The American fiscal system extracts $5T while leaving $3T in costs unpriced
It taxes work heavily, wealth lightly, and waste not at all. It creates armies of compliance specialists whose sole function is to help those who can afford them avoid obligations that others cannot escape. The system is not broken by accident — it is broken by design, designed over decades by those with the resources to bend legislation toward their advantage. Three structural failures sit at the core.
The base is wrong, the incidence is wrong, the enforcement is wrong
Every decade brings proposals to fix the tax code. Rates are adjusted. Deductions are capped. Credits are introduced. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 broadened the base and lowered rates — within five years, the loopholes regenerated. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 simplified the code for individuals while opening new opportunities for sophisticated tax planning. The reason is structural.
A system that taxes work but not wealth, income but not assets, wages but not capital gains, cannot be rendered fair through rate adjustments. The base is wrong. The incidence is wrong. The enforcement is wrong. Incremental reform fails because the system itself is designed to be gamed by those with the resources to hire specialists to game it. The next generation of escape vehicles is being designed right now, by the same firms that designed the last one.
The system will not be repaired by raising a rate here or closing a loophole there. It must be replaced.
Individual progressive capture, structural support layers
The Accord splits the work in two. The individual layer is the novel-and-overdue half — ten progressive-capture instruments aimed at individuals at the top of the income and wealth distributions. The structural layer is the conventional-but-essential support architecture — corporate book minimum, sales-factor apportionment, VAT with Pre-bate, institutional excise, and the new payroll tax — that keeps the individual capture from leaking out through the corporate ledger, the offshore IP holding company, the consumption side of the household budget, or the tax-exempt institutional vehicle.
Three calculators against this architecture
How the layers reinforce each other
Corporations must declare all compensation paid — wages, bonuses, equity, options, perks, deferred comp, partnership distributions, contractor payments — or they are committing tax fraud. Once that declaration is made, the disclosure has been completed for income tax. The Flat Payroll Tax rides on top of that disclosure: the corporation cannot declare $X paid for purposes of its own deduction and then dispute that $X for purposes of the recipient's payroll tax base.
Wealth holders must disclose possessions to satisfy the Estate Tax Prepayment Plan — even at the 0.8% bottom-bracket rate — or they are committing tax fraud. Once that disclosure has been made, the basis for the estate tax and the basis-step-up elimination is established: the IRS now has a contemporaneous statement of holdings, made under penalty of perjury, that no later estate-settlement valuation game can contradict.
Each instrument in Engine 1 is paired with a disclosure obligation. Falsifying disclosure at any layer is tax fraud independently — and the disclosed records become the audit basis for every other instrument that touches the same base. The income tax draws on the corporation's compensation declaration. The estate tax draws on the Estate Tax Prepayment Plan filing. The institutional excise draws on the entity's filing as a tax-exempt institution. The capital-gains convergence draws on the realization disclosed under basis step-up elimination. The layers reinforce each other.
Disclosure amnesty during Years 1–4 (0.8%/year flat rate, no interest, no penalty, no criminal review of disclosed categories) creates a one-time onboarding ramp. After Year 4, non-disclosure interest is Fed short-term + 8pp compounded plus 25% civil penalty on back-tax — and estates cannot settle to heirs until reconciled. The teeth are in the rate structure, not in raids.