{"id":2613721,"date":"2026-06-13T09:06:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T13:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/op-ed-what-the-court-refused-to-say-about-your-money\/"},"modified":"2026-06-13T09:06:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T13:06:00","slug":"op-ed-what-the-court-refused-to-say-about-your-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/op-ed-what-the-court-refused-to-say-about-your-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Op-Ed: What the Court Refused to Say About Your Money"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fop-ed-what-the-court-refused-to-say-about-your-money%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2613721&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><br \/>\n<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\"><br \/>\n<?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><html><body><\/p>\n<section> \t\t\t\t<script>console.log(\"ad slot (AC1)\")<\/script><script>console.log(\"ad slot (IC1)\")<\/script><script>console.log(\"ad slot (IC2)\")<\/script><script>console.log(\"ad slot (IC3)\")<\/script><script>console.log(\"ad slot (IC4)\")<\/script><script>console.log(\"ad slot (REP_0)\")<\/script><script>console.log(\"ad slot (REP_1)\")<\/script><script>console.log(\"ad slot (REP_2)\")<\/script><script>console.log(\"ad slot (REP_3)\")<\/script><\/p>\n<p>The Supreme Court had a clean opportunity two summers ago to tell Congress whether it can tax money you haven\u2019t received. It passed.<\/p>\n<p>In Moore v. United States, decided June 20, 2024, the Court declined to resolve whether Congress can tax appreciation you haven\u2019t received. That refusal was deliberate and strategic. It carries nine-figure implications for anyone with significant private wealth.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<h4>The Case That Asked the Question<\/h4>\n<p>Charles and Kathleen Moore invested $40,000 in KisanKraft, an Indian agricultural tool company, in 2006. The company made money every year. It reinvested rather than distributing. The Moores received no dividends.<\/p>\n<p>Then, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act imposed a one-time Mandatory Repatriation Tax on American holders of controlled foreign corporations for accumulated, undistributed earnings. The Moores owed roughly $15,000. They sued, arguing that the Sixteenth Amendment only authorizes Congress to tax income that has been realized, and that income the Moores had never received couldn\u2019t qualify.<\/p>\n<p>The question presented was explicit: whether the Sixteenth Amendment authorizes Congress to tax unrealized sums without apportionment among the states.<\/p>\n<p>This was the constitutional question the wealth tax debate had been waiting for. The Court agreed to hear it. Then the majority, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, went to considerable lengths to avoid answering it.<\/p>\n<p>The majority\u2019s reasoning ran through a narrow lane. KisanKraft had realized income. Congress has long had the power to attribute a corporation\u2019s realized income to its holders. The Mandatory Repatriation Tax operated within that attribution framework. Therefore, the Moores were being taxed on realized income, just attributed to them through an entity.<\/p>\n<p>The broader constitutional question, whether realization is required at all, need not be addressed. It wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<h4>Four Votes and an Unanswered Question<\/h4>\n<p>The separate opinions carry the more important story. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented, concluding that the Sixteenth Amendment requires realization, and the Mandatory Repatriation Tax failed that test.<\/p>\n<p>Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, concurred in the judgment, but wrote separately to say explicitly what the majority wouldn\u2019t: The Sixteenth Amendment\u2019s reference to income \u201cderived\u201d from any source \u201cencompasses a realization requirement,\u201d and realization is required before Congress can tax financial gain without apportionment.<\/p>\n<p>Barrett\u2019s concurrence and Thomas\u2019 dissent together represent four justices prepared to draw a constitutional line that would stop federal and state wealth taxes cold.<\/p>\n<p>Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing solo, praised the majority\u2019s restraint and signaled openness to Congress\u2019s broader taxing latitude. The scorecard: four justices for a realization requirement, one against, and five who declined to answer the realization question. It didn\u2019t produce a holding.<\/p>\n<p>Justice Thomas was pointed in his dissent. The Court \u201cshould not have hesitated\u201d to impose a realization requirement when the votes were there, he wrote, rather than deferring the question to a future case when the alignment might shift.<\/p>\n<p>Constitutional doctrine set on your terms beats doctrine set on someone else\u2019s terms. The majority chose patience. Four justices \u2014 two in dissent, two in a separate concurrence \u2014 recorded that patience as an error.