Tax law is where power hides. The rate cut gets announced; the bracket compression that keeps your rate high while dropping theirs is buried in a technical definition nobody reads. This statute refuses that game. Every rate, every bracket, every deduction cap is stated plainly — capital gains taxed as income, the stepped-up basis loophole closed, the IRS actually funded to audit the people who can afford to hide.
Money made by working was taxed at a higher rate than money made by owning. That single choice is most of the story of American inequality.Check it
The stepped-up basis loophole let a lifetime of untaxed gains pass at death completely untaxed, forever — the largest fortunes were literally never taxed at all.Check it
The IRS was deliberately starved until it could only audit the people too poor to fight back, while the complex returns of the wealthy went unexamined.Check it
And tax cuts for the top were passed by simple-majority reconciliation, then defended as untouchable — while the debt ceiling was used to hold the country hostage.Check it
Unlike other nonprofits, churches and religious organizations aren’t required to file the Form 990 — the annual return that makes a tax-exempt group’s finances public. A church can hold substantial wealth and reveal almost nothing about where the money comes from or where it goes.Check it
And a trust can be written to run forever: in states that repealed the old limit on perpetual trusts, a founder’s instructions can govern the money for centuries after death, adapting to nothing.Check it
Capital gains and investment income are taxed as ordinary income, with a transition. Owning stops being taxed more gently than working.
Stepped-up basis is closed — deemed realization at death and gift. The infinite tax holiday for inherited wealth is over.
Only four permitted deductions, each defined with a cap. The loophole industry loses its raw material.
The IRS gets a mandatory funding floor and mandatory audit rates at the top. And every rate here is locked behind a 60% supermajority — no more partisan tax cuts through reconciliation.
Now any tax-exempt organization — church or foundation — above $1 million in yearly income or $1 million in assets files the same public accounting as everyone else; the small congregation and neighborhood charity stay exempt. (CS-4 Fight 17.)
And no dead hand rules forever: 90 years on, the living can ask a state judge to update a founder’s frozen terms — approved only when the change stays faithful to the founder’s original purpose. Universities, hospitals, and pensions carry on untouched. (CS-4 Fight 18.)
Wages were taxed at full rates; capital gains got a preferential rate. The more of your income came from owning things, the less you paid.Check it
Capital gains and investment income are treated as ordinary income, on a defined transition timeline. A dollar is a dollar, however you got it. Pass-through income gets the same treatment, with anti-abuse rules.
Stepped-up basis erased a lifetime of unrealized gains at death — so the largest fortunes in the country passed to heirs having never been taxed once.Check it
Deemed realization at death and at gift closes the loophole entirely. Plus an inheritance tax above a $5 million threshold — with an operating continuity exemption so a family farm or working business isn’t forced into liquidation.
Thousands of pages of deductions, credits, and carve-outs — each one lobbied for, and usable only by those who could pay someone to find them.Check it
Four permitted deductions, each with a specific definition and a cap. Simplicity is itself an anti-corruption measure — a code nobody can read is a code written for the people who hire readers.
A defunded IRS audited the poor, whose returns were simple, and left the complex returns of the wealthy alone.Check it
Mandatory minimum audit rates and a mandatory IRS funding floor. Enforcement can no longer be quietly killed by starving the agency — the people best able to hide are the people who now get looked at.
Profits were shifted to tax havens, and the corporate rate applied equally to a corner store and a trillion-dollar firm.Check it
A progressive corporate rate schedule, plus a global minimum tax and defined foreign-income treatment. Moving a mailbox to Ireland stops being a tax strategy.
Partisan tax cuts for the wealthy passed on simple-majority reconciliation, and were then defended as permanent.Check it
Rates can change — but only by 60% supermajority, requiring genuine cross-party agreement. That protection matters more than any single rate.
The trust fund was a perpetual hostage, raided rhetorically and threatened in every budget fight.Check it
The trust fund is ring-fenced with a benefit floor and real enforcement. It stops being a bargaining chip.
A procedural quirk let a faction threaten national default to extract concessions it couldn’t win by voting.Check it
Void. Treasury has the authority to pay debts Congress already incurred. Hostage-taking with the full faith and credit of the United States is finished. Property tax standards — land valuation, assessment caps, and long-term owner exemptions — round out the framework.
A tariff is a tax — you pay it at the register when the importer passes it on. But Congress handed the power away decades ago in technical trade statutes, so one person could raise your costs by declaring aluminum a national security threat. No vote, no debate, no accountability. The thing the Revolution was fought over, given away in fine print.Check it
The taxing power can’t be delegated. Congress sets tariffs itself, or they don’t exist. A President can negotiate, and can administer what Congress enacted — collect it, classify goods, chase evasion — but cannot create, raise, or extend a tax. Saying “national security” doesn’t change what a tax is. The only exception is armed attack while Congress physically can’t meet, capped at 90 days and void if Congress declines. Existing delegations expire in two years, and anyone who paid can sue.
Two moves made a fortune permanent. First, discounts: put stocks and cash into a family partnership, gift slices to your children, then claim the assets are worth 30–40% less because they’re “hard to sell” — an illiquidity you created yourself. A 1993 IRS ruling opened this and a 2016 attempt to close it was withdrawn a year later. Second, the perpetual trust: estate tax is triggered by death, and a trust never dies. Assets went in once and passed down a bloodline for centuries, never taxed again.Check it
The honest discount survives — a real minority share of a real business is still worth less. The manufactured one doesn’t: if your family still controls it, there’s no discount for “lack of control,” and assets that were liquid before you wrapped them stay valued as liquid. You can’t create a restriction and then cite it. And trusts over $10 million are taxed on their gains every 35 years — roughly the interval at which an ordinary family gets taxed as wealth passes down. Moving the trust offshore, rewriting it, or splitting it into ten smaller ones doesn’t reset the clock. Disability trusts, minors’ trusts, and charitable trusts are untouched.
The inheritance tax spared the family farm and the family business — as it should. But “operating business” had no ceiling. An heir to a multi-billion-dollar private conglomerate could clock 19 hours a week in a “management role” for ten years and pass the entire fortune untaxed, using a rule written to protect a working farm to shelter a dynasty.Check it
The exemption protects continuity, not scale. It fully covers the first $15 million of operating-business or farm value — far above any real family farm — indexed to inflation. Above that, the tax is owed, but a genuinely operating heir never faces a forced sale: they can pay it in equal installments over fifteen years from the business’s earnings. And one active sibling’s hours can’t shelter another’s passive stake. The working family is protected in full; the dynastic fortune pays.
A fund manager or business owner could pay themselves a modest “reasonable” salary — taxed as ordinary income — and take the real money as a distribution they’d call a return on capital, taxed far lower. As long as the small salary sat inside a broad industry benchmark, the burden fell on the IRS to prove the split was rigged. The same move that powers the carried-interest loophole.Check it
The safe harbor is a floor, not a shield. Once your distributions run past three times your claimed salary, the presumption flips: now you must prove, by clear and convincing evidence, that the salary reflects the real value of your work. And where a business’s income comes from an owner’s own skill and reputation rather than capital they actually put at risk, the excess is presumed to be wages — taxed as ordinary income. Your labor is labor income, no matter how the paperwork dresses it up.
This is the plain-language version. The binding text is CS-4, which implements Article Seven, Sections 2 and 6, and (for organizations) Article Thirty-One, of the Constitution.
This is your country’s law. Help shape the next draft of it.
