
I actually don't like property tax on homes/land. I dont like the idea of the government forcing people out of their homes (usually the elderly). I prefer taxing based on income/gains because they actually have money coming in and largely removes the government seizure aspect.
It depends. In areas where home prices have risen or are relatively high, home improvement activities increase the home value and so that is generally reserved for sales preparation periods. Consumption is delayed until it is untaxed.
Otherwise, I am not sure how taxing land will increase consumption, unless you're saying people will make land productive in order to offset tax liability? In some cases maybe, but certainly not on low-density residential plots.
You're talking about Georgism and taxing unutilized assets. If you have trees on your land, those could be utilized for lumber and you would be taxed on them if if they were unutilized. The same for oil, minerals, even raw land with agricultural potential. The main premise of Georgism is tha the resources belong to everyone and that people should be charged rent for access/ownership of them, whether used or not. This provides incentive for the owner to consume the resource to pay the tax.
Just because something is already being done doesn't make it right. Kick someone out of their house which they bought with their hard earned work and money is immoral and abusive and abhorrent.
And means that even once one manages to buy a house, one is still just renting from the government, and property taxes can be quite high, equivalent to a mortgage in some cases (sleep tight knowing they'll only increase, to boot)
The fact that ownership of businesses is exempt from this is part of the inequitable structure of our laws that benefits the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
This will hurt the middle class who have 401ks or pensions. I get wanting to tax the rich, but this is absolutely going to hurt more than just the wealthy.
I think it will only hurt 401k's if they have over a billon in assets, or pull out $100M/annual. In which case... I think I'm still ok with it. I remember someone has a billon+ Roth IRA, and at some point that is just getting really lucky and then abusing the structure.
Income tax was originally only applied to the wealthy. Now look where we are. Even if they do pass the bill with those limits it is only a matter of time until they lower it more and more and it applies to everyone.
Well that's clearly not the intent of the bill and regardless:
The tax proposal would apply to just about 700 taxpayers,
Democrats say — people who earn more than $100 million per year or who have more than $1 billion in assets for three straight years.
If you have $1 billion in your 401k, you can probably afford the taxation.
Most of the gains on tradeable assets like stocks would be taxed at the existing capital gains rate, which is currently 20% for individuals earning over $445,850.
That quote is putting the 20% rate in context, it's not saying that anyone earning over $445,850 would pay it. The legislation still only applies to the ultra-rich, but they'd be using the existing capital gains rate, which is currently 20% for individuals earning over $445,850.
For the vast majority of people the only piece of property they own in this sense is their home
I agree with what you said, and just wanted to make a minor(ish) correction: if you exclude homes bought w/ a mortgage which is still ongoing, probably the "vast majority" part does not hold, anymore.
They're still considered to own their home, even when they have a mortgage on it. Though, I'm not sure how many people do own their home at all - so I probably should have said "For the vast majority of people who own any property at all in this sense, the only piece of property they own is their home". I think the majority probably own no property in the sense of assets.
One difference is that you benefit directly and personally from owning your home in that you live in it and don't pay rent. Owning equity in a business doesn't yield the same direct personal benefits.
Wouldn't that also force the less wealthy to sell their assets to pay the tax? They have less cushion and fewer assets, so they would be more likely to need to sell and reduce the compounding they could achieve, leading to less upward mobility.
There are approaches that can alleviate the impact on the less wealthy (think progressive taxation; taxing progressively only amounts above predefined limits, such that you don't end up getting less money in hand after a promotion etc).
But, I'd be curious to hear what do you (and people in general) consider wealthy-but-less-so, if that makes sense. Can we try to assign very rough dollar ranges on these categories?
I think that makes sense in an academic/theoretical setting. I think it would require a massive tax/policy overhaul to make it work in real life (which would be good but seems unlikely). We seem to tax just about every level of income, but then offer all sorts of credits, deductions, etc to promote some special interest. And the special interests (looking at your TurboTax) want to keep it complicated to make money off of it. Then we have all sorts of use based taxes like property, gas, sales, guns, alcohol, cigarettes, etc.
