AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.Guest EssayMay 22, 2026Credit...George WylesolListen · 6:30 min By Zachary LiscowMr. Liscow is a professor at Yale Law School.The United States is seeing an increasing concentration of wealth at the very top and a worsening national debt. For many Americans, taxing the rich more is an obvious move.Ask tax policy experts how to do this, and you will often hear novel proposals to curb the many intricate ways the rich make and hide their money: A wealth tax. A tax on unrealized gains. A tax on the loans that billionaires take against their stock. These ideas, now common in progressive tax thinking, come with serious catches, legal or arithmetical. The tax code has structural flaws, and many of the ideas would be good in theory. But pursuing them could result in little or no new revenue for the government.The boring truth is that Congress can accomplish a lot simply by raising the rates of the taxes already on the books. Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, has proposed a 2 percent annual levy on fortunes above $50 million, rising to 3 percent on those over $1 billion. There are serious constitutional and policy arguments for this idea, but the Supreme Court’s current members would probably strike it down. (A California proposal for a state-level wealth tax would not face the same legal barriers, but it would be a partial response to problems that are national in scale.)Then there are proposals for a “mark to market” tax, which would tax unrealized capital gains — the appreciation in the paper value of assets such as stocks — every year, not just when an asset is sold. Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon, has proposed a billionaire income tax along these lines. Such a tax would raise a lot of money for the Treasury. But it faces its own constitutional hurdles. The Supreme Court has left the legal status of unrealized-gains taxes deliberately unresolved, and a mark-to-market tax’s chances at the court would be, at best, 50-50. Despite the proposal’s many appeals, building a generation of fiscal policy on a coin flip would be risky.Another idea is imposing a borrowing tax, a policy aimed directly at the widely criticized “buy, borrow, die” loophole. The loophole allows the rich to take loans against their portfolios and use the money to finance glamorous lives. They pay no capital gains tax because they avoid selling the assets — often stock that has risen in value — that they use as collateral for the borrowing that sustains their lifestyles. When they die, they pass on their assets to their heirs, who, because of the “stepped-up basis” loophole in inheritance law, can avoid paying capital gains taxes even if they sell those assets. A borrowing tax would discourage the buy, borrow, die strategy and restore some fairness to the tax code. It’s a policy I like — I proposed my own version of it.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT