The American Tax Code Is Exactly Wrong

100 Americans now have more wealth than 170 million Americans.

The 100 wealthiest Americans hold roughly $5.5 trillion.

The bottom half of the country—roughly 170 million people—holds about $4.3 trillion.

That didn’t happen by accident.

The American tax code is exactly wrong.The American tax code is exactly wrong.

We tax the people who work for their money at the highest percentages. We tax the people who have the most money at the lowest percentages.

And we allow the people with the most money to control the laws that determine how much tax we all pay.

That’s the system.

Today it was reported that the 100 wealthiest Americans now hold more wealth than the entire bottom half of the country.

100 people: roughly $5.5 trillion.

170 million people: roughly $4.3 trillion.

Now look at where the great fortunes come from. They overwhelmingly sit on top of dominant corporations or inherited, and marital concentrations of wealth tied to oligopolies and monopolies.

So, spare me the mythology about competition.

There is no meaningful capitalism without competition.

When markets are dominated by a handful of companies, when those companies generate enormous fortunes, when those fortunes acquire political power, and when that power determines tax and competition policy, society is being destroyed.

That’s not a free market. It’s not innovation.

That’s 100 people taking advantage of 350 million people and laughing to the bank.

And the American tax code fuels it.

If money comes from work, we tax it brutally.

Worker. Doctor. Lawyer. Executive. Entrepreneur.

Earn more through your labor and the government takes more.

Extreme wealth gets different treatment.

Capital produces capital. At enormous scale it becomes an ever-expanding gas that should be the first source of tax revenue.

Instead, it is the last. We attack income and innovation and protect extreme concentrated ownership—as a matter of policy.

The tax code and the economy are not weather. They don’t simply happen to us.

They are policy.

And the policy of the United States is effectively this:

If you generate a large income, tax it brutally and make the accumulation of wealth extraordinarily difficult -- if you control an oligopoly, inherit the wealth created by one, or marry into it, protect the fortune at all costs.

That is exactly backward. And it is a despicable lie that protecting the fortunes of these 100 people from taxation is somehow necessary for the future of American innovation while we crush the people actually innovating

Executives. Entrepreneurs. Designers. Doctors. Lawyers. Teachers. Mental-health professionals. Nurses. Farmers. Hospitality workers.

Years ago, Senator Ron Wyden took me aside when I was covering politics and showed me what he described as the room where the tax favors were handed out.

That was the education. The tax code isn’t nature.

It is policy.

And concentrated wealth has concentrated power over that policy.

Then we compound it by refusing to enforce competition.

The result is devastating.

Concentrated markets create concentrated wealth.

Concentrated wealth creates concentrated political power.

Concentrated political power protects concentrated markets and favorable tax treatment.

That’s not competition. It’s a feedback loop. Meanwhile, government waste, fraud and incompetence destroy public confidence in taxation itself. That gives the beneficiaries of the system the perfect defense:

Why give the government more money?

So, the circle closes.

This is not an unavoidable consequence of capitalism.

It is a catastrophic failure of tax policy and a catastrophic failure of antitrust policy.

A country cannot indefinitely tax income, protect concentrated wealth, tolerate monopoly and expect economic mobility to survive. The laws created this structure.

The laws can dismantle it.

Tax extreme wealth, starting with these 100 people.

Break up the monopolies.

Anything else is pretending we still have competition.