Educators are flipping out over Donald Trump’s choice of pro wrestling exec and longtime donor Linda McMahon for secretary of education. Predictably so, since experts in just about every field are flipping out when Trump chooses some poorly qualified (yet very loyal) hack to oversee their specialty—or selects another fox to guard the henhouse.

America’s biggest union, the National Education Association, for instance, slammed McMahon as unqualified and bent on a privatization agenda:

Her chief goal for education is to promote vouchers, which drain resources from public schools and send taxpayer money to unaccountable private schools that are permitted to discriminate against students and educators. The policies she promotes are aligned with Trump’s Project 2025 plan. 

McMahon, who served as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s initial term, has scant education experience. She earned a teaching certificate in college and was a student teacher for a semester, but resigned from the Connecticut Board of Education in 2010, according to the Washington Post, after the Hartford Courant found that she’d claimed an education degree she never obtained. More recently, a lawsuit accused McMahon and her estranged husband, Vince, of tolerating the sexual abuse of children by an employee of their company, World Wrestling Entertainment. (A lawyer for McMahon told CNN the allegations are “baseless.”)

But hey, she likes vouchers.

Voucher-esque programs, speaking of discrimination, were first deployed across the South during desegregation so authorities could shutter public schools—the white parents didn’t want their kids mixing with Black kids—and instead provide grants to fund the private education of exclusively white children at hundreds of new private schools that popped up to serve them. This was a sordid and horribly racist enterprise, as you will glean from this history compiled by the Center for American Progress.

When states expand voucher programs, shoddy and established school operators both cash in, and public schools and their students are the losers.

And it’s still happening, de facto. ProPublica reported the other day that tens of millions of dollars in public funds are still flowing to these “segregation academies”—of the 39 schools the reporters found in North Carolina alone, more than half had reported to the federal government that their student bodies were at least 85 percent white.

Republicans have been drooling over vouchers for as long as I can remember. They were talking about them when I was in grade school, and I’m a geezer. But now the messaging revolves around school “choice,” with proponents claiming that vouchers, which a number of states have revived in the form of education savings accounts (ESAs), allow low-income parents to escape failing public schools. And this is certainly true to some extent.

But the voucher/ESA cheerleaders neglect to mention that those public schools are failing in significant part because affluent families have fled en masse, and that their budgets have been gutted by, well, the same voucher-loving politicians and/or charter school systems championed by billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and the Waltons, and affluent members of both parties. All this drainage leaves many public schools underfunded to the point that teachers literally have to beg for basic classroom supplies—as some did during parents’ night at the public high school my kids attended in Oakland, California.

McMahon or no McMahon, vouchers have come back into vogue recently, likely in reaction to the educational upheaval of the Covid pandemic. “In 2023 alone, seven states passed new school voucher programs and nine expanded existing plans—highlighting a push that is largely coming from red states,” notes a Brookings Institution report published last year.

And sure, some low-income families will benefit from the programs, which channel money that would have gone to the local public school into private accounts (the ESAs) that can be used for private K–12 tuition and related expenses. But there can be a lot of collateral damage, notes the Brookings report.

First, whenever you expand government payouts—and this is something the Republicans complain about in other contexts—fraudsters and opportunists will come out of the woodwork. The report cites research showing that when traditional voucher programs were enacted, a host of “pop-up” private schools would follow, of which many fail quickly. “That’s exactly what is happening with the ESA-style expansions in Arizona now,” the report notes. (Arizona, which in 2011 became the first state to offer ESAs for selected students, expanded its program in 2022 to all students—including those already enrolled in private schools—according to a subsequent Brookings paper that deems the program “a handout to the wealthy.”)

Voucher programs also lead to tuition hikes by existing private schools, according to the Brookings report, “and that is exactly what recent reports are showing with ESA passage.” So, basically, shoddy and established operators alike cash in, and public schools and their students are the big losers.

There are other consequences, too. From the report:

The last decade of research on traditional vouchers strongly suggests they actually lower academic achievement. In Louisiana, for example, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations—extremely large by education policy standards—with declines that persisted for years. Those results were published across top journals for empirical public and education policy. Similar results in Indiana found impacts closer to -0.15 standard deviations. To put these negative impacts in perspective: Current estimates of COVID-19’s impact on academic trajectories hover around -0.25 standard deviations.

Vouchers, more broadly, are of a piece with what I’ve been calling the Plunder—the steady rigging of our economic system over the past four and a half decades to benefit people who need no government support at the expense of those who really do. This, as I argued in a recent piece, was a primary reason why Trump won a second term, as ironic as that may sound.

I wrote about the rigging of our educational system in my 2021 book about excessive wealth in America. (Chapter title: “Getting In.”) Take the tax-advantaged 529 college savings plans our government offers. Like private retirement plans—401(k)s, IRAs, etc.—these plans provide far more help to rich families than to poor ones. The example I used in my book involved two (fictitious) students living in Ohio, one rich, the other middle-class.

The middle-class family could only afford to put $6,000 a year into their daughter’s 529—an investment fund that grows tax-free over the years and can be used to pay college tuition and qualified expenses when the child comes of age.

And that’s good. They needed that assistance. But for some reason the rules also allow the rich couple in my example to frontload their son’s 529 with up to five years’ worth of the maximum contribution all at once. So, they put $150,000 into a 529 that they set up for him as a newborn, do this again during his fifth year, and then, when he’s 10, bring the balance up to maximum the state allows, beyond which they can contribute no more. With so much cash in their fund from the start, you can imagine how quickly the interest accumulates.

Rich families gained yet another lucrative perk in late 2017, when Donald Trump signed his most notable first-term achievement, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Beyond cutting taxes for wealthy folks and corporations, the TCJA stipulated that parents could now take up to $10,000 a year from their child’s 529 fund for private K–12 tuition. It’s worth noting that elite private high schools—where tuition typically runs between $40,000 to $60,000 a year—offer extensive college admissions mentoring, whereas a middle-class kid at an underfunded public school cannot use their 529 fund to cover expenses like SAT prep, college advising, or essay coaching that their school doesn’t offer in any meaningful way.

When I crunched the numbers, here’s what I found: Even assuming a conservative annual investment return of 5 percent for the students’ 529 funds, the rich family got some $117,000 in tax breaks, nearly seven times what the middle-class family received, not to mention that young Nigel (XTC fans will get the reference) had two and a half years of his private high school tuition covered by the taxpayers. He also ended up with a staggering $688,660 in his fund—likely enough to also cover the cost of law school or med school or business school should he choose any of those paths.

Small wonder that, at the time I reported these numbers, the “Ivy Plus” colleges were enrolling more students from the top-earning 1 percent families than from the bottom 50 percent. And that, compared with kids with families in the bottom 20 percent of the wealth spectrum, the children of 1 percenters were 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy Plus college. 

