Taxing You ‘Just for Existing’

Commentary Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has proposed a “billionaires tax.” Laughably, the first thing you notice about it is that it targets trusts value at … $100 million. To the insatiably greedy and shamelessly profligate federal government, some $34 trillion in the red, a pittance like $900 million is a mere rounding error. Still, Mr. Wyden must have thought that christening it a mere “multimillionaires tax” wouldn’t engender a sufficient level of envious rage among the masses in the great class warfare struggle. When Uncle Sam goes after “the rich,” the government’s really planning on picking the pockets of the middle class, where collectively the real money is to be found. Even the corporate tax, despite its name, deceptively takes precious, hard-earned cash from those in the middle and at the bottom. President Richard Nixon and a Democrat-controlled Congress in 1969 enacted the alternative minimum tax (AMT) to stop 155 super-rich individuals from getting away with paying no income taxes; but before it was fixed by President Donald Trump’s tax cut legislation in 2017, the AMT was taking money from no less than 62 percent of taxpayers who were earning $500,000 to $1 million annually—well off yes, but hardly in the range of, say, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos....