Modern Core Group

How do you text "okay" but in the rudest way possible?

THE IDEA IS SIMPLE. THE DEBATE BEHIND IT HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR DECADES.

Stop taxing what people earn. Start taxing what people spend. The more you buy, the more you contribute. The less you spend, the less you owe. No filing. No W-2s. No April deadlines. No agency with the power to audit your entire financial life because a number on a form did not line up with a number on another form.

On the surface the logic is clean. A consumption tax treats every dollar the same regardless of where it came from. The billionaire who spends $10 million a year pays tax on $10 million. The worker who earns $60,000 and spends $55,000 pays on what they actually use. The person who saves aggressively pays less because they are consuming less. The incentive structure rewards building and saving instead of penalizing earning.

The argument against it is also worth understanding honestly. Critics point out that lower income households spend a higher percentage of what they make on necessities, meaning a flat consumption tax can hit them harder proportionally than a progressive income tax would. Proponents counter that exempting essentials like groceries and medicine addresses that concern directly.

What is not debatable is that the current system spends billions of dollars administering itself, employs armies of specialists whose entire job is navigating its complexity, and still manages to collect far less from people with access to sophisticated planning than from people who just get a W-2 and file on TurboTax.

Whether a consumption tax is the right answer is genuinely worth discussing. That the current system works better for some people than others is not really up for debate.

What’s a “rich people thing” you experienced once and immediately understood why rich people love it?

YOU PAID OFF THE MORTGAGE. THE BILL NEVER STOPPED COMING.

Thirty years. Every payment made. Every refinance navigated. Every tight month pushed through because the goal was always the same. Own it. Free and clear. Finally yours.

And then the statement arrives in January showing $10,000, $12,000, $15,000 in property taxes due for the year. Same as last year. Same as the year before. Same as every year from here until the day you die or the day you can no longer afford to stay in the home you technically own.

That is not ownership. That is the most expensive rental agreement in America dressed up in a deed.

Real ownership means the obligation ends. You buy the car, you pay it off, nobody sends you a monthly statement for the right to keep parking it in your own driveway. But the home you spent three decades paying for comes with a permanent invoice attached to it that grows over time, resets when the assessor decides your neighborhood got more valuable, and can ultimately remove you from the property if you cannot keep pace with it.

There are retired Americans on fixed incomes being taxed out of homes they have lived in for forty years. Not because they were irresponsible. Not because they overspent. Because the tax on a paid-off home climbed past what a fixed income can carry and nobody in the system finds that particularly troubling.

Most developed nations do not place this level of ongoing financial burden on people who simply want to remain in the home they already bought and paid for. The idea that you can lose your home to the government for non-payment of taxes on a property you fully own is worth examining much more seriously than it ever gets examined.

What screams, “I’m an adult that still hasn’t grown up!”?