President Biden is proposing a tax on wealth appreciation for people above a certain level of wealth. In that group, if you have a house and the value goes up, you would pay a tax on the appreciation. If you had stock, you would pay tax on the increase. If you owned a privately held company that had a good year, you would pay a tax on the increase. If you had a farm, and the value of the land and equipment and buildings appreciated, you would pay a tax.

Of course, the first question you have to ask about this new tax is this: why you think it would remain restricted to a small group of wealthy people? Government and pro-government politicians have a never-ending need for more money. They would immediately start targeting the next lowest threshold to shake down.

History is filled with examples of a tax starting small and steadily growing. When the federal income tax was instituted in 1894, it was supposed to apply to only the highest 10 percent of income earners. Naturally, over the years, it was extended to almost half of all American households. The Biden wealth tax would soon face the same kind of expansion. Within a few years, virtually everyone who owned any property, stocks or businesses would face a complicated system of paying taxes on an increase in wealth—even if they did not have any increase in income.

There are three even bigger problems with this kind of wealth tax.

First, who is going to measure your assets every year? Are you going to have an IRS agent poring over all your assets (including your home) and then telling you what you are worth in his or her opinion? As the government needs more money, it will simply extend the number of things that count toward your assessed wealth. They’ll open up furniture, paintings, jewelry, family heirlooms, cars—the list will only grow. Imagine the level of paperwork—and the frequency of appeals to a reviewing authority—this will lead to. (Of course, this activity will only give government an excuse to expand and create new bureaucracies).

Second, if you don’t have enough income to pay the wealth tax, will the government force you to sell assets to meet this new obligation—including the assets it just assessed? Does that represent a taking of your property?

Third, what about years when you lose wealth? Imagine the mess after the 2008 financial crisis, when the price of housing dropped dramatically—or the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on many businesses. Knowing government and liberal politicians who are desperate for money, this will be a one-way street. If you succeed, you pay. If you lose, you get no relief.

If you look at the Biden budget proposal, you will see why they are desperate for more money from the American people.

Republicans on the House Budget Committee members analyzed the Biden budget and reported it includes $73 trillion in spending over the next decade. That is a 66 percent increase over the last 10 years of federal spending. GOP members also assert that Biden included $58 trillion in additional taxes. That is an 80 percent increase over the last 10 years. The new Biden budget would add $16 trillion in national debt, with more than $1 trillion deficits every year for the next decade.

This absurd degree of borrowing, taxing and spending is not inevitable. When I was speaker, we reformed welfare with a work requirement, cut taxes and regulations to accelerate economic growth and balanced the federal budget for four straight years (the only time in your lifetime). By 2001, the Bush administration had a working group on how to manage the money supply if we paid off the entire federal debt. Alan Greenspan, then-chair of the Federal Reserve, testified in public that they had never before had to plan for a debt-free system.

We do not have to have a giant, bureaucratic, corrupt government. There are alternatives that lead to lower taxes, lower interest rates, more jobs and much less inflation.

The Biden approach is a disaster. Consider the analysis of the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. The foundation noted that since the plan calls on taxing unrealized capital gains every year, people would pay taxes on gains which were never actually made. Additionally, keeping track of this would bear an enormous administrative cost—and create a real challenge to someone who doesn’t have a great deal of money on hand but has unsold assets that grow.

The foundation reported:

You should call your congressman and your two senators today and tell them to control spending, reform the bureaucracy, return welfare to a workfare system and never try to pass Biden’s tax on success.

For more of Newt’s commentary, visit Gingrich360.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.