A hunting license costs money. So does a liquor license. Neither one is a tax on being wealthy. Each is a fee for using something the public manages and stands behind. If you never hunt, you never buy a license.
There is a lot of talk right now about taxing billionaires. One version made the ballot in California. Proposition 40 is a one-time 5% tax on people with more than $1 billion in assets, about 200 Californians, with the money going mostly to health care. Regardless of where you land on that, there is another way to ask the question. What if the financial system is better understood as something people pay to use, like a license?
The public already stands behind it
Bank deposits are insured by the federal government. In 2008, Congress authorized up to $700 billion to steady the financial system, a program called TARP. About $444 billion went out. Most of it came back, and the Congressional Budget Office put the final cost at $31 billion. The cost was small next to the commitment. The commitment was the point. The backing was there, and everyone who pays federal taxes stood behind it, whether or not they owned a single share.
One proposal for a license fee
The draft Alignment Economy Act, from my book, includes one idea. It is called the Systemic Capital Participation Assessment, or SCPA. In plain words, it is a yearly fee for holding a very large amount of money inside U.S. financial markets. The draft calls it an assessment, and it is built like a fee. It is set by the scale of use, not by income or profit.
To size the fee, the book uses a yardstick called the National Productivity Unit, or NPU. The NPU is the value of one hour of taking part in the economy. It blends two things: what the country produces per person, and what it costs just to get by. The book’s teaching example sets it at $20 an hour. At 1,500 hours a year, that is $30,000, about a year of pay for a full-time worker at $20 an hour. That $20 is an example. It is not a published number, because the NPU doesn’t exist yet. It has to stay a stand-in until the Act’s formula is run on real data. The reason to use it anyway is that a fixed dollar line goes stale as prices rise, and a line tied to the NPU moves with the economy.
Nothing is owed below 100 times the yearly NPU. In the example, that is $3 million. Above that line, the rate is 0.10% to 0.25% a year on the value held.
Retirement savings are protected. The draft says ordinary household savings and moderate retirement savings stay exempt, and so do qualified tax-advantaged retirement accounts, the kind most people know as a 401(k) or an IRA. The one exception is for very concentrated holdings that pass the Act’s own thresholds. The draft does not spell out exactly how that exception would work.
In the draft, the money goes to the Stability Fund. Think of it as a town’s rainy-day fund: money set aside in good years to cushion the bad ones. Extra reserves can later reduce the national debt. A first version, before a Fund exists, could send the assessment straight to the debt instead. That variation is not in the draft Act. The Fund is also still theory, since it has never been built and its size depends on how much the fee collects.
If you don’t use it, you don’t pay it
A fee for using a system raises an obvious question: what if the money moves? The draft answers it in layers.
Each year’s amount is figured on a rolling 90-day average. That means the value is averaged over about three months, not read on one day, much like a grade that comes from a semester instead of one quiz. A move on assessment day changes little. Related trusts and companies are counted together, and borrowing against an asset does not remove it from the count. Anyone holding assets in U.S. financial systems is covered, wherever the holder lives. Assets that leave those systems don’t pay, because they aren’t using them.
The fee is also set so that avoiding it costs more than paying it. Take a $10 million portfolio. At 0.10%, the fee is $10,000 a year. Moving all of it into plain bank deposits to skip the fee would give up whatever extra the portfolio was earning. If that extra is only 1% a year, it is $100,000. Moving the money offshore doesn’t help either, if it still uses U.S. markets. A hunting license works on the same logic. The fee is small enough that skipping it isn’t worth the trouble, and the access that comes with it is the reason to hold one.
A future version could add one more rule. If assets leave and later come back, the average would resume where it left off, so leaving and returning wouldn’t reset the clock. That rule is not in the draft Act.
Size matters here too. At the end of 2025, the U.S. stock market was worth $68.9 trillion, which is 43.7% of the world’s total. Investors outside the country held $35.3 trillion of U.S. securities in mid-2025, including $19.9 trillion of U.S. stocks. Stocks are one pool. The U.S. bond market was another $61.2 trillion at the end of 2025. The broad money supply, which includes cash and bank deposits, stood at $23.3 trillion in August 2026. Most of that cash belongs to households and businesses far below the $3 million line, and nobody has counted how much sits above it. Moving capital out of a market that holds 43.7% of the world’s stock value means giving up access to a lot of buyers, sellers, and companies. The Act’s modeling bets that a fee of 0.10% to 0.25% a year is small next to what that access is worth. It also expects some people to move assets, and calls broad capital flight unlikely at these rates. That modeling is the book’s, and no outside study has tested it.
What it could add up to
Nobody has published a total, and it would depend on steady participation. For scale: every $1 trillion of covered assets, at the lowest rate of 0.10%, is $1 billion a year. The draft Act aims to build a reserve in the good years. The target is 1.5 times the Fund’s average yearly spending over three years, so the money is in place before the next downturn. The Act’s own modeling expects collections to fall in a crisis, because asset values fall. That is the reason to build the reserve first.
For comparison, the final cost of TARP was $31 billion, and it was arranged after the crisis had begun. Whether a reserve like this would be large enough for another 2008-sized event is something no one has shown.
What this does not settle
The Act is a draft, and none of this is law. It was drafted and stress-tested against legal and constitutional challenges, and no court has ruled on any of it. Whether to take it up is a decision for legislators: whether they would approach a system like this with the same rigor.
A line near $3 million is far below $1 billion, so it would cover many more households. Nobody has counted how many, and that count should come first. No actuary has scored the rates. The draft’s list of covered holdings names securities, funds, private ownership interests, and similar assets. It does not name cash or bank deposits, and whether it should is a design question. The retirement exception for very large concentrated holdings is another place where the details would need to be written out. Whether any assessment on wealth slows investment is a contested question, and this piece does not claim to settle it.
The system has more than one pressure on it, and a license-style fee is just one way to ease it. What’s a fix that doesn’t just move the problem somewhere else?