Dead billionaires should pay higher taxes

Vanitas Still Life with a Skull, a Book and Roses, c.1630, from the collection of Nationalmuseum Stockholm. | Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images Americans want to soak the rich .

But few have strong opinions about precisely how.

Indeed, even among our nation’s most impassioned class warriors, contemplating the fine details of tax policy is an eccentric pastime.

In an interview earlier this month , Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Megan Romer called for taxing “the hell out of” the wealthy.

When asked exactly what that meant, Romer conceded that she had no “solid answer.” Key takeaways • A loophole in the tax code allows the rich to escape capital gains taxes by dying. • Closing that loophole would raise a lot of revenue while also making other investment taxes more effective. • A tax on the unrealized capital gains of the dead poses fewer logistical and judicial challenges than many other approaches to soaking the rich.

On one level, this is understandable.

Anyone can freeze up when put on the spot.

And in any case, Romer believes in collective ownership of the means of production.

When your preferred tax policy is 1,000 times more radical than anything Congress would entertain, sweating its particulars might not feel urgent.

Still, there’s more than one way to soak a fat cat.

And some approaches work better than others.

Thus, for non-revolutionaries, thinking through the details of a “tax the hell out of them” platform seems worthwhile.

Many of that platform’s potential components have already attracted widespread attention.

Wealth taxes — which expropriate a certain fraction of the super-rich’s assets each year — are on the ballot in California and the progressive agenda in Washington, DC.