Vouchers only add insult to this injury. They can be marketed to sound like a good and equitable thing—a perk for all Americans—when in reality, without serious means-testing, they end up delivering the most benefit to families who need it the least. They are but one of the levers (here’s another) the Project 2025 people and Trump’s new administration may use to accelerate a plunder that has been in progress for decades, under the watch of both major parties.

One can almost hear it now: the “giant sucking sound” that the late Ross Perot used to talk about, except in this case it won’t be the sounds of US jobs going to Mexico. It will be the sound of the remaining wealth of the middle class getting sucked ever upward and into the coffers of our most privileged.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Private jet flights have soared in recent years, with the resulting climate-heating emissions rising by 50 percent, the most comprehensive global analysis to date has revealed.

The assessment tracked more than 25,000 private jets and almost 19 million flights between 2019 and 2023. It found almost half the jets traveled less than 500 kilometers (about 310 miles) and 900,000 were used “like taxis” for trips of less than 31 miles. Many flights were for holidays, arriving in sunny locations in the summertime. The FIFA World Cup in Qatar in 2022 attracted more than 1,800 private flights.

Private flights, used by just 0.003 percent of the world’s population, are the most polluting form of transport. The researchers found that passengers in larger private jets caused more CO₂ emissions in an hour than the average person did in a year.

The US dominated private jet travel, representing 69 percent of flights, and Canada, the UK, and Australia were all in the top 10. A private jet takes off every six minutes in the UK. The total emissions from private jet flights in 2023 were more than 15 million metric tons, more than the 60 million people of Tanzania emitted.

The jets “are an utterly unjustifiable and gratuitous waste of our scarce remaining emissions budget…and their emissions are soaring.”

Industry expectations are that another 8,500 business jets will enter service by 2033, far outstripping efficiency gains and indicating that private flight emissions will rise even further. The researchers said their work highlighted the vast global inequality in emissions between wealthier and poorer people, and tackling the emissions of the wealthy minority was critical to ending global heating.

Stefan Gössling, the professor at Linnaeus University in Sweden who led the research, said: “The wealthy are a very small share of the population but are increasing their emissions very quickly and by very large levels of magnitude.” He added: “The growth in global emissions that we are experiencing at this point in time is coming from the top.”

The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, took data from the ADS-B Exchange platform, which records the signals sent once a minute by transponders on every plane, recording its position and altitude. This huge dataset—1.8 terabytes—was then filtered for the 72 plane models marketed by their manufacturers as “business jets.” The emissions figures are most likely an underestimate, as smaller planes and emissions from taxiing on the ground were not included.

The analysis found the number of private jets increased by 28 percent and the distance flown jumped by 53 percent between 2019 and 2023. Fewer than a third of the flights were longer than 620 miles and almost 900,000 flights were less than 31 miles.

“We know some people use them as taxis, really,” Gössling said. “If it’s just [31 miles], you could definitely do that by car.” Outside the US and Europe, Brazil, the Middle East, and the Caribbean are private jet hotspots.

Much of the use is for leisure, the researchers found. For example, private jet use to Ibiza in Spain and Nice in France peaked in the summer and was concentrated around weekends. In the US, Taylor Swift, Drake, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey are among those who have been criticized for heavy private jet use.

The researchers also looked at some business events in 2023, with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, resulting in 660 private jet flights and the COP28 climate summit in Dubai having 291 flights.

Gössling said the driving factors behind the large recent increase in private jet use have not been analyzed but might include an increasing reluctance to share cabins on commercial flights that began during the Covid pandemic. Industry documents describe private jet users as “ultra-high net worth,” comprising about 250,000 individuals with an average wealth of $123 million. US private jet users are increasingly using “privacy ICAO addresses,” which mask the identity of the plane and could make tracking them much harder in the future.

According to Gössling, passengers should pay for the climate damage resulting from each ton of CO₂ emitted, estimated at about $216: “Very basically, it would seem fair that people paid for the damage they are causing by their behavior.”

A second step would be to increase the landing fees for private aircraft, which are currently very low, he added. A landing fee of $5,400 could be an effective deterrent, roughly doubling the cost of common private flights.

Alethea Warrington, head of aviation at the climate charity Possible, said: “Private jets, used by a tiny group of ultra-wealthy people, are an utterly unjustifiable and gratuitous waste of our scarce remaining emissions budget to avoid climate breakdown, and their emissions are soaring, even as the impacts of the climate crisis escalate.”

“It’s time for governments to act,” she said. “We need…a supertax, rapidly arriving at an outright ban on private jets.”

The US Private Aviation Association did not respond to a request for comment.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Private jet flights have soared in recent years, with the resulting climate-heating emissions rising by 50 percent, the most comprehensive global analysis to date has revealed.

The assessment tracked more than 25,000 private jets and almost 19 million flights between 2019 and 2023. It found almost half the jets traveled less than 500 kilometers (about 310 miles) and 900,000 were used “like taxis” for trips of less than 31 miles. Many flights were for holidays, arriving in sunny locations in the summertime. The FIFA World Cup in Qatar in 2022 attracted more than 1,800 private flights.

Private flights, used by just 0.003 percent of the world’s population, are the most polluting form of transport. The researchers found that passengers in larger private jets caused more CO₂ emissions in an hour than the average person did in a year.

The US dominated private jet travel, representing 69 percent of flights, and Canada, the UK, and Australia were all in the top 10. A private jet takes off every six minutes in the UK. The total emissions from private jet flights in 2023 were more than 15 million metric tons, more than the 60 million people of Tanzania emitted.

The jets “are an utterly unjustifiable and gratuitous waste of our scarce remaining emissions budget…and their emissions are soaring.”

Industry expectations are that another 8,500 business jets will enter service by 2033, far outstripping efficiency gains and indicating that private flight emissions will rise even further. The researchers said their work highlighted the vast global inequality in emissions between wealthier and poorer people, and tackling the emissions of the wealthy minority was critical to ending global heating.

Stefan Gössling, the professor at Linnaeus University in Sweden who led the research, said: “The wealthy are a very small share of the population but are increasing their emissions very quickly and by very large levels of magnitude.” He added: “The growth in global emissions that we are experiencing at this point in time is coming from the top.”

The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, took data from the ADS-B Exchange platform, which records the signals sent once a minute by transponders on every plane, recording its position and altitude. This huge dataset—1.8 terabytes—was then filtered for the 72 plane models marketed by their manufacturers as “business jets.” The emissions figures are most likely an underestimate, as smaller planes and emissions from taxiing on the ground were not included.

The analysis found the number of private jets increased by 28 percent and the distance flown jumped by 53 percent between 2019 and 2023. Fewer than a third of the flights were longer than 620 miles and almost 900,000 flights were less than 31 miles.

“We know some people use them as taxis, really,” Gössling said. “If it’s just [31 miles], you could definitely do that by car.” Outside the US and Europe, Brazil, the Middle East, and the Caribbean are private jet hotspots.

Much of the use is for leisure, the researchers found. For example, private jet use to Ibiza in Spain and Nice in France peaked in the summer and was concentrated around weekends. In the US, Taylor Swift, Drake, Floyd Mayweather Jr., Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey are among those who have been criticized for heavy private jet use.

The researchers also looked at some business events in 2023, with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, resulting in 660 private jet flights and the COP28 climate summit in Dubai having 291 flights.

Gössling said the driving factors behind the large recent increase in private jet use have not been analyzed but might include an increasing reluctance to share cabins on commercial flights that began during the Covid pandemic. Industry documents describe private jet users as “ultra-high net worth,” comprising about 250,000 individuals with an average wealth of $123 million. US private jet users are increasingly using “privacy ICAO addresses,” which mask the identity of the plane and could make tracking them much harder in the future.

According to Gössling, passengers should pay for the climate damage resulting from each ton of CO₂ emitted, estimated at about $216: “Very basically, it would seem fair that people paid for the damage they are causing by their behavior.”

A second step would be to increase the landing fees for private aircraft, which are currently very low, he added. A landing fee of $5,400 could be an effective deterrent, roughly doubling the cost of common private flights.

Alethea Warrington, head of aviation at the climate charity Possible, said: “Private jets, used by a tiny group of ultra-wealthy people, are an utterly unjustifiable and gratuitous waste of our scarce remaining emissions budget to avoid climate breakdown, and their emissions are soaring, even as the impacts of the climate crisis escalate.”

“It’s time for governments to act,” she said. “We need…a supertax, rapidly arriving at an outright ban on private jets.”

The US Private Aviation Association did not respond to a request for comment.

In the coming days, you will hear every imaginable take on why Americans voted to put Donald Trump back in office.

Pundits will say toxic masculinity was to blame—and men feeling usurped by women. They’ll say it was the Christian nationalism movement. A surprising shift in Latino voting patterns. Sexism. Racism. Transphobia. Elon Musk. Crypto bros. “Theo bros.” Housing prices. Gaza! Propaganda from Fox News and Newsmax. Misinformation on X.

Perhaps it was the cowardice of powerful men like Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon. The anti-immigrant frenzy—Trump’s incessant false claims about vicious murderers and rapists and mental patients swarming across the border like locusts. Property crime. Inflation. Interest rates. Lingering malaise from the pandemic. The Democrats’ failure to sell their economic wins. Kamala Harris’ inability to distance herself from an unpopular president.

Or maybe a combination of all these things. Gender and Gaza clearly made a difference. Inflation is a notorious regime killer—it was high inflation that underpinned the rise of fascism in Europe in the last century—and rising wages haven’t kept pace. When the Dems say, “Look, inflation is back to normal,” well, the price of groceries sure ain’t.

But I’m talking here about something even more basic, something that undergirds so much of America’s discontent. The best explanation, after all, is often the simplest:

Wealth inequality.

There is little that leaves people as pissed off and frustrated as the feeling that no matter how hard they work, they can’t ever seem to get ahead. And this feeling has been slowly festering since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and his cadre of supply-side economists launched the first salvos in what would become the great fucking-over of the American middle and working classes.

Half of the families in the richest nation on the planet have no wealth at all. Is it any wonder some of them are willing to see the system burn?

The frustration was evident in something two very different women in two very different states told me on the very same day in 2022 for a story on how America spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year subsidizing retirement plans mostly for rich people: “I’m going to have to work until I die.”

The great fucking-over commenced with President Reagan’s gutting of unions and the wealth-friendly tax cuts he signed into law in 1981 and 1986. The trend continued with George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and culminated with the Trump tax cuts of 2017—which, like all of those other Republican initiatives, failed to generate the degreee of growth and prosperity the supply-siders promised. They did, however, make the rich richer as wages stagnated and the middle class shriveled.

We talk a lot about income inequality, but wealth and income are different beasts. Income is what pays your bills. Wealth is your security—and in that regard, most American families are just not feeling sufficiently secure.

In January 1981, when Reagan took office, the households of the Middle 40—that’s the 50th to 90th wealth percentiles—held a collective 31.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. Fast-forward to January 2022: Their share of the pie had dwindled to 25.7 percent, even as the combined wealth of the richest 0.01 percent of households soared from less than 3 percent of the total to 11 percent.

Put another way, 18,300 US households—a tiny fraction—now control more than a tenth of the nation’s wealth.

And what of the bottom 50 percent? How have they fared over the past four decades or so? When Reagan came in, their average household wealth was a paltry $944. (All figures are in 2023 dollars.) Today they have even less—just $659 on average, according to projections from Real Time Inequality, a site based on data from the Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. All told, those 92.2 million households now hold less than 0.05 percent of the nation’s wealth—which rounds down to zero. In short, half of the people living in the richest nation on the planet have no wealth at all.

They’re not doing so hot income-wise, either. In September, the Congressional Budget Office reported that average income of the highest-earning 1 percent of taxpayers in 2021 was more than $3.1 million, or 42 times the average income of households in the bottom 90 percent, according to the nonprofit Americans for Tax Fairness. That’s the most skewed income distribution since CBO began reporting this data in 1979, the group noted. Back then, the disparity was only 12 to 1.

And the billionaires? I’m glad you asked. Based on Forbes data, from January 1, 2018, when the Trump cuts took effect, to April 1 of this year, the nation’s 806 billionaires saw a 57 percent gain in their collective wealth—after adjusting for the inflation that has plagued working families.

Team Biden has actually done a good bit for the middle class, and tried to do more, but nuance is a hard sell when you’re pitching to families worried about whether they can make it to the end of the month.

“It’s a class and inequality story for sure,” Richard Reeves, the author of 2017’s Dream Hoarders, concurred when I ran my premise by him. “But it’s also a gendered class story.” (His latest book, Of Boys and Men, examines how “the social and economic world of men has been turned upside down.”) And he’s right.

But are you starting to see why the broader electorate, race and gender notwithstanding, might be just a little fed up?

I suppose, having also written a book about wealth in America, that I know enough to assert that wealth insecurity is fundamental.

But why, you might ask, would someone living on the edge vote for Republicans, whose wage-suppressing, union-busting, benefit-denying policies have only tended to make the poor and the middle class more miserable?

And why in the name of Heaven would they vote for Trump, a billionaire born with a silver spoon in his mouth who has lied and cheated his way through life? A man whose latest tax-cut plans—though some, like eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security income, can sound progressive—will be deeply regressive, giving ever more to the rich and rationalizing cuts that will hurt the poor and middle class and accelerate global climate chaos.

