A Billionaire CEO Wants a Wealth Tax. Guess Who Actually Gets Hurt.

Scott Kirby Has Some Thoughts on Your Money

Let me set the scene. The CEO of United Airlines, a man who runs a company propped up by bailout money and government goodwill, decided to go on record calling for a national wealth tax. Not just any wealth tax. He wants certain levels of inheritance taxed at 100%. He even admitted it has to be national because if you do it state by state, the rich will just move.

So the play is to trap them. Nowhere to run. Just hand it over.

I want to be real clear about something. This is not a working-class hero moment. This is political theater, and the people who will end up holding the bag are not the ultra-wealthy. They never are.

Every Country That Tried This Already Failed

France tried a wealth tax. Twelve European nations have tried versions of it. You know what they all have in common? They all repealed it. Not because they suddenly became compassionate toward rich people. Because the math did not work.

Here is why wealth taxes collapse every single time:

• The wealthy leave. Capital is mobile. People are mobile. You cannot legislate loyalty to a tax jurisdiction.
• Valuation becomes a weapon. Private businesses, real estate, art collections. Good luck taxing something you cannot price accurately.
• Revenue evaporates. The projections that politicians sell you never match reality because behavior changes the moment the law passes.

We already watched this play out with corporate tax inversions during the Obama years. We had the highest corporate tax rate in the world and companies engineered acquisitions by smaller foreign firms just to move their headquarters to Dublin and pay 12% instead. That is not a scandal. That is basic math.

The Real Hustle Inside the Tax Code

Here is the part that nobody in the mainstream press wants to say out loud. Our 70,000-plus page tax code is not complicated because taxes are complicated. It is complicated because complexity is the product being sold.

Every page of that code represents a deal. A negotiation between a moneyed interest and a politician who needed a check cashed.

• Small business owners and salaried workers get taxed at higher effective rates than hedge fund managers exploiting carried interest rules.
• That disparity is not an accident. It is a feature purchased by people with access.
• A national wealth tax will not fix this. It will add a new layer of loopholes that the connected will immediately purchase.

Mark my words. If a wealth tax passes at any level, within two budget cycles there will be exceptions, carve-outs, and special provisions that the well-connected will qualify for and the rest of you will not. That is how this machine works. It has always worked this way.

The Fix They Do Not Want You Talking About

The answer is not more complexity piled on top of a corrupt system. The answer is radical simplicity:

• One rate. Flat. Everyone pays the same percentage regardless of where their income comes from.
• No carried interest exceptions. No charitable foundation shelters that let billionaires control their wealth in perpetuity while avoiding estate taxes.
• No 70,000 pages of special treatment for people who can afford to buy their way in.

A real tax system treats every American equally under the law. What we have now does not do that. And a wealth tax, despite how righteous it sounds when a CEO says it at a dinner party, will not change that. It will just create a shinier new mechanism for the same old corruption.