Assuming billionaires were going to get a special tax, how would you actually determine how much to tax them? Sure some would be straightforward like Musk where it’s entirely derived from a few companies with known ownership stakes, but what about all the others?
We don’t even know the names of most of the billionaires. With all the games they can play to hide money, now made even easier thanks to the changes Trump made in his first few months, how would you even figure out who and what amount to tax? They don’t have a normal salary or easily documented income like everyone else.
I guess you tax assets more and salaries less - and work internationally to make tax avoidance harder and less profitable by taxing capital flows and by cracking down on tax havens.
Unless you can get a political consensus on it, I don’t think an inheritance tax will be very effective. Tax planners will find a way to transfer the wealth before it gets inherited, helped by certain kinds of politicians whenever they have power.
America used to tax billionaires already in the 40s. Nothing new to invent here.
Super simple. Inheritance tax is enormous. You have the right to pass on as many “upper middle class trust funds for life” as you would like, but no other wealth of any kind is inherited.
Two prongs. One, tax loans against stock options and publicly traded shares. Two tax foreign investment dividends that constitute more than 10% of the total value of a publicly traded company. Step one makes them live off of dividends and realized assets. They can’t live off other loans of other people’s money and just keep hording assets, two pins them down and keeps them from trying to take their money and run to a tax haven.
They will eventually find a way around those, and you will have to adjust the tax code to accomodate, but that’s going to be true regardless. It’s a bit like digital hygene and cyber security. An endless arms race between states trying to build more effective risk management tools and people trying to exploit and the system and thus the people living within the system.
I’d refine that slightly - tax loans on anything except those for a primary residence, and loans used to create businesses that employ less than 100 people, or any business in service of the loan recipient. I’m sure that could be refined quite a bit. The intent being that they can buy a primary residence like anyone else and not be taxed on it - restrictions would apply like they’d actually have to live there, not sell it for “x” years and not build another primary residence for “x” years or then be taxed on it. The businesses would have to be big enough to be useful, not a business of rich guy’s 2 buddies that would just use the “fake” business to throw venture capital back in the rich guy’s business, or the rich guy buy a yacht and the “business” be him paying his own crew through a shell company to drive him around in his own yacht.
The specifics are going to need refinement, yes. The broad principles should hold though. One tax that forces them to spend down accumulated wealth, one to punish trying to offshore profits to tax havens.
Tax them? Nationalize their assets
You have a special division of the IRS whose job is to identify the top few hundred wealthiest individuals and then tax them. These people wouldn’t have to self report like the rest of us.
Idk how it is in the US but in Canada, they already have all our numbers. Really wouldn’t be hard to enforce except many billionaires wealth doesn’t come from their income.
That’s the thing. If you pay people to figure it out, they will. It’s only through massive defunding that the IRS has become completely incompetent. They used to be quite good at their jobs.
I was going to write about how an existing tax agency (the California FTB) is already aggressive at tracking down high-earning residents that leave the state – whether in-fact or on-paper – in order to collect precisely what the state is owed per the tax code. That is, the FTB already engages and challenges the precise amounts that these former residents write on their final California tax returns, with some more spectacular results being some incredibly detailed timelines for when someone finally stops being a resident in California, as defined in state law.
But then I noticed that because of California’s proposed wealth tax (aka Billionaire Tax) on the November 2026 ballot, the SF Chronicle has already started a series of articles to answer the specific what-and-hows of the wealth tax. This is the first article, pertaining to enforcement, and it agrees that the FTB would be capable of pursuing any high-wealth individuals that the proposal would tax. https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/ca-billionaire-tax-mechanism-21330110.php
This proposed tax in California is written as a one-time tax, so the question of whether high-wealthy people could flee the state is nearly irrelevant, because either they’re subject to the tax or they’re beyond the reach of the US courts (eg Venus). Almost. The remaining questions are legal in nature, and don’t really change how the tax would be pursued. Whether FTB simply hires a dedicated team or outsources to private investigators, the task is still straightforward: follow the money.
Unlike civil lawsuit plaintiffs, who have more limited means of chasing down a defendant’s assets in order to get paid on a judgement, the California tax authorities enjoy the benefit of the subpoena power, that can be used to compel companies and banks to tell the tax authorities about where and how wealth is being held. It is, after all, a core power of a US state to administer a tax, especially when the tax is authorized directly from the sovereign power (ie the citizenry). Any other result would conflict with the very purpose of a republic: to unyieldingly serve the people.
With a gun to their head
100% inheritance tax on any value over 5 million, and slam shut any loopholes that get found.
Force them to either spend it stimulating the economy or give it up to society directly.
the only sure way is to abolish private property and give the businesses to the workers
It’s called an income bracket. We already have them in place.
One of the big arguments is to tax wealth, not just income.
So. If I make 50,000 dollars a year but only need 40,000 to live. And I save that 10,000 a year for 20 years. You want to tax me on that $200,000 I saved? Lol wtf
No, but if you own $4billion in stocks and you borrow against it to live off of then you’ve realized that value and you get taxed heavily on it.
The idea is to get them to stop doing the “unlimited money glitch” of doing this.
Most of the current plans for wealth taxes start in the region of $5-$50 million, taxing wealth above that bracket (like other progressive taxes). Do you expect to save $5 million, let alone $50 million?
Most of the seriously proposed tax rates are also in the 1-3% range, maybe 5% on the very high end. Again, of wealth above that threshold.
If you spend it eating out, drinking, getting your house renovated, flying somewhere - then you end up paying tax and spending money and there’s some trickle down. If it sits in a bank account or in stocks or real estate, less so.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how an individual’s wealth can be useful to society. Societies become prosperous when they do things that are good for people, and that is what the money is best spent on - making society better. Sure, if they go to the bar every night and spend $200k getting hammered, maybe we netted a little extra tax revenue. And the bar is certainly doing better. But it is far better for everyone if that money becomes the startup capital for, say, a new plumbing business or taco restaurant or law firm or real estate development. Put it into something that actually does something
And that’s essentially what buying stocks is. Putting your money in stocks is good for the economy.
Steve Jobs notoriously took an annual salary of $1 despite being worth billions. Many of them do the same thing to avoid taxation.
Flat tax on spending, flat tax on financial assets, flat tax on out of state transfers. Just no matter what anyone does with their money, it’s taxed.
It’s actually more complicated than you think. Here’s the starting point of the complexity. When do you tax someone’s investment earnings? When do you tax someone’s business? When do you tax someone’s income from abroad? If they live part of their life abroad, how much of their income does your country tax? … If you think the above have simple answers, then you don’t understand the actual situations that people are living.
It’s great to say that a flat tax is simple and it will work but in reality actually it’s not simple at all because there are always ways to gain the system and you have to find those and keep working on fixing them.
A flat tax is regressive and impacts the poor the hardest
you’re assuming nothing changes. I’m assuming we increase revenues by massive amounts and actually implement social welfare policy.
regressive af
