Make Americans Wealthy Again!
Washington debases the dollar, then taxes the inflation it manufactured as if it were profit — and since 1982 it has taxed your “gains” before returning a dime of your own principal. These are two takings, and one principle ends them both: tax profit, never debasement. I'll work to index savings and investment to the dollar's decline, count the saver's own money first, and give every family a simple after-tax account with no warden at the door.
The argument
A Utah family buys an asset in 2010 and sells it in 2026. The dollar has lost roughly a third of its purchasing power in between, so the sticker price has risen — and the IRS taxes the entire difference as “gain,” though the inflation portion is not profit at all. It is the family's own principal, restated in smaller dollars and taxed as if it were income: a tax on principal disguised as a tax on profit. Government debases the currency, the debasement inflates the price of everything you own, and the government then taxes the inflation it manufactured — the arsonist billing the fire victims. And Washington already concedes the point everywhere it is visible to voters: it indexes the tax brackets, and it indexes its own inflation-protected bonds — denying it only where the phantom hides, in the basis of your savings. Tax profit, and never debasement.
The plan
- Create the Make Americans Wealthy Again account: after-tax dollars, up to $10,000 a year per person (indexed from enactment), open to every American from birth — no income tests, no penalties, no required distributions.
- Index every contribution and everything it earns from the day it is made, and let withdrawals come out first-in, first-out at full indexed value — so your own principal returns untaxed and only real profit is ever taxed.
- Index the basis of every capital asset for inflation, so the IRS taxes the real gain and never again the phantom.
- Count interest honestly — tax only the real component, the nominal interest minus the year's inflation, floored at zero.
- Restore the pre-1982 first-in, first-out ordering for annuity withdrawals, repealing the gains-first rule that puts the taxman ahead of the saver's own principal.