A Boring Dystopia

A wealth tax wouldn't apply to normal people below an obscene threshold. And you wouldn't tax a primary residence at all, as is already the case with our tax code on near every score. You wouldn't tax a baseball card collection.

But if a person put a bunch of paypal stock into an IRA account, and it turned into 5 billion dollars later, you would find a way to tax most all of that. If bezos' worth increased by billions, then a portion above an obscene level would be taxed, often exempting the first so much then graduating higher levels, as is customary in taxation here.

You are excusing the super rich from taxes by associating it with hypothetical unfair taxations against normal people for smaller amounts. Which is the same way they got rid of the estate tax, by lying about who paid the estate tax, claiming family farms and small business paid it, when it was only obscenely rich people that paid it.

Now, no one pays it. An heiress just inherited 200 million on her 19th birthday or something, not the entire estate just a piece of it, without paying a dime in tax, thanks to the dishonest arguments mirroring the ones you made on this in the first half of your piece at least.

Bezos paid 600 dollars in 2020, a year his net worth skyrocketed, and where he spent an incredible amount of money he got without getting a paycheck. He paid less in taxes than we do, not just per capita, total. He claimed the child tax credit. When your net worth increases by millions above millions, it needs to be taxed, whether it's when they borrow against the value of that which is where they now realize much of their income that is tax free now, or whether it's regardless of it being realized.

If the value they were taxed on an increased price of an asset fell later, they would be able to subtract that back 3 years and forward ten years to offset other taxable income, that's the way it's already set up, itself quite unfair as working people get no such consideration to only pay taxes on profits, which would be akin to only paying taxes on wages after paying all of your core bills.

In 1950, the majority of taxes, like 90 percent, came from businesses, now 90 percent is ripped from working people, and the richer they are, the less they pay above a certain threshold, something has to change.