There is a plague upon the Earth! Every day of our lives your blood and mine is being sucked by a growing army of parasitic drones. You may barely notice their effect right now, but if the drones are not stopped your children and grandchildren will be condemned to lives of servile poverty.
If it weren’t for the constant brainwashing with which we are flooded by their propaganda machine it would be obvious to all of us that a new and fairer tax scheme is needed in order to halt the increasing dominance of our societies by the parasitic drone class of Non-Working Rich. But Robert Reich’s tax proposals don’t go nearly far enough. We urgently need now, in every country of the world, to limit the extent to which wealth can be passed to those who haven’t in any way earned it.
My own (as yet incomplete) proposal for a universal asset transfer tax is intended to be both transparent and almost impossible to evade. It would tax any transfer of assets between individuals as income on both sides based on a declared value whose artificial reduction to avoid tax would be discouraged by the provision that the state would always have the option to acquire the asset for a price equal to whatever value was declared by its recipient. In order not to unduly slow down the economy, transfers between corporations for the purpose of economic production, purchase of materials, and more effective business structuring might be treated differently (although some sort of lower rate Tobin tax might still actually be useful to control volatility), and then there might be a need to disqualify some such transfers as merely re-formulations of personal transfers for the purpose of tax-avoidance.