Ezekiel Arnold

Should billionaires be allowed to exist?

The estate tax already exists, and it's already a wealth cap of sorts. The federal government taxes large estates at 40%, and several states pile on their own. [Tax Policy Center on the estate tax](https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-estate-tax). Fortunes don't survive many generations of that intact. The old money families everyone pictures are the exception, shredded by division among heirs and taxation. If dynastic wealth is the concern, the fix is tightening the estate tax and closing the trust loopholes, not a new category of banned person. We already built the mechanism. Use it.

Should unrealized capital gains be taxed?

I built my company over 22 years, and on paper it is worth enough that a tax like this would notice me if the threshold ever drifts down, which thresholds always do. For founders, most wealth is shares you cannot sell without losing control of the company your employees depend on, so a tax on unrealized gains means selling pieces of the business every year just to pay the IRS. Startup employees get hit too: engineers holding illiquid options would owe real cash on paper value they cannot touch, forcing them to walk away from the equity they earned. The [Tax Policy Center](https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/) has warned about exactly these liquidity crunches, and they are not theoretical, they are arithmetic. A tax bill should not force a founder to choose between paying Washington and keeping her company.

The Maine and Vermont example is interesting, but those are two small states with unusual politics. I would want to see how prison voting works somewhere bigger and more politically charged before calling it reassuringly boring everywhere. Still, the burden of proof should be on the ban, not on the right.

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