The reason, my friends, may well be that those on the losing end of our thriving economy don’t see it as thriving. Historically, every election cycle, when reporters fan out to ask low-income voters in swing states what they are thinking, the message has been roughly the same: Presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans, come around here every four years and talk their talk, and then they leave and forget about us when it comes to policy.

Now that’s not entirely fair, because the Biden administration actually has done a good bit for working people and families of color, and has proposed all sorts of measures to make the tax code fairer and reduce the wealth gap (both the racial one and the general one)—including increasing taxes and IRS enforcement for the super-rich. But one can only get so far with a split Senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on your team, and a rival party that would just as soon throw you into a lake of fire as support your initiatives.

And nuance is a hard sell when you’re pitching yourself to families worried about whether they can make it to the end of the month. Roughly half of the population barely gets by, has no stocks, no wealth, no retirement savings, and can’t imagine how they’ll ever afford a house—certainly not at current interest rates. Meanwhile, the billionaire techno-dicks are strutting around, publicly flexing their wealth and power with Democrats and Republicans alike.

In courting Americans who, fairly or not, feel like the system has never done them a bit of good, Team Trump has the rhetorical advantage, because he says he’ll destroy that system—even if that really just means he’ll subvert it to further enrich his buddies. “Populist Revolt Against Elite’s Vision of the U.S.” was one of the New York Times’ headlines after the race was called on Wednesday morning. And that’s absolutely right.

Because when the Republicans say, “The economy is a nightmare under Biden and Harris, and illegal immigrants are committing heinous crimes and taking your jobs and we’re gonna cut your taxes,” and the Dems counter, “Hey, none of that is really true and we actually did a lot and we feel your pain and the economy is going gangbusters and Trump’s tariffs will destroy it,” well, whom do you think a person struggling from paycheck to paycheck might be more inclined to believe?

Sure, the economy is doing great—if you own stock. If you have a well-paying job and a retirement plan. If you are in the top fifth of the wealth and income spectrums.

If not, even if you rightly suspect that the Republicans won’t do a damn thing to improve your lot, you might just be tempted to say, “Fuck it.”

And watch the system burn.

It feels strange to suggest that the second-most memorable thing that happened on a stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, this year was the former president of the United States getting shot in the face. But if Donald Trump wins the presidential election, the image that will be seared in my mind is that of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, jumping around the same stage a few months later—eyes weirdly vacant, a black MAGA hat splayed awkwardly on his head, his legs and arms outstretched in the shape of a knotted and overgrown X.

Musk had been a public Trump supporter since the summer, and a not-so-subtle conservative sympathizer for far longer. He was already pouring tens of millions of dollars into an unusual and untested field campaign in key swing states. And he had hosted a glitchy and uncomfortable conversation with Trump on X. But the appearance at that rally of a defense contractor who controls half the satellites in the night sky, the electric-vehicle charging network, and quite possibly the social media network where you found this article, felt like something ominous and new. 

Tim Walz—who told a crowd a few weeks after Musk’s appearance in Butler that the tech mogul was “skipping around like a dipshit”—was only trying to get one over on his counterpart when he called Musk Trump’s “running mate.” But it was not entirely wrong. It was Musk who lobbied Trump to put JD Vance on the ticket. Musk was the one funding the get-out-the-vote effort. Musk was the guy who turned one of the world’s biggest social media platforms into a black hole of anti-immigrant agitprop. Musk was the guy who was going to be given the keys to the domestic discretionary budget, federal budget, to find $2 trillion in cuts from just $1.7 trillion in discretionary spending. Vance was the headliner at a rally in Scottsdale over the weekend, but Musk was a star in absentia, the name people kept bringing up on their own. He was “hilarious,” a voter told me. He was a “genius.” (He was also: “Not a very good speaker.”) Musk’s organizers swarmed the line outside to collect data for Musk’s PAC so that he could—well, it’s not really clear what the point of that was. That felt kind of Trumpian too.

From the start of the primaries, it was almost impossible to separate what was happening on stage from what some of the richest people alive were doing off it.

It is hard to say anything new about 78-year-old Donald Trump. Nine years after his first campaign event in Manhattan, even the ex-president himself seemed to be running out of steam sometimes, forgetting names and places, missing door handles, and eschewing his entire stump speech entirely to dance—if that’s the word—to a Sinéad O’Connor cover of a Prince song from 1985. But Musk did offer something different, if not in any of the things he had to say—the inevitable race science and disinformation and faux-heterodox drivel of someone discovering conservative message boards for the first time while also playing Starcraft—than in the relationship between money and power he represented. This was the oligarch election. And Musk was the richest and most powerful oligarch of them all.

One of the simpler explanations you often heard about Trump’s rise was that the electorate had been primed for someone like him. The conditions were all there for the right kind of demagogue—we had bad trade deals, scam culture, reality television, and the Electoral College. You could say the same about Musk and the billionaires whose spending set the terms for how the election would be conducted and what it would be about.

In Musk’s case, the work was made possible by landmark Supreme Court decisions more than a decade ago, which opened the floodgates to an ever-growing and frankly horrifying gusher of often untraceable cash into the political system. The rules on what those outside groups can and cannot do, and how closely they can coordinate, have become a little more toothless every cycle since. For one person to gain this much influence, a lot of other kinds of people and institutions have to lose it. Musk’s power has been enabled by the monopolistic growth of the internet economy, and the not entirely unrelated collapse of much of the hard-news media industry, online and off, and by a tax and regulatory climate that has allowed a small subset of people in Silicon Valley to grow not just rich, but nation-state rich.

But the oligarch election was not just about Musk. From the start of the primaries, it was almost impossible to separate what was happening on stage from what some of the richest people alive were doing off it. Rep. Dean Phillips’ primary challenge to Joe Biden was funded in large part by billionaire investor Bill Ackman. (Phillips even changed his campaign’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policy after Ackman complained.) Sen. Tim Scott’s primary challenge to Trump was supposed to be bankrolled by Larry Ellison, but the money never materialized. And then there was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose campaign, while it lasted, was an almost wholly-owned subsidiary of Timothy Mellon, grandson of Andrew. Mellon, who was, at one point, the largest contributor to both the RFK Jr. and Trump campaigns, was sort of Musk, inverted—a scion of Gilded Age wealth who spent part of his share of family fortune on a fruitless search to find Amelia Earhart’s plane at the bottom of the sea.

(An aside: Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, who was chosen for the ticket largely because of her perceived ability to fund it, once allegedly had an affair with Musk while married to Sergey Brin. According to a recent New York Times story, Musk once offered her his sperm, as part of his obsession with populating the world with children who share his genes. During the campaign, Musk similarly offered to father a child with Taylor Swift, following the pop star’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.)

