Ray Madoff

I think that we all understand now that the problem is that wealth owners have enormous acquisitions of wealth and they're not paying tax.

And so the answer, the obvious answer seems to be let's tax their wealth.

And particularly for people who have publicly traded stock where we can so easily see how much wealth they have.

The problem is that sometimes these easy answers don't actually work, and I feel that's the case with the wealth tax.

On a federal level, there's a very serious problem about whether the Supreme Court would find it unconstitutional.

We have every reason to think that the Supreme Court would based on a recent case.

And, you know, they didn't have to go that way.

But there was a recent case, Moore, where they basically said, oh, yeah, we might very quite well find this unconstitutional.

So on a federal level, there's a real problem.

And then on state level, there's a problem because states, people can easily move from one state to another.

And we see this happening everywhere.

They can move countries.

Well, I disagree about that.

In Europe, you can move countries very easily because in Europe, you have the EU, you have free transport, and you don't have a unified tax system.

I do not think we're going to have a serious problem in the United States of people leaving the United States and becoming citizens of Qatar or other countries.

Well, that's a separate—corporations is a whole separate issue, but I think that right now we're talking about individual taxes.

I want to add one thing about the wealth tax that makes the wealth tax particularly problematic.

which is the problem of valuation, as you mentioned earlier.

We tend to think of it as like publicly traded companies, but lots of people own these highly complex partnership interests that are like 50 levels deep of partners, and people might own levels at all different places.

And the idea that we're going to have a strong enough IRS