Ray Madoff

The 1986 Tax Act was put forth by President Ronald Reagan.

And I think that what he did was he brought down top rates but equalized capital gains and ordinary income.

So it's definitely something that can be done.

And one of the things I talk about in my book is how Andrew Mellon, who was one of the early treasury secretaries and was very conservative, a staunch anti-tax the rich kind of guy, wrote himself that he saw no reason for taxing capital less than labor.

And indeed, he thought capital should be taxed much higher than labor because capital is something that grows without anyone's effort, whereas labor is something that requires a lot of work.

And so and so I think that this is it's definitely doable and we've had it in our not so distant past.

One argument that you'll often hear, somebody will get very wonky and they'll say, the statistics show that if you raise capital gains rates above a certain amount, then you stop raising money because people stop selling their property.

Something like that, right?

But the reason that that is the case is because we allow people to avoid capital gains by avoiding sales.

The problem was that loophole.

If you close that loophole, then people will not be able to avoid capital gains.

And that is one of these arguments that looks and sounds really persuasive, but really isn't when you look at it.

So the first thing, as we talked about, is to make sure that unrealized gains have a time of realization.

So that should be whenever the property is transferred.

That's the first step.

Brings coherence to the system.

Absolutely.

When you change title, you're subject to tax.

Whenever somebody no longer owns that property, that's when the gains should be tallied for that person.

The second thing that I would do