Probably the simplest way to assign ranges of income is to apply statistics to the unadjusted pretax income in the US. It would probably make sense to adjust it based on COL too. I'm not sure what numbers and adjustments the following distribution used. I did not expect to see 10% of households making over $200k. That seems insanely high to me, but maybe that's an effect of HCOL places like Silicon Valley and dual income families.
I wonder with crypto and the dysfunction of nation states growing if property tax or some sort of land value tax may be the only collectible one in the future?
If it collapses that far, then I think there's a chance that we could see the old Depression farm sale paradigm where the community would gather at the auction to make sure the only bidder would be the evicted owner so they could buy it back for a penny. Or we could see complete overthrow of the system.
No. Some limitations might be inherent (disabilities), some might be personal choices (spend rather than save, gamble). It also depends on inflation and what sort of returns one gets. It offers a chance at mobility, but no guarantees. There's almost no mobility in today's world without some sort asset appreciation.
At the moment, wealth in most western countries is concentrating upwards:
1) employees, especially low-wage employees such as Amazon delivery and warehouse workers, Walmart employees or "gig workers" get exploited (e.g. Walmart is infamous for workers being paid such pittances that they require food stamps to survive)
2) customers are exploited by having to bear the cost of bad products (e.g. getting hacked because Microsoft can't be bothered to do proper QA)
In the meanwhile of that, the companies rake in billions - and many of them are owned to a large part by extremely rich individuals and thus gain (depending on corporate structure) wealth by dividend payments or stock price growth: Jeff Bezos, the Walton family, Elon Musk, Bill Gates to name a few.
The average employee in contrast doesn't see anything from that paper wealth gain: the poorest class doesn't even have enough money to put in a 401k or other investment vehicles, 70% of all stock investments is held by the 10% top earner class (per https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2020/08/31/mo...), and wage increases have been scarce prior to the current COVID-resulting crunch.
An implicitly forced break-up would at least redistribute the wealth gain to a broader class of people, and if it were done by levying taxes against the super-rich, the government would actually have money to provide services to its citizens: a decently trained, competent police force, health care access, housing cost assistance, public transport, to name those where the last two years showed the worst issues.
Let's face the truth: Elon Musk alone is worth 288 billion $. Taxing off half of that would still leave him with more money than he can reasonably spend in ten life times and provide money desperately needed to fix a lot of issues. The usual counter-point is that this eliminates the control the owners hold over their company and with it, the driver for success goes away - however that can easily be bypassed by converting the sold-off shares to simple capital-interest-only shares without voting power.
That said, the more I read about the low or no interest loans against investments that seem to be the primary “income” of the mega-rich, it seems more and more that something needs to be done here.
The problem isn't that people don't pay taxes on unrealized gains, the problem is that people pay low taxes on realized gains, and usually no taxes on the very large gifts and estates. A tax on unrealized gains of billionaires raises a little bit of money without dealing with the giant structural unfairness in the tax system—which, really, is why it might be politically viable.
Actual tax fairness would be simple and not require a tax on anyone's unrealized gains: special taxes (with low rates and broad exemptions) on long-term capital gains and estates and the givers of gifts would be eliminate, and all of those things would be regular income to the recipient. Windfall gains and gains requiring long-term effort/ownership would be addresaed by allowing everyone the option of advance tax recognition of future income and deferring windfall gains over a period of years, both tools to smooth income.
I’m not sure this solves the current problem of the wealthy living off loans against unrealized capital investments. One of the issues that this plan is trying to address is that these gains are forever unrealized, but the person still has access to billions of dollars as a result…
One of the issues that this plan is trying to address is that these gains are forever unrealized
To the extent that is a real issue, it's not even approximately just for billionaires; again, the point of this bill isn't to deal with structural problems rewarding the rich at the expense of the working class, its to raise a little money making a symbolic gesture at a handful of people while preserving the features benefitting the wealthy at the expense of the working class. The action does not match the problem is that it supposedly addresses.
If you wanted to fix that problem in the system I describe upthread (and you’d do basically the same in the status quo system, leaving the broader problems the system upthread fixes in place), you’d tax non-cash assets as income at market value less purchase price at the death against the estate after subtracting any unused advance-recognized income (and likewise adding in any leftover deferred income.) Nothing is then “unrealized forever” for tax purposes. Not for billionaires. Not for hundred-millionaires. Not for anyone.
