IMO The only tax should be a wealth tax. If someone wants to spend 100% of what they make and they make billions of dollars, power to them. If they want to live on credit only and never keep a dime, power to them.

If someone wants to rent out a home they own and make money on it and keep the money, they should be taxed on the money they kept AND the value of the home. Wealth hoarding should be extremely discouraged past the lifetime earnings of something like 10x minimum wage. Assuming you work 40 years at 7.25, that’s 6 million dollars. Today that more than affords for a 4 BR home and enough investments to have ~150k passive income from dividend stocks. The market will be especially lucrative for those who are under the asset cap as they can freely buy and sell without being taxed on gains on their way up.

Use it or lose it. There’s no reason for anyone to have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars… let alone billions or trillions or more. If you can’t find ways to spend your wealth in excess of 6 million dollars of assets, maybe you shouldn’t have it.

A 5% tax per year, forever on assets over 6m would still not ever put someone in the poor house. 6.1m doesn’t mean you lose 5% of 6.1m, it means you lose 5% of 0.1m, or 50k. Get taxed down to 6m or lower? No tax. Oh, and we can do all kinds of fun things here to pass wealth down generationally. Money given to kids should be totally protected up to that 6m figure, and it should have to go into a trust that can’t be touched by anyone but the child. A % of taxes paid from a parent should be deposited into all biological children’s trust evenly until they reach that 6m figure. Conversely, kids’ taxes can also go to parents until they reach that 6m number. No more fucking your kids out of their inheritance by living to 100 and no more fucking your parents out of caregiving or tossing them onto public assistance even though you are wildly wealthy.

Want to have more assets for everyone? raise minimum wage. Want more money so you can spend more money? Keep doing stuff that produces value, there’s certainly no shortage of billionaires who have made money from millions, and 5% a year is WAY lower than what people’s wealth accumulates once they get a high income from a source.

I’d also say abolish nonprofits entirely. Organizations can exist, but they need clearly defined ownership and that 5% tax still applies to wealth. a company can become enormous and quite valuable simply by fairly distributing the assets to their employees. Not paying employees a fair share? Well that’s gonna be clawed back… and those taxes should at least partially go to the workers under the tax ceiling.

We should probably also make it so legal agreements cannot be enforced unless they are public. NDAs should practically never be enforceable. Whistleblowing should be incredibly incentivized. No more back room deals. No more loop holes. This needs nuance and much consideration as obviously some exceptions should exist, like all of the above.

Transferring wealth out of the country is probably one example of an income tax that should exist, but clearly some thought and nuance needs to be applied to figure out how to make this work, but it would work.

We could fund all of the necessary social programs with this. We could eliminate homelessness, food insecurity and poverty with this.

All this being said, i’m not naive enough to think this would ever happen. Wealth and power is too concentrated already and democracy doesn’t seem capable of escaping the levers of wealth and power. We’ll keep on hoarding wealth in an extreme minority of people, per usual.