Idle Capital Is Wasted Capital

No loopholes — but progressive by income

We levy an income and wealth tax with no exemptions — the same rules for everyone, with nothing to deduct your way out of — while the rates rise with what you make and what you hoard. Flat in its fairness, progressive in its ask: a nurse and a magnate file under the identical code; the magnate simply owes a higher rate on the income — and on the idle wealth — a nurse will never have.

It is not possible to know, in advance, that any given carve-out is free of bad externalities or perverse incentives — even one written with the best of intentions. So we stop pretending. Every exemption, credit, and special case is a door, and given time the largest monopolies pay the best lawyers to walk through all of them. A code with no exemptions has no loopholes to exploit — and no corruption to buy. We make exactly one exception, and it shelters no income — it pays for care (below).

Every dollar is taxed the same way, and the rate rises steeply with income — so working families pay far less and the largest incomes carry the load:

Income (no deductions)	Rate
First $15,000	0%
$15k – $50k	6%
$50k – $120k	13%
$120k – $300k	22%
$300k – $1M	40%
$1M – $5M	49%
$5M – $10M	52%
$10M – $50M	55%
Over $50M	59%

Nothing under $120k is taxed above 13% at the margin, and the rate only climbs steeply once income clears $300,000 — so working and middle families pay far less than the very top. Capital gains, dividends, and carried interest are income — taxed like any wage — and the brackets are inflation-indexed, so rising prices never quietly push you into a higher one.

The one exception: a Caregiver Credit

We allow exactly one credit — because it does not shelter income, it pays for care the public would otherwise have to pay for itself. If you are raising a child, or supporting an aging parent or a disabled loved one, you receive a refundable $3,000 per dependent — cash even if you owe no tax, paid monthly if you want it. It covers children, dependents 65 and older, and disabled dependents of any age; it goes to whoever actually does the caring; and there is no cap on the number of children — raise as many as you can love and care for, and every one counts.

Why this one and nothing else? Without it, a no-loophole code quietly raises taxes on families with children — they lose today’s child credit, and lower rates cannot replace a fixed-dollar benefit. That is exactly backwards for a country that needs a next generation. So we make raising one affordable, and we pay for it at the top — which is why the schedule crests at 59%. Those with the most, who tend to have the fewest children, help fund the care of the families raising the country’s future.

Idle capital is wasted capital

A wealth tax begins only above $3 million per person, passes 5% a year at $20 million, and keeps climbing above that for the largest fortunes. That is not a punishment; it is a floor on productivity — and the bigger the idle pile, the higher the floor.

Net wealth (per person)	Annual rate
First $3M	0%
$3M – $20M	2%
$20M – $100M	5%
$100M – $1B	6.5%
Over $1B	8%

The S&P 500 has returned on the order of 8% a year over the long run. If a great fortune earns less than the tax it owes, it is not being put to work — not built into companies, not lent, not invested in the productive economy that grows GDP for everyone. At that point it is cheaper to put those assets to work — or lend them to small businesses at preferential rates — than to let them sit idle. The tax simply makes idle capital pay for the growth it is refusing to create.

Three million is enough to be free

The threshold is deliberate. $3 million is enough for any one person to live comfortably and retire — forever — so long as those assets are doing something. Below it, you are untouched. Above it, you are only asked to keep your capital working: invest it, lend it, build with it, and you owe little or nothing. Let it sit idle, and you pay.

The hole we’re in

The stakes are not abstract. Federal debt now runs to roughly $39 trillion — about $115,000 for every American, and nearly $291,000 per household — and Washington still borrows another ~$1.8 trillion a year. Idle fortunes sitting out of the productive economy while the government borrows to keep the lights on is the same problem told twice.

We out-grow it — we don’t pay it off

Here is the honest arithmetic. Between the income tax and the wealth tax, this raises on the order of $0.9 trillion a year — enough to close the primary deficit and fund the safety net. We do not try to retire $39 trillion in nominal dollars; we out-grow it. With steady growth and moderate inflation running ahead of the interest bill, the debt shrinks against the economy on its own — from about 120% of GDP today toward ~60% over a generation.

And we will be straight about what does the work: the flat-fair income tax and growth carry the plan. The wealth tax is a fairness measure and a bonus — it makes idle fortunes pay, but its yield is the softest number here, so we never build the budget on it. Keep borrowing costs below the growth rate, index the brackets, and the line finally bends down.

Enforced under the Public & Private Trust

This only works because someone honest is keeping the books. The tax is administered and audited by the Auditor General’s Office of the Public and Private Trust — the same office that grades government, non-profits, and private enterprise by one standard — so the rules are applied evenly and cannot be gamed.