I agree and it is the wrong approach. Rich people can always find ways to hide their money because they can afford to pay people to help them because of the sheer scale.
I'd rather see us get rid of the like kind exchange and also modify how we handle capital gains. Get rid of the long term rate. How about any time you make money, you have to pay tax on it. It seems more reasonable and simple. Additionally, we should start adding VAT on certain kids of revenue, especially digital advertising. It is far too profitable to propagate hate today. I'd also like to see additional taxes on real estate with an exception for everyone's personal residence. We need to make it too expensive to just sit on an asset everyone needs. I know some places like Vancouver have started programs like this but we need it more broadly. Personally, I'd also like to see an additional tax on buybacks. Companies should have to pay the corporate tax rate plus and additional rate to buyback their own stock.
Do we force people to sell pieces of their property to pay the taxes on that property? (In short, for many types of property, yes, but it still has always seemed strange to me)
Not that strange, really. If your income tax at the end of the year leaves you in the red, you might sell some of your property to balance your accounts.
Just like how plenty a corporation, or rental property, has been sold because it was too expensive to hold profitably. In the case of land in particular, people who make poor use of it and fail to extract a profit probably should be forced to sell it. That's the market correcting their inefficient use.
Seems reasonable in a business context but normal folks should have a more generous carve out for a single home, single property, etc. assuming utilized for personal use
Another issue on my mind is that non-liquid assets are really hard to assess the value.
Let’s say I had a complete set of Picasso’s paintings for a year. Every painting he did that year, I have.
Who is qualified to say how much each painting individually is worth (other than an auction), and who can say what the total set value is in comparison to the individual value?
Of course this proposal isn’t quite the Wealth Tax that Warren originally wanted but I could see even this tax not being enough in the future.
Perhaps when getting a loan against collateral, they could tax the value of the collateral. Make it so the loaner cannot receive more than they declare the collateral worth ( which should prevent overly low valuations by making them a risk to the loaner ), and require the loanee to pay taxes against the 'loan-value' of the collateralized resource.
Treating the lien itself as something created by the loanee and sold to the loaner, I suppose.
For illiquid holdings, the plan only taxes them at time of sell (which, by definition is when they are liquid). The only thing that is taxed continually are things like stocks, that are pretty liquid (though can be put into structures that make it illiquid, which may be a tax avoidance strategy?)
Right, so this doesn’t hit real estate or private companies (yet), but it would hit many very wealthy people who have large holdings in publicly traded companies (often ones they founded).
Looking at you Bezos…
And it’s true stocks are quite liquid, but if the person never sells to realize gains, they will never be taxed…
This is effectively a wealth tax and making people sell assets is indeed one of the consequences of such taxes where they exist.
These tend to be political and symbolic measures as in general they are neither really fair nor beneficial (in Europe the main result in countries like France has been to make people move to Switzerland, Belgium, London, etc).
Edit: A fair way to tax is to tax all incomes equally and not to offer any loopholes. But politically an issue (or not) is that people will still be able to claim that e.g. Bezos only pays x in tax although he is worth zillions, which plays on people not understanding that they are comparing apples and oranges...
Just to be clear, this would be a tax on "people who earn more than $100 million per year or who have more than $1 billion in assets for three straight years."
If you qualify and feel it's unjust, you could simply go and buy your own country.
Comments
I have mostly skeptical about tax plans like this one that tax non-liquid assets. It seems odd to me to tax a person’s illiquid holdings in a company for example. Do we force people to sell pieces of their property to pay the taxes on that property? (In short, for many types of property, yes, but it still has always seemed strange to me)
That said, the more I read about the low or no interest loans against investments that seem to be the primary “income” of the mega-rich, it seems more and more that something needs to be done here.
Or am I wrong? Thoughts?
You answered your own question, but to add more context the answer isn't "For many types of property" but for most people the answer is an emphatic yes. For the vast majority of people the only piece of property they own in this sense is their home, and if they cannot pay the property taxes on that, the state sells it on tax sale. So yes, absolutely, we already do this.
