Originally published at: After racking up $7.8 trillion in public debt, Trump tells Congress not to pay it | Boing Boing
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I have an even better idea than cuts to the things taxpayers want their tax dollars to pay for: introduce progressive taxation of capital gains and increase the marginal rate on wages in excess of $1M/yr back to what they were in the 1950’s.
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“Conservatives” are very selective about what they want to preserve or return to. It’s almost like it was a lie or something. 
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Maybe they should start here:
The senators expressed concern that defense contractors were securing profits of 40 percent, and sometimes as high as 4,000 percent.
“Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and TransDigm are among the offenders,” the senators wrote, “dramatically overcharging the Department and U.S. taxpayers while reaping enormous profits, seeing their stock prices soar, and handing out massive executive compensation packages.”
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The Pentagon has requested a record $842 billion for the next fiscal year, about half of which is expected to go toward private defense contractors.
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Increase capital gains to equal the maximum marginal income tax rate and make them payable when those assets are used as collateral. That would solve a lot of problems, but unlike a wealth tax it leave the IRS out of the thorny issue of valuing poorly traded assets.
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Nothing new for this notorious deadbeat.
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I’ve thought that somebody should make a book cataloging all the times he has shafted his creditors and contractors and call it “The Art of Reneging on the Deal.”
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But but… siphoning public money to their private friends, while pushing the tax burden further down the ladder is what Republicans and “centerists” are really all about.
Next someone would want to restrict senators from own big chunks of defense company stocks! 
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Trump is notorious for not paying his bills, so this all tracks.
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That could be a worthwhile endeavor. Or it may already have been created with a less-creative title.
There is a book about all his lawsuits, titled “Plaintiff in chief: a portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 lawsuits”, although it only includes what was true up through 2019 when it was written.
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That sounds good. Having massive unrealized (and untaxed) capital gains, while using it just like money is a huge loophole.
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This is such an easy win. And probably would’ve killed something like the Twitter acquisition.
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Trump’s personal hypocrisy aside, running up huge debts and then claiming the government has no money to perform its functions has been the Republican policy for over a generation now. MAGA really is just where they were going anyway.
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Suddenly imagining a genre-bending graphic novel about an undead Eisenhower leading a ragtag Leverage-style band of misfits in “recovering” profits from defense contractors. working title M.I.C. Drop?
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Conservatives: Trump is a successful businessman, and he’ll run the country like one of his businesses!
Everyone else: Yeah, that’s what we’re afraid of.
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THIS. I mean, how the hell does one drive a freaking casino into backruptcy!?!? (let alone doing it four times…)
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Money laundering front is the rational explanation. The only other possibility is epically incompetent management resulting in the worst service experience imaginable at a hotel and casino.
As it’s often said,
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I can understand that all too well.
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I’m not sure that is actually different to / simpler than a wealth tax, because changing the boundary conditions for when a capital gain is realised (and how many times the same asset can be taxed) has the same technical problems as any other method for getting at wealth as opposed to income.
But the goal shouldn’t be to find a simple way to tax the rich; they employ armies of tax-avoidance staff, so we can take for granted that’s never going to happen. However much it costs to pin them down, that just needs to be tacked on to their eventual bill.
That being said, one measure that is simple is a 100% tax on the value of estates beyond, say, $100m. And most people are so brainwashed that they think this would be morally wrong, which shows what the real obstacle is to taxing the rich.
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