Blow Up the Tax Code: The Rigged System That Keeps Workers Paying and the Wealthy Skating

Let Me Be Very Clear About What the Tax Code Actually Is

It is not a funding mechanism for the government. It is a transfer of power from the people who work to the people who already have. And it has been engineered that way deliberately, loophole by loophole, over decades of campaign contributions and congressional favors.

I said it in 2008 and I will keep saying it. Shoot the tax code into the sun.

The Numbers Are Not Subtle

Look at what we are actually living with right now:

• 100 Americans hold approximately $5.5 trillion in assets
• 170 million Americans, the entire bottom half of the country, hold $4.3 trillion
• The assets at the top can be borrowed against tax-free while ordinary workers get taxed on every dollar they earn

This is not a market outcome. This is a policy outcome. The people with the most wealth also have the most access to the people who write the laws. They buy the loopholes. They fund the campaigns. The tax code reflects who paid for it.

Executive Stock Compensation Is a Legal Wealth Extraction Scheme

I have been vocal about this for years and I am not backing down. When you pay a CEO primarily in stock grants, you allow them to accumulate massive wealth without ever triggering a taxable event. No salary. No ordinary income. Just appreciation, deferred indefinitely, borrowed against when needed.

Aaron Judge gets a salary. He pays taxes on that salary like every other working person in America. Why should a Fortune 500 CEO operate under a completely different set of rules?

• Stock grants at the top create tax-advantaged wealth accumulation unavailable to ordinary workers
• C-suite executives control compensation committees and set their own terms
• The result is a legal system that punishes income from work and rewards the ownership of assets

If you want stock in the company you run, go buy it on the open market like everyone else.

There Is No Free Market. Stop Pretending.

The phrase free market has become a shield used to deflect any serious conversation about what is actually happening in the American economy. You want to talk free markets? Show me the competition.

When every major sector is dominated by three or four enormous corporations that generate enough cash to acquire political power, and then use that power to write the rules of their own industry, you do not have a free market. You have a managed oligarchy with better branding.

Dylan Rattigan walked away from journalism because he got so beaten down covering this reality. He is coming back, and he is saying the same thing I have been saying. No meaningful capitalism exists without competition. What we have instead is competition policy written by the people who benefit most from crushing competition.

The California Wealth Tax Is a Sideshow

Every time politicians propose a wealth tax, I want you to understand why it will not work. The people it targets wrote the laws. They will find the exits before the ink is dry. It is political theater designed to look like action while the underlying system remains completely intact.

Real reform means:

• Eliminating the loopholes that exist solely because someone wrote a check to a politician
• Taxing compensation as compensation regardless of whether it comes as salary or stock
• Enforcing antitrust policy aggressively enough to actually restore competitive markets
• Recognizing that the federal regulatory apparatus serves the same function as the tax code, protecting incumbents and burying challengers

Until that happens, the people who work for a living will keep subsidizing a system designed by and for the people who do not have to.