Tax Fortunes, Not Just Paychecks
When the largest fortunes in history compound untouched while wages carry the tax code, a wealth tax isn't radical. It's overdue arithmetic.
The American tax system has a design flaw it no longer bothers to hide: it taxes work heavily and wealth barely. A nurse's overtime is taxed the year she earns it. A billionaire's fortune can compound for decades, borrowed against for living expenses, and pass to heirs with the gains never taxed at all. A direct tax on extreme wealth simply closes the loop the current code leaves open.
The objections arrive on schedule. Valuation is called impossible, though the same assets are valued daily for loans, estates, and divorces. Capital flight is predicted, though exit taxes exist precisely for that. The Constitution is invoked, though scholars have argued both directions for a century and the question ends where it should: in court, not in a veto by hypothesis. Hard is not the same as wrong, and every tax we now consider ordinary was once called unworkable.
What the revenue funds is the actual argument: childcare, care work, public health, the unglamorous infrastructure of ordinary life. The concentration of wealth is also a concentration of power, over media, elections, and increasingly the technologies remaking work itself. A democracy that cannot ask its largest fortunes to contribute proportionally has not chosen small government. It has chosen who governs.