Last month, Jeff Bezos unilaterally stopped his newspaper from publishing an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris… It was hard to view the timing as anything less than a weak surrender, from a man whose rocket company would be competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for contracts in a potential Trump second term.

Musk’s former partner at PayPal, Peter Thiel, did not give as much money this cycle as he has in the past. But he also didn’t really need to. His contribution to the race was merely a vice presidential nominee—his former employee, Vance, with whom Thiel shares some unusual ideological influences. Vance got to the Senate because Thiel personally introduced him to Trump at Mar-a-Lago and spent $15 million to get him elected. He’s on the ticket now, in part, because Thiel, like Musk, urged Trump personally to pick him.

All this money, and the people throwing it around, often defined the terms of the debate. Trump said so explicitly at a fundraiser early in the campaign, promising fossil-fuel executives a host of goodies—including eliminating the electric vehicle mandate—if they ponied up $1 billion to support his bid. He supported a ban on TikTok in the United States. Then he changed his mind after a meeting with the Pennsylvania billionaire—and TikTok investor—Jeff Yass, who has given Republican outside groups and candidates upwards of $50 million. Incidentally, Yass was a shareholder in a company that merged with Trump’s media venture this year.

The money sloshing around, in pursuit of tax cuts and government contracts and something called “pronatalism,” has real consequences on real people. If there was a defining issue on the Republican side, it was the continuing attack on transgender athletes who compete—in astonishingly small numbers—in high school and college sports. It is impossible to overstate how much this issue dominated the airwaves of competitive Senate races.

Who was funding this onslaught? A peek at the disclosures of Senate Leadership Fund, a leading Republican outside group in Senate races, offered a revealing look. Leading the way was billionaire Ken Griffin, the Florida-based hedge-funder who once told his local paper that ultra-wealthy elites have “insufficient influence” in American politics. His $27.5 million was followed by $20 million from Paul Singer, a hedge-funder who grew his fortune by squeezing poor countries for debt repayments, and who appeared in the news most recently for flying Samuel Alito to Alaska on his private jet. Another top contributor was Stephen Schwarzman ($9 million), the private-equity mogul who once compared President Barack Obama’s efforts to close the carried interest loophole to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Marc Andreesen, the Silicon Valley mogul, chipped in a more pedestrian but still respectable $375,000—perhaps enough to buy a starter home someday in the new model city he’s trying to build from scratch in California. Throw in a few million from several different Waltons, and a big check from Rupert Murdoch, and SLF was flush.

I’ve mostly focused on Trump and his allies, and not Democrats, because this election in particular was asymmetrical. Donors were contributing to Republican super-PACs at a roughly 2-to-1 clip. No one on the left is fusing government business with high-dollar donations and media manipulation like Musk.

The election was defined not just by the oligarchs who participated but by those who sat it out. .

But the Democratic campaign was shaped by the power of ultra-wealthy donors too. Conservatives talked incessantly about George Soros not just because of the subtext but because of the plain text—he gave $60 million to a super-PAC that supports Democrats earlier this year, while seeding left-of-center political organizing efforts across the country. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has spent $50 million. So has Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder whose philanthropic efforts have given him vast influence over the future of public health and education. The right-wing populists and the demagogues might be full of shit. But their punches often land for a reason.

In the three-week interregnum between President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate and his eventual departure from the race, some of the most important voices were the megadonors—the shadow party within the party. And in the punch-drunk weeks that followed, as Harris set out to define what her candidacy would be about, everyone from Mark Cuban to Barry Diller to Reid Hoffman came forward with the same suggestion—that perhaps Harris could replace Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, who has been the tip of the spear of the current administration’s anti-trust enforcement. When the people funding the campaign are naming the bureaucrats they want fired, that’s oligarchy, too.

But the election was defined not just by the oligarchs who participated but by those who sat it out. 

When I mentioned Musk’s donations to a voter at the Vance rally in Scottsdale, she was nonplussed.

“Look at what Zuckerberg is doing on the left with his money,” she said.

But seriously, look at what Mark Zuckerberg is doing with his money: Not very much! A former supporter of immigration reform efforts, who helped pay for poll workers across the country a few years ago, Zuckerberg has largely given up on political activism, the New York Times reported recently. He has made peace with Trump, who has said Zuckerberg should face “life in prison” for taking down Covid misinformation during the pandemic. After Trump was shot, Zuckerberg called the former president a “badass.” They even spoke by phone. 

In seemingly abandoning any efforts to maintain a functioning online space, and actively throttling real political news, Zuckerberg created a vacuum that other powerful actors could fill. Facebook no longer really cares about politics or moderation or the appearance of impropriety now. The company is happy to take huge amounts of money from Musk for misleading advertisements that pretend to be coming from Harris.

Last month, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, unilaterally stopped his newspaper, the Washington Post, from publishing an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, on the grounds that he believed newspaper endorsements contributed to a declining trust in news media. And while few people will miss one more sternly worded editorial about Donald Trump, it was hard to view the timing as anything less than a weak surrender, from a man whose rocket company would be competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for contracts in a potential Trump second term. It fit into a pattern of elite timidity. The Times recently reported that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon—like a number of other prominent business titans—quietly supported Harris, but were afraid to say so publicly. The billionaires aren’t going to save us. They might not even try.

Elon Musk, far and away the richest man on the planet, is pouring tens of millions of dollars into efforts to get Donald Trump elected. In addition to his massively valuable promotion of Trump’s messaging on X—an in-kind donation if ever there was one—he reportedly gave $50 million to a group linked to immigrant-hater Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s morally abominable family separation policy. And then there’s the legally problematic $100 payments and $1 million lottery-style giveaways he’s been offering registered swing-state voters who sign a petition stating the following:

The First and Second Amendments guarantee freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. By signing below, I am pledging my support for the First and Second Amendments.

Weird, right? But Musk’s return on investment could be huge if Trump prevails and gives him even more power over the very government at whose teat Musk’s companies were nurtured to profitability—and on which they continue to depend. Also, let’s remember, tens of millions for this dude is the equivalent of pocket change for the rest of us. Here’s how much of Musk’s net worth $50 million represents:

0.000183486238532

But what of his philanthropy, you ask? Didn’t Musk sign Bill Gates’ “Giving Pledge,” vowing to give at least half of his wealth to charity?

Yes, he signed up in 2012, for what it’s worth. But he’s running way behind on his giving. Consider that, in all of 2022, according to his foundation’s latest tax filing, he gave $160.5 million to charitable causes. Musk made more than that just yesterday—a great deal more.

That’s right, Musk’s net worth increased by $2.7 billion on Friday, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires, a database that serves as a reminder of just how far our supposedly egalitarian American experiment has devolved into plutocracy—or oligarchy, if you prefer—a situation that founder John Adams had hoped we would avoid (though he wasn’t terribly confident that we would).

