When it comes to taxing the super rich, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel

In this new era of rampaging oligarchs, nothing may seem as satisfying as slapping a tax on Elon Musk ’s new trillion-dollar fortune. What most bothers Americans about federal taxes is that billionaires don’t pay their fair share . As the race to develop artificial intelligence mints more billionaires, policymakers’ temptation to directly tax their brobdingnagian wealth is becoming unbearable. The first state out of the blocks is California , where voters in November will decide whether to impose a one-time tax of 5% on fortunes worth more than $1bn. Given the ease with which plutocrats avoid paying income taxes , the case for this sort of direct tax on their stash appears unassailable. The US government needs money for all sorts of reasons, starting with the imperative to restore one of the rich world’s most meager social safety nets and do more to mitigate America’s mushrooming income inequality . Increasing demands on the safety net by an ageing population will require considerably more money. And the prospect of an AI-laced economy with little human income to tax argues for efforts to find other sources of revenue. And yet deploying a newfangled wealth tax that has been largely abandoned across the world’s industrialized nations could actually put at risk the prospect of building the more capable state the US needs, draining political capital that would be best used to restore the decimated array of taxes it already uses. …