The fact that ownership of businesses is exempt from this is part of the inequitable structure of our laws that benefits the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Because the primary property of the wealthy is currently exempt from property taxes (we only tax the gains, not the assets themselves), but the primary property of the middle class is taxed.
I have an LLC. Taxing it (more) would be catastrophic. Why should we tax the assets and not the gains?
I actually don't like property tax on homes/land. I dont like the idea of the government forcing people out of their homes (usually the elderly). I prefer taxing based on income/gains because they actually have money coming in and largely removes the government seizure aspect.
Taxing unutilized assets is the key idea of Georgism. We don't do that in the US, rather we give tax incentives to farmers to underutilize their land.
But taxing resources, whether utilized or not, will increase consumption, right? That doesn't seem like a sustainable option.
It depends. In areas where home prices have risen or are relatively high, home improvement activities increase the home value and so that is generally reserved for sales preparation periods. Consumption is delayed until it is untaxed.
Otherwise, I am not sure how taxing land will increase consumption, unless you're saying people will make land productive in order to offset tax liability? In some cases maybe, but certainly not on low-density residential plots.
You're talking about Georgism and taxing unutilized assets. If you have trees on your land, those could be utilized for lumber and you would be taxed on them if if they were unutilized. The same for oil, minerals, even raw land with agricultural potential. The main premise of Georgism is tha the resources belong to everyone and that people should be charged rent for access/ownership of them, whether used or not. This provides incentive for the owner to consume the resource to pay the tax.
Just because something is already being done doesn't make it right. Kick someone out of their house which they bought with their hard earned work and money is immoral and abusive and abhorrent.
And means that even once one manages to buy a house, one is still just renting from the government, and property taxes can be quite high, equivalent to a mortgage in some cases (sleep tight knowing they'll only increase, to boot)
This will hurt the middle class who have 401ks or pensions. I get wanting to tax the rich, but this is absolutely going to hurt more than just the wealthy.
I think it will only hurt 401k's if they have over a billon in assets, or pull out $100M/annual. In which case... I think I'm still ok with it. I remember someone has a billon+ Roth IRA, and at some point that is just getting really lucky and then abusing the structure.
Income tax was originally only applied to the wealthy. Now look where we are. Even if they do pass the bill with those limits it is only a matter of time until they lower it more and more and it applies to everyone.
Yep, it's a strategy to divide opposition and get people used to the idea of it
401k already have a slew of different rules and exemptions and it would make sense to continue to exempt them from regular taxes.
Seeing how they are talking about unrealized gains, I wouldn't count on an exemption.
Well that's clearly not the intent of the bill and regardless:
If you have $1 billion in your 401k, you can probably afford the taxation.
Looks like you missed part of the article
That quote is putting the 20% rate in context, it's not saying that anyone earning over $445,850 would pay it. The legislation still only applies to the ultra-rich, but they'd be using the existing capital gains rate, which is currently 20% for individuals earning over $445,850.
I agree with what you said, and just wanted to make a minor(ish) correction: if you exclude homes bought w/ a mortgage which is still ongoing, probably the "vast majority" part does not hold, anymore.
They're still considered to own their home, even when they have a mortgage on it. Though, I'm not sure how many people do own their home at all - so I probably should have said "For the vast majority of people who own any property at all in this sense, the only piece of property they own is their home". I think the majority probably own no property in the sense of assets.
One difference is that you benefit directly and personally from owning your home in that you live in it and don't pay rent. Owning equity in a business doesn't yield the same direct personal benefits.
I don't see the problem here. Slowly breaking up ownership like that would be a net good to society.
Why would it be a net good? (Just curious about your thoughts)
(not GP) Better distribution of wealth comes to mind.
Wouldn't that also force the less wealthy to sell their assets to pay the tax? They have less cushion and fewer assets, so they would be more likely to need to sell and reduce the compounding they could achieve, leading to less upward mobility.
There are approaches that can alleviate the impact on the less wealthy (think progressive taxation; taxing progressively only amounts above predefined limits, such that you don't end up getting less money in hand after a promotion etc).
But, I'd be curious to hear what do you (and people in general) consider wealthy-but-less-so, if that makes sense. Can we try to assign very rough dollar ranges on these categories?
