Or so says yet another proposed scheme from our elected officials. This one involves a truly AWFUL scheme—in theory, and in any possible practical application of said scheme—to tax UNREALIZED capital gains.

Naturally, the tax is, again in theory, to be structured to affect “only” billionaires, but we don’t have to go into a soliloquy on how that tends to trickle down. The short point is how to actually make it work? The related short point is that in practice this works rather neatly on public companies since a 12/31 value is easily calculated. But the funny thing about people with liquid assets over $1 billion is that they employ very smart tax people. And one obvious dodge here is to take your company private and fight every year about what it is worth. My guess is the IRS will be undermanned here by Private Equity, which seems to have more than its fair share of billionaires. Genius.