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.
The problem is that their wealth is in unrealized gains on speculative assets, but they take out loans using those assets as collateral.
That means we have to either treat assets used for collateral as realized gains, as income, or both. But, we need to make sure normal people don’t get caught up in it in a way the wealthy can’t exploit.
My thoughts are that we pick a number like you were talking about, but make it based on a variable like 100x the average take home pay of the bottom 20% of earners, which would be $1.6m. But, apply it to the total of all loans in a year period so they can’t just take out a bunch of small loans.