Put another way, the amount Musk gave to charity in one year is this much of what he gained in a day:

0.05962962962963

Six percent! Musk, by the way, is now roughly 100 times as rich as he was when he signed the pledge—a scenario Andrew Carnegie would consider grotesque. He’d best start acting more like MacKenzie Scott. Because, as a trusted advisor to industrialist John D. Rockefeller once warned his boss:

You must distribute it faster than it grows! If you do not, it will crush you, and your children, and your children’s children!

Now, Musk did contribute almost $2.3 billion in Tesla stock to his foundation in 2022, earning a fat tax break and locking in a huge, tax-free capital gain at the expense of America’s taxpayers. But our rules governing philanthropy are so toothless that he need only disburse a small fraction of these “charitable” assets. His foundation’s nest egg—roughly $7.2 billion at the end of 2022—generated $309 million in investment income that year, and the value of its unsold assets gained at least $373 million. Yet the amount it gave to charity was about the same as the previous year.

Federal law requires private foundations to spend down 5 percent of their assets annually (which includes overhead). Musk’s 2022 obligation was about $358 million—he didn’t give even half that. The government lets foundations average their disbursements over five years, but he’ll have to pick up his pace considerably.

Lest you were hoping the Musk Foundation’s tax documents would reveal sinister causes to which he may have donated, sorry to disappoint. His public giving is unobjectionable. What you have to watch out for, though, is the transfers to donor-advised funds. His foundation has, since 2018, moved more than $75 million over to a fund at Fidelity Charitable. For some unfathomable reason, the government lets such transfers count toward a foundation’s mandatory charitable payout.

Donor-advised funds are even more problematic than private foundations—although both cost taxpayers a fortune and are, as I explained in our must-read American Oligarchy issue, profoundly undemocratic. Not only are the creators not obligated to dole out a minimum of their assets each year, they are not obliged to reveal whom they are giving to. It’s dark money, in other words— convenient for anyone who wants to give secretly to odious nonprofits, including groups willing to subvert the democratic process if it will help put a certain candidate back in the White House.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Donald Trump presidency—you know, that document he knows nothing about even though 140 people from his first administration, including six former Cabinet members, helped create it—is full of delightful little Easter eggs. One provision that has attracted almost no public notice, perhaps because it seems so reasonable, is the authors’ call for the government to create “universal savings accounts” (USAs).

Heck, it even has a patriotic name!

All taxpayers should be allowed to contribute up to $15,000 (adjusted for inflation) of post-tax earnings into Universal Savings Accounts (USAs). The tax treatment of these accounts would be comparable to Roth IRAs. USAs should be highly flexible to allow Americans to save and invest as they see fit, including, for example, investments in a closely held business. Gains from investments in USAs would be non-taxable and could be withdrawn at any
time for any purpose. This would allow the vast majority of American families to save and invest without facing a punitive double layer of taxation.

But let’s think about this. Over the past few decades, Congress passed a series of bills to help Americans save for old age privately via government-subsidized pensions, 401(k)-type plans, and individual retirement accounts—of which Roth IRAs are one type. These tax breaks and program expansions have all been bipartisan, and all have passed with flying colors, because they sound pretty good—much like these universal savings accounts—until you examine them more closely.

And then you have to ask: Good for whom?

Taken collectively, the various retirement subsidies are mind-bogglingly expensive. They are, in fact, the federal government’s single largest tax expenditure, projected to deprive the Treasury of almost $2.5 trillion over five years (2023–2027), according to the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT)—mostly, as I’ve written, to the wildly disproportionate benefit of our most affluent.

In the most extreme case reported thus far (by ProPublica), the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and political puppet-master Peter Thiel used a $1,700 contribution to his Roth IRA—Roths are intended for middle-class savers—decades ago to purchase 1.7 million “founder’s shares” of PayPal at one-tenth of a cent each. Because of that, by 2002, the year eBay purchased PayPal, ProPublica reported, the balance in Thiel’s Roth was up to $28.5 million, with all of those gains nontaxable. He then repeated this cycle with other fledgling companies, culminating in a Roth IRA containing north of $5 billion in assets.

Thiel was an outlier, but ProPublica identified others with IRAs worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Indeed, in 2021, at the request of Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the JCT counted more than 28,000 taxpayers with traditional or Roth IRAs with balances exceeding $5 million—497 of the accounts contained $25 million or more.

What does this have to do with Project 2025? Well, USAs would be Roths on steroids. The $15,000 annual contribution limit is more than twice what people under 50 are allowed to contribute to a Roth. And even the highest earners could contribute to a USA—with Roths, you can only make the full contribution if your income is $146,000 or less. The fact that one needn’t wait until retirement to withdraw funds make USAs all the more compelling.

Heck, if you can afford to put $15,000 a year into an investment fund and let it take a tax-free ride—which the majority of Americans cannot—there would be no reason not to. “High bracket taxpayers would get the biggest tax benefits and could find the disposable savings to participate most easily,” says Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center who has written about the retirement system’s income and race disparities.

Roth IRAs cost taxpayers relatively little, mainly because most people play by the rules. USAs would obliterate the rules, and cost the government a pretty penny.

But the real poison pill is this line: USAs should be highly flexible to allow Americans to save and invest as they see fit, including, for example, investments in a closely held business.

That sounds an awful lot like what Thiel did. Or, for example, a private equity fund manager could put his “carried interest” in a USA at the outset of a project. A CEO could contribute tens of thousands of shares of cheaply acquired stock options before the company goes public. A garage inventor—like Bill Gates once was—could value his company initially at $15,000 and put all of the stock into his USA. It’s not worth much now, but wait 10 years—Jackpot!

“Their tax avoidance potential would be infinitely greater. They would have the potential to exempt multibillion-dollar gains, even trillion-dollar gains, from taxation,” tax attorney Bob Lord and Morris Pearl, chair of Patriotic Millionaires, wrote in a Fortune commentary.

“Allowing taxpayers to invest ‘as they see fit,’ could fuel stuffing…when an individual uses a tax-free account to acquire non-publicly traded assets at prices below fair market value,” Rosenthal told me in an email. (He and New York University law professor Daniel Hemel have written to the Senate Finance Committee, urging lawmakers to crack down on the practice.)

Whether Thiel’s Roth magic trick violates current IRS rules on “prohibited transactions” is a private matter for him and agency lawyers to hash out—but legal minds who have thought it through see some potential red flags. What’s more, the IRS has issued guidance that deems similar-sounding strategies “abusive” and says it views them as “tax avoidance transactions.”

