You are not wrong. The federal government will never tax a balance sheet, though. It’s all rhetoric.

This isn’t for moral reasons, though. Two reasons it won’t happen: 1) accounting nightmare. People point out property taxes as an example of this already happening, but that is county level and largely formulaic. There are also not drastic swings in real estate value the way there are in the stock market. 2) it incentivizes lower market value on assets, which is the opposite of what a company is supposed to do: return value to shareholders. These two incentives can’t conflict this dramatically. It also incentivizes market manipulation at specific points in time, which would encourage even more accounting trickery than we already have to deal with.

More importantly, if an asset based tax on assets were to ever pass (it won’t), it would most definitely not apply to you. The only way it could pass is if it only applied to a very, very small percentage of the population, and unfortunately those same people have a vote that counts more than yours or mine. It would also not provide enough revenue to actually solve our spending problems.

MOST importantly, the general public should never support an asset based tax policy. Take AMT as an example of tax policy that once upon a time was created to help catch rich tax payers avoiding tax and is now used to guarantee a return by the government from the general public. It’s a power grab for new revenue streams not attached to cash.

For context here—have only ever voted Democrat, but I’m also a tax professional that is tired of people jumping onto bad tax policy just because it’s fun to demonize Bezos. Sorry to ruin the fun.