Harris has an exotic plan to tax the rich. But it’s not enough.

Taxing unrealized capital gains is a desperation move.

It is hard to think of any facet of American life that Democrats don’t want to spend more money on: child care, health care, housing, higher education … I won’t belabor it; you’ve listened to the speeches, too.

If you ask Democrats how they will pay for all this bounty, the answer is always the same: make the rich and corporations pay their fair share. The details of how we’re going to tax the rich have evolved somewhat over the years — it used to be rate hikes, but with a top marginal tax rate of 37 percent, big rate hikes would take high earners in states with substantial income taxes close to 50 percent, the point at which higher taxes might start to cost the treasury money. Eventually, as tax rates rise, some people decide it’s not worth the effort and risk to earn an extra dollar that benefits the government more than them.

So in recent years, the conversation has focused on more exotic plans to tax rich people’s total wealth, or their unrealized capital gains (accumulated gains in assets that haven’t been sold yet). The United States has historically taxed most of those gains only upon the assets’ sale. President Joe Biden’s administration has put forth a plan to institute a 25 percent minimum tax on people who have $100 million in assets, including their unrealized capital gains, and last week, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign said she is adopting that plan.

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The good news is that Harris understands she needs to raise more revenue. Our national debt now stands at 99 percent of GDP, and this year’s budget deficit is projected to be 7 percent of GDP, almost $2 trillion. Those numbers are of course projected to rise as more baby boomers retire and start tapping Social Security and Medicare. So unless politicians find some spending they’re willing to cut (other than the 0.3 percent of GDP we spent on foreign aid last year), we’re going to need to hike taxes on the rich significantly to put our national books in some sort of order. And the rich can spare the money more easily than the middle class.

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The bad news is that Harris, like Biden, has pledged not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year. That is simply not enough to fund our existing commitments and an expansive Democratic agenda.

Though this limitation probably seems quite reasonable to six-figure couples in expensive metropolitan areas, earning $400,000 puts you in the top 3 percent of all households. Yes, that group earns a disproportionate share of national income — the top 5 percent of taxpayers take home 42 percent of total adjusted gross income. (Sorry, I was unable to find data that broke out........

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