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris regularly asks Americans to imagine Donald Trump without guardrails. Well, imagine Roths without guardrails—larger contributions, no income cap, and no rules about how the funds can be invested. Roth IRAs in particular cost US taxpayers relatively little—about $14 billion a year—mainly because most people play by the rules. USAs would obliterate the rules, and in doing so, cost the government a pretty penny.

But this isn’t just about tax revenues. The bigger problem is how wildly inequitable America’s wealth and income distributions have become over the past four decades, a shift that started with the wealth-friendly tax cuts of the Reagan era. Just this week, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the average 2021 household income for the top-earning 1 percent of taxpayers was more than $3.1 million—42 times the average for the bottom 90 percent, according to an analysis of the data by Americans for Tax Fairness. That’s the most skewed income distribution since CBO began reporting on the data in 1979. Back then, the income disparity was 12 to 1.

America has ceased to be recognizable as a land of opportunity—or rather, one must now ask, a land of opportunity for whom?

USAs would be worth considering if Congress limited them to people with few assets who earn less than $100,000, for example, and imposed strict rules to prevent wealthy investors from gaming them for tax avoidance. As proposed by that nonprofit Trump knows nothing about, they would make our class divisions even worse. And that would truly be unaffordable.

Do you have $100 million? I don’t. Heck, I don’t even have $50 million! Which is why I’m not worried about the likes of President Joe Biden and maybe-president Kamala Harris and Rep. Barbara Lee and Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Bernie Sanders—all of whom have proposed various levies on excessive wealth over the past five years—taxing my unrealized capital gains.

I do have unrealized capital gains. Maybe you do, too. My wife and I bought our house in Oakland, California, almost 20 years ago, and it’s worth more now than when we bought it. We also own shares of some stock funds that have appreciated over the years. Those paper gains are “unrealized” because we haven’t sold the assets. Unless they are sold, and the profits “realized,” they won’t be taxed under current law.

This gives America’s richest families a convenient way to avoid income tax. If you, like our thousand-ish billionaires, have vast stock holdings, you can have your tax lawyers and accountants arrange your affairs so as to minimize your realized income. Then, instead of selling long-held assets to fund your lavish lifestyle—and paying a capital gains tax of 20 percent plus a 3.8 percent surcharge known as the Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT)—you simply borrow against your holdings at a few percent interest, tops.

Guys like Bezos and Bloomberg and Buffett (who needs first names?) take advantage of this tactic, which is why ol’ Warren can accurately say he pays a lower overall tax rate than his secretary does. Per ProPublica‘s analysis, the wealth of the 25 richest Americans totaled $1.1 trillion at the end of 2018, but their combined 2018 tax bill? A scant $1.9 billion.

Several of the aforementioned wealth tax proposals, including Biden’s (which Harris generally supports), aim to shrink our obscene wealth gap by taxing the unrealized gains of the super-rich. But the $100 million Biden-Harris cutoff means that fewer than 10,000 people would be affected.

TikTokkers are having fun with this...

@mayagouliard

They arent talking about us. The capital gains tax has nothing to do with us. Aside from trying to reign in the uber greed of the already mega wealthy in our country. Trickle down economics failed. #harriswalz #capitalgainstax #taxtherich #99percent

♬ original sound – theshamingofjay

The TikTok dad below, Dean, sums up the situation nicely: Taxing unrealized gains “sounds really ridiculous, and it’s very, very complicated,” he says. “But the key thing everyone needs to know, which is why I don’t care about it,” he says, is the cutoff: “I’d love to have this problem. It means I’m freakin’ worth $100 million!”

@alexisanddean

Should we be worried about the proposed capital gains tax by Kamala Harris? #capitalgains #capitalgainstax #kamalaharris #harris2024 #tax #taxes #capitalgains #uspolitics #politics #trump #trump2024 #taxcuts #taxpolicy #economics #useconomy #ustaxes #taxation #econ101 #fintok #finance #finance101 #financialfreedom #financialliteracy #financialeducation #financetiktok #invest #investing #investor

♬ original sound – Alexis and Dean

The people who are freakin’ worth $100 million oppose such a tax, of course. The New York Times reports that a group of venture capitalists calling themselves VCs for Kamala has been whispering in her ear to dissuade her from trying to tax unrealized gains. In a survey, 75 percent of the group’s members reportedly agreed that doing so would “stifle innovation.”

Bob Lord, a tax attorney who advises Patriotic Millionaires, a group of affluent people seeking fairer tax policies, isn’t buying it. Wouldn’t that innovation-stifling argument “apply equally to their realized gains? And to their tax rates?” he asks in an email. “The logic would justify them having a negative tax rate, so we could spur innovation.”

“As I see it,” adds Lord (who helped write Rep. Barbara Lee’s Oligarch Act of 2023, and who has contributed to this publication) “any tax on the ultra-rich is significant to them only for how it impacts their wealth. Taxes don’t impact their spending decisions, their career decisions, college affordability, retirement decisions, or whether a spouse needs to work full time.” 

Those taxes also won’t affect you if you have the following issue:

@dadified

Just a quick PSA #capitalgains #taxes #kamalaharris #repairs

♬ original sound – Freddie

VCs for Kamala did not respond to questions I sent via their media contact, but those rich kids may not have to worry either. Congress has thus far been unwilling to touch unrealized gains, in part because, as Dean noted, it sounds ridiculous—even un-American—when applied to ordinary people.

I know. These aren’t ordinary people. But remember how, when Congress passed $80 billion in funding so the IRS would finally have sufficient resources to go after wealthy, sophisticated tax cheats? And remember how Republican lawmakers, including Donald Trump, widely (and falsely) shrieked that the Biden administration was hiring 87,000 new IRS agents to fan out and harass regular people just like you? Yeah, that was hogwash. But it was politically effective hogwash that helped set the stage for the GOP to claw back tens of billions of that funding as part of a subsequent debt ceiling deal.

Something similar would almost certainly happen if Congress got close to imposing a tax on unrealized gains. It’s simple politics: “We don’t feel in general that it’s fair to tax people when they don’t have the ability to pay,” explains Harvey Dale, an attorney who advises ultra-wealthy clients on tax matters. “Suppose I am a farmer. My family has owned this 1,000-acre spread for four generations, and in a good year I make $30,000 farming. But the land, wow, that could be worth $10 million now.”

(Note: That farmer, lacking $100 million in assets, would be unaffected by the Harris plan.)

The Supreme Court “is all but certain to strike down a tax on wealth, and the wealth transfer tax system we have has effectively been neutered through avoidance strategies.”

One could, of course, write exceptions into the law, “as long as you could figure out what all of those kinds of issues are,” Dale says. Or you could take a different approach: “Why don’t you say, in general, we won’t tax unrealized gains, but we’ll make exceptions and tax them—for example, if the asset in question is freely marketable, like securities, and we won’t do that for people below a certain level of wealth or income.”

