I Demand an Inflation Tax on Gubmint Employees

 No one can doubt the sincerity of our blue-state governors in their noble quest to teach migrants a lesson with wealth taxes and exit taxes? I mean, of course, the migrants from blue states to red states, the traitors who, as billionaires and white oppressors, don’t want to pay their fair share.

But there’s a bigger issue, one that our liberal friends are naively ignorant about, as usual.

It is inflation.

A century ago, the dollar was priced at $20.67 per ounce of gold. Today it’s about $4,770 per ounce. If we assume that the gold price is the closest measure we have of inflation, then the dollar is worth less than 1/200th of its value a century ago. Or less than half a cent of the dollar in 1926.

Inflation, as Milton Friedman wrote, “is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” That is economist-speak for “government did it.”

And it seems to me, as a gentle soul writing in the spirit of our beloved blue-state governors, that the people in government that “did it” are saboteurs and wreckers and should pay for their crimes.

I propose, to avoid a McCarthyite witch hunt, that we simply institute an Inflation Tax on the income and emoluments of all politicians, government employees, regulators, and also non-governmental organizations that receive grants from the government.

How much should that Inflation Tax be? In the interest of justice and personal responsibility, it should merely be equal to the inflation recorded on the Gross Domestic Product: Implicit Price Deflator. FRED has the numbers. from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025 the index went from 126.45 to 130.624. That’s an increase of 3.29 percent. There’s your base rate for the Inflation Tax in 2026 that all the grifters -- I mean, devoted public servants -- should willingly pay.

Somehow, to me, that doesn’t seem like it’s enough. Not for elected politicians whose votes for more spending help drive the inflation train. Not for government executives whose failures we the people get to pay for.

Just as with the income tax, the Inflation Tax should be graduated, so that those close to the corridors of power will get to pay their fair share. I am sure that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), given her passion for justice, will agree with me.

I think that, in the interests of justice, government executives should pay double the base rate of the Inflation Tax and that elected officials should pay triple the base rate of the Inflation Tax.

And then there is a special case: the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the man with his hand on the money spigot. I won’t say his name, because I am opposed to doxxing. But you know who he is.  There is no inflation unless the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board wills it with his money creation. I believe that a poll of philosophers, theologians, and secular moralists would reveal a consensus that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board should pay ten times the base Inflation Tax rate. Because justice and morality. In 2025 his Inflation Tax rate would have been 32.6 percent of income and emoluments. That would be justice if I ever saw it.

Think the graduated rate for the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is too high? Then, did you know that the monetary base went from $3.455 trillion in February 2020 to $4.845 trillion in April 2020 to finance the War on COVID? That’s an increase of 40 percent in two months! And for what! To finance all those mostly peaceful protests in the Year of Floyd?

But hey, inflation peaked at only 6.47 percent in 2022. So the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board would only have paid about 65 percent of his remuneration in Inflation Tax. Imagine if he were in charge of Argentina’s central bank, where inflation is down from 200 percent to 33 percent under the chainsaw of President Milei.

Now, according to Google AI, there are about 22-23 million government employees in the United States, and the average earnings of state and local government employees is north of $65 per hour, including benefits. So if we assume that they work 40 hours per week and 40 weeks a year, that would add up to about $74 billion collected by the Inflation Tax last year. Not a lot, not even as much as the notorious Trump Tariffs, that collected nearly $200 billion in 2025.

However, all this is nothing to what is transpiring in Canada where a speaker at the Liberal Party convention proposed to charge young people $500,000 to go work in the USA, in the true spirit of Marx’s 1848 demand for “the confiscation of the property of emigrants and rebels.”

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/04/i_demand_an_inflation_tax_on_gubmint_employees.html