I think that makes sense in an academic/theoretical setting. I think it would require a massive tax/policy overhaul to make it work in real life (which would be good but seems unlikely). We seem to tax just about every level of income, but then offer all sorts of credits, deductions, etc to promote some special interest. And the special interests (looking at your TurboTax) want to keep it complicated to make money off of it. Then we have all sorts of use based taxes like property, gas, sales, guns, alcohol, cigarettes, etc.
Probably the simplest way to assign ranges of income is to apply statistics to the unadjusted pretax income in the US. It would probably make sense to adjust it based on COL too. I'm not sure what numbers and adjustments the following distribution used. I did not expect to see 10% of households making over $200k. That seems insanely high to me, but maybe that's an effect of HCOL places like Silicon Valley and dual income families.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distri...
I wonder with crypto and the dysfunction of nation states growing if property tax or some sort of land value tax may be the only collectible one in the future?
If it collapses that far, then I think there's a chance that we could see the old Depression farm sale paradigm where the community would gather at the auction to make sure the only bidder would be the evicted owner so they could buy it back for a penny. Or we could see complete overthrow of the system.
This still happens now. So I'm quite sure we'd see it happen.
Is it possible for everyone in a society to achieve upward mobility through compounding?
No. Some limitations might be inherent (disabilities), some might be personal choices (spend rather than save, gamble). It also depends on inflation and what sort of returns one gets. It offers a chance at mobility, but no guarantees. There's almost no mobility in today's world without some sort asset appreciation.
At the moment, wealth in most western countries is concentrating upwards:
1) employees, especially low-wage employees such as Amazon delivery and warehouse workers, Walmart employees or "gig workers" get exploited (e.g. Walmart is infamous for workers being paid such pittances that they require food stamps to survive)
2) customers are exploited by having to bear the cost of bad products (e.g. getting hacked because Microsoft can't be bothered to do proper QA)
In the meanwhile of that, the companies rake in billions - and many of them are owned to a large part by extremely rich individuals and thus gain (depending on corporate structure) wealth by dividend payments or stock price growth: Jeff Bezos, the Walton family, Elon Musk, Bill Gates to name a few.
The average employee in contrast doesn't see anything from that paper wealth gain: the poorest class doesn't even have enough money to put in a 401k or other investment vehicles, 70% of all stock investments is held by the 10% top earner class (per https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2020/08/31/mo...), and wage increases have been scarce prior to the current COVID-resulting crunch.
An implicitly forced break-up would at least redistribute the wealth gain to a broader class of people, and if it were done by levying taxes against the super-rich, the government would actually have money to provide services to its citizens: a decently trained, competent police force, health care access, housing cost assistance, public transport, to name those where the last two years showed the worst issues.
Let's face the truth: Elon Musk alone is worth 288 billion $. Taxing off half of that would still leave him with more money than he can reasonably spend in ten life times and provide money desperately needed to fix a lot of issues. The usual counter-point is that this eliminates the control the owners hold over their company and with it, the driver for success goes away - however that can easily be bypassed by converting the sold-off shares to simple capital-interest-only shares without voting power.
The problem isn't that people don't pay taxes on unrealized gains, the problem is that people pay low taxes on realized gains, and usually no taxes on the very large gifts and estates. A tax on unrealized gains of billionaires raises a little bit of money without dealing with the giant structural unfairness in the tax system—which, really, is why it might be politically viable.
Actual tax fairness would be simple and not require a tax on anyone's unrealized gains: special taxes (with low rates and broad exemptions) on long-term capital gains and estates and the givers of gifts would be eliminate, and all of those things would be regular income to the recipient. Windfall gains and gains requiring long-term effort/ownership would be addresaed by allowing everyone the option of advance tax recognition of future income and deferring windfall gains over a period of years, both tools to smooth income.
I’m not sure this solves the current problem of the wealthy living off loans against unrealized capital investments. One of the issues that this plan is trying to address is that these gains are forever unrealized, but the person still has access to billions of dollars as a result…
Or have I misunderstood your point?