As things stand, investors already get a sweetheart deal. When you profit from the sale of an asset today, you pay a far lower tax rate than you would if you made the money by working. Sometimes you pay no tax at all: Uncle Sam, for instance, lets a married couple pocket the first $500,000 in gains from the sale of their primary residence. (Sorry, renters.)

Stock is different. If you sell shares you’ve held at least a year, any profits are taxed at a rate based on your overall income. For 2024, a couple making up to about $94,000 pays no capital gains tax. From there up to $583,750, the rate is 15 percent plus that 3.8 percent NIIT on incomes north of $250,000. Families raking in even more pay 20 percent—23.8 percent with the NIIT.

That’s a great deal for people whose incomes derive largely from investments. It means that a couple with wage income of $1 million in 2024 owes the IRS about $321,000, whereas a couple with $1 million in investment income owes only $181,000. (These simple figures ignore tax credits, deductions, etc.)

Why structure our tax code this way? Some people say it’s to incentivize investment, but I’m skeptical. As long as the government isn’t taking 90 percent of your profits, people will keep investing. What else are you gonna do—shove your excess cash under the mattress? Bury it in the yard?

Another rationale, says Dale, who has taught tax at New York University’s law school for decades, involves “bunching.” If my job pays $100,000 a year and I work for five years, I pay 22 percent annually to the federal government. But suppose capital gains were taxed the same as wages. If an investor who’s held a bunch of stock for four years then sells that stock the fifth year for a $500,000 profit, their income is the same as mine, but because it came all at once, their tax rate would be closer to 28 or 29 percent. “So if you want the theoretical justification, it is to average out the bunching,” Dale told me.

For people who make more than $1 million a year, Biden has proposed taxing capital gains at the same top rate as ordinary income—currently 37 percent. Last week, Harris softened that proposal, saying she’d only raise the rate to 28 percent. She and Biden also both seem to support raising the NIIT to 5 percent on incomes north of $400,000. Which means wealthy investors would pay a total of 33 percent on realized gains.

But you don’t make $1 million a year, so never mind.

Trump hasn’t specified his plan for capital gains—maybe, as with health care, he only has a “concept of a plan.” But Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint created by conservatives from Trump’s first administration, proposes cutting the top rate to 15 percent and eliminating the NIIT. If that happens, America’s one-percenters will pay a tax rate on investment profits that’s less than half the rate they pay on their salaries. And it means wealthy families whose income comes largely from investments will pay a lower tax rate than workers who bring home the nation’s median pay: roughly $60,000 a year.

For hectomillionaires, people with $100 million or more, the Biden-Harris plan would impose a minimum tax of 25 percent on all income, realized and unrealized. But that faces long odds, because even if Congress passes it, the Supreme Court might slap it down.

As the Tax Policy Center’s Steven Rosenthal has written, in the case of Moore v. United States, four of the justices “expressly declared that realization is a constitutional requirement” for taxation. If either Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Brett Kavanaugh joins with their fellow conservatives, most of those wealth tax proposals would be in trouble.

Lawyers specializing in trusts and estates have long been engaged in “an ongoing, very complicated game to reduce the taxes paid by the wealthy.”

Tax attorney Lord sees a window: “The court is all but certain to strike down a tax on wealth, and the wealth transfer tax system we have has effectively been neutered through avoidance strategies,” he says, “so that leaves a tax on true economic income [including unrealized gains] as the only plausible option.” 

Dale says he likes the Harris plan, and “it’s not clear that SCOTUS would declare unconstitutional a 25 percent tax on unrealized gains of people whose net worth is over $100 million, but it’s also not clear that SCOTUS would approve or sustain such a tax.”

That uncertainty, he adds, will affect how Congress views the proposal: “At least some senators and representatives would decide to vote against it because of its possible unconstitutionality. Others in Congress will vote against it because they will dislike such a tax.”

Dale’s NYU colleague, former Biden Treasury official and tax expert Lily Batchelder, is more optimistic about the Supreme Court sustaining a minimum income tax for extremely high-wealth individuals: “The majority in Moore expressed concern about how the petitioners’ arguments would deprive the government and the American people of trillions of dollars in tax revenue by eliminating a vast array of existing provisions, including multiple provisions that already tax unrealized income,” she notes in an email. “I think the case educated the justices about the ‘blast radius’ that would result if they read some sort of realization requirement into the Constitution.”

It’s always been somewhat of a challenge to effectively tax the superwealthy, who wield political power and guard their hoards as jealously as Smaug, the Tolkien dragon. But Congress isn’t without options. It could, as Sens. Wyden and Angus King have proposed, restrict abusive trusts that allow billionaires to transfer massive sums to their heirs without paying a dime in tax. And lawmakers could cap federally subsidized retirement accounts to prevent wealthy retirees from taking excessive government handouts.

They also could do away with carried interest once and for all and strengthen the rules for Roth IRAs—retirement accounts meant for the middle class—that have famously allowed Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel to parlay a $1,700 retirement fund contribution into billions of tax-free dollars.

And they could, as Biden has proposed, eliminate the socially corrosive “step-up in basis” rule: Suppose your father bought $5,000 worth of stock in 1960 and now it’s worth $5 million. If he dies and leaves it to you, under today’s rules, the “cost basis” of the stock—what it cost him originally—resets to the current market value. Boom! Your family just sidestepped taxes on almost $5 million in investment profits.

His estate wouldn’t have to pay any tax on that transfer, either: As of 2024, the IRS lets a couple give their kids up to $27.2 million, free of any gift or estate tax. This generous exemption is yet another rule that Congress could target. In fact, it’s set to revert to half that amount at the end of 2025, so I guess we’ll see whether our lawmakers will stand up to the oligarchs.

“There are $5 trillion of offsets in the president’s budget that raise revenue exclusively from large corporations and individuals earning more than $400,000 in income,” Batchelder points out. “Every member of Congress has different views about which of these options are most appealing, so the most doable reforms will depend on who are the marginal votes in Congress after the election, but there are many, many options.”

Dale figures the best way to shrink the wealth gap is to target inheritances—closing loopholes, restricting trusts, and generally strengthening the rules on intergenerational wealth transfers, which are taxed at only about 2 percent overall, per Batchelder’s 2020 analysis. The wealth industry will find workarounds, and you’ll never get a perfect system, he says, but you could make inheritance taxes harder to circumvent.

“A nontrivial portion of my practice was estate planning,” a field that has long engaged in “an ongoing, very complicated game to reduce the taxes paid by the wealthy,” Dale says. “It would be sweet, I suppose, to say, here is one simple thing that could be done that your readers can understand. But the loopholes are very, very sophisticated. If I tell you that the right thing to do is to repeal 664(c)(1), your eyes would glaze over. But there are trillions of dollars in that simple thought.”