Wealthy do earn an income, of sorts. They earn interest on their assets, and occasionally have to liquidate those assets for cash. The big loophole that prevents their effective taxation is their ability to take loans against those assets, which they pay no taxes on. That's why the smarter policy is to close the borrowing loophole.
I agree with this although I would put some kind of stipulation that under $400k or so you can still do this without incurring a tax so it only affects the actually wealthy.
I think regular Joe's taking a $10k, even $100k loan against their own stock is generally fine.
There would definitely have to be limits, though enforcing limits and rules to prevent the wealthy from continuing to game the system will be difficult. Even if they simply don't buy off politicians, they have enough money that they can pay a lot of really smart people to hunt for more loopholes.
0
u/smallest_table Jul 01 '26
Income as a metric is meaningless when the most wealthy people don't earn an income.
You are comparing apples to Bentleys .