Brian Galle (Berkeley; Google Scholar) presents How To Tax The Rich: Options For 2025 And Beyond at UCLA on January 22, 2026, as part of its Colloquium on Tax Policy and Public Finance:

How should we pay for the future? This monograph describes and compares major proposals to reform federal individual income and transfer (that is, estate and gift) taxes. The Biden administration and senior Senate Democrats have outlined plans for a “minimum income tax” on multi-millionaires in which very wealthy households (generally those worth over $100 million) would be taxed on the value of appreciated but unsold property. The administration’s proposal was dubbed the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax, or BMIT. Yet some other Senators, and advocates outside government, have pointed to possible constitutional limits on that proposal, as well as offering critiques of its economic and political merits.

Critics of the BMIT have proffered a set of alternatives, most of them more limited versions of the same idea. For example, Senator Mark Warner has proposed that we treat borrowing by very wealthy households with appreciated property as a partial sale of that property, and a pair of well-regarded academics have written up a more detailed analysis of how that policy might operate. Other commentators suggest that the U.S. reverse its long-standing, but widely criticized, policy of wiping away tax obligations for appreciated property at the death of its owner, which tax mavens call the “basis step-up.” A bill introduced by the late Bill Pascrell would have implemented that idea by treating death as a deemed sale of the decedent’s asset. And a third idea, favored by some influential academics such as Larry Summers, would be to just raise the capital gains rates imposed on the sale of investment assets.