To the extent that is a real issue, it's not even approximately just for billionaires; again, the point of this bill isn't to deal with structural problems rewarding the rich at the expense of the working class, its to raise a little money making a symbolic gesture at a handful of people while preserving the features benefitting the wealthy at the expense of the working class. The action does not match the problem is that it supposedly addresses.
If you wanted to fix that problem in the system I describe upthread (and you’d do basically the same in the status quo system, leaving the broader problems the system upthread fixes in place), you’d tax non-cash assets as income at market value less purchase price at the death against the estate after subtracting any unused advance-recognized income (and likewise adding in any leftover deferred income.) Nothing is then “unrealized forever” for tax purposes. Not for billionaires. Not for hundred-millionaires. Not for anyone.
I agree and it is the wrong approach. Rich people can always find ways to hide their money because they can afford to pay people to help them because of the sheer scale.
I'd rather see us get rid of the like kind exchange and also modify how we handle capital gains. Get rid of the long term rate. How about any time you make money, you have to pay tax on it. It seems more reasonable and simple. Additionally, we should start adding VAT on certain kids of revenue, especially digital advertising. It is far too profitable to propagate hate today. I'd also like to see additional taxes on real estate with an exception for everyone's personal residence. We need to make it too expensive to just sit on an asset everyone needs. I know some places like Vancouver have started programs like this but we need it more broadly. Personally, I'd also like to see an additional tax on buybacks. Companies should have to pay the corporate tax rate plus and additional rate to buyback their own stock.
Not that strange, really. If your income tax at the end of the year leaves you in the red, you might sell some of your property to balance your accounts.
Just like how plenty a corporation, or rental property, has been sold because it was too expensive to hold profitably. In the case of land in particular, people who make poor use of it and fail to extract a profit probably should be forced to sell it. That's the market correcting their inefficient use.
Seems reasonable in a business context but normal folks should have a more generous carve out for a single home, single property, etc. assuming utilized for personal use
Another issue on my mind is that non-liquid assets are really hard to assess the value.
Let’s say I had a complete set of Picasso’s paintings for a year. Every painting he did that year, I have.
Who is qualified to say how much each painting individually is worth (other than an auction), and who can say what the total set value is in comparison to the individual value?
Of course this proposal isn’t quite the Wealth Tax that Warren originally wanted but I could see even this tax not being enough in the future.
Perhaps when getting a loan against collateral, they could tax the value of the collateral. Make it so the loaner cannot receive more than they declare the collateral worth ( which should prevent overly low valuations by making them a risk to the loaner ), and require the loanee to pay taxes against the 'loan-value' of the collateralized resource.
Treating the lien itself as something created by the loanee and sold to the loaner, I suppose.
Seems like that would fall under the non-tradeable asset part, which is paid upon sale rather than mark-to-market.
In theory it could work the same way as land/building assessment for certain assets.
Physical goods can be taxed on sale though, that's easy.
If the assets in question are equities listed on a public market it's actually quite easy for the government to assess the value.
For illiquid holdings, the plan only taxes them at time of sell (which, by definition is when they are liquid). The only thing that is taxed continually are things like stocks, that are pretty liquid (though can be put into structures that make it illiquid, which may be a tax avoidance strategy?)
Right, so this doesn’t hit real estate or private companies (yet), but it would hit many very wealthy people who have large holdings in publicly traded companies (often ones they founded).
Looking at you Bezos…
And it’s true stocks are quite liquid, but if the person never sells to realize gains, they will never be taxed…
This is effectively a wealth tax and making people sell assets is indeed one of the consequences of such taxes where they exist.
These tend to be political and symbolic measures as in general they are neither really fair nor beneficial (in Europe the main result in countries like France has been to make people move to Switzerland, Belgium, London, etc).
Edit: A fair way to tax is to tax all incomes equally and not to offer any loopholes. But politically an issue (or not) is that people will still be able to claim that e.g. Bezos only pays x in tax although he is worth zillions, which plays on people not understanding that they are comparing apples and oranges...
The federal government is literally chasing us out of our own country.
Just to be clear, this would be a tax on "people who earn more than $100 million per year or who have more than $1 billion in assets for three straight years."
If you qualify and feel it's unjust, you could simply go and buy your own country.