<\/p>\n<h4>What Wealth Tax Advocates Are Counting On<\/h4>\n<p>Federal and state wealth taxation remains constitutionally untested at the Supreme Court level. Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden\u2019s mark-to-market proposal, which would subject publicly traded assets held by taxpayers with over $1 billion in net worth or $100 million in income over three years to annual taxation regardless of whether gains have been realized, was not constitutionally foreclosed by Moore.<\/p>\n<p>The Biden administration\u2019s 2025 budget proposal for a minimum tax on unrealized gains for households with more than $100 million in assets was not foreclosed.<\/p>\n<p>California\u2019s AB 259, which proposed a 1 percent annual wealth tax on net worth above $50 million before dying in committee in January 2024, was not foreclosed.<\/p>\n<p>A ballot initiative targeting California\u2019s November 2026 election that would impose a 5 percent tax on billionaire net worth, including unrealized gains, has not been foreclosed.<\/p>\n<p>The post-decision coverage framed Moore as a government win. On narrow grounds, it was. What it wasn\u2019t was a constitutional green light for taxing gains you haven\u2019t received. The majority\u2019s opinion explicitly declined to answer that question. Every proposal premised on doing so remained constitutionally unchallenged.<\/p>\n<h4>Why It Matters Beyond the Headlines<\/h4>\n<p>I\u2019ve spent 30 years advising ultra-high-net-worth families on private equity, private credit, and family office structures. The clients carrying the most direct exposure to this question are exactly the ones you\u2019d expect: founders with illiquid positions in closely held businesses, limited partners locked into fund commitments for 10-year holds, and real estate principals whose embedded appreciation in core holdings dwarfs their available liquidity.<\/p>\n<p>An annual tax on unrealized appreciation isn\u2019t an income tax in any functional sense for these clients. It\u2019s a forced-sale mechanism.<\/p>\n<p>A founder holding $200 million in private company equity, none of it liquid, faces a tax bill he can only pay by selling part of what he owns or borrowing against it at terms the market dictates.<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cbuy, borrow, die\u201d criticism of current law is real. Its remedy, mandatory annual recognition of gains you can\u2019t monetize without selling the underlying asset, creates its own structural damage.<\/p>\n<p>The administration problem compounds the constitutional one. Annual mark-to-market taxation of illiquid private assets requires valuation infrastructure that doesn\u2019t exist. California\u2019s Franchise Tax Board estimated it would need $200 to $300 million annually to administer its proposed wealth tax \u2014 roughly 2-3 percent of projected revenue \u2014 for a regime with no precedent in American tax law. The IRS isn\u2019t staffed to build that infrastructure, and no timeline for building it has been proposed.<\/p>\n<h4>The Constraint That Didn\u2019t Come<\/h4>\n<p>The Moore case produced a constitutional question deferred, not resolved: four justices on record for the answer that stops wealth taxation, one against, and five who declined to address it.<\/p>\n<p>The next challenger to bring a tax on genuinely unrealized gains, one that can\u2019t be rationalized as attributing realized corporate income to a holder, will arrive at a Court that may have the votes to rule differently than this majority allowed itself to.<\/p>\n<p>The Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913 to reverse Pollock v. Farmers\u2019 Loan and Trust Co., which had held that an unapportioned income tax on property income was an unconstitutional direct tax. The amendment gave Congress broad power to tax incomes from whatever source derived.<\/p>\n<p>That breadth is what Wyden and the California legislature are relying on. It\u2019s also what four Supreme Court justices are prepared to constrain. The constraint didn\u2019t come in Moore. It may be closer than the wealth tax advocates are assuming.<\/p>\n<p>Your estate planner probably flagged Moore as a win for the government. She wasn\u2019t wrong. She may have missed the most important sentence in Justice Thomas\u2019s dissent: that the Court should have drawn the line when it had the votes to draw it. Four justices agreed with him about the line. They disagreed only about the timing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><i><b>The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either d or endorsed by the owners of this website. 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( opts[inputs[i]] = document.querySelector( '.entry-submit-correction [name=\"' + inputs[i] + '\"]' ).value ) ) { \t\t\t\t\t\tdocument.querySelector( '.entry-submit-correction .required-message' ).style.display = 'block'; \t\t\t\t\t\treturn; \t\t\t\t\t}  \t\t\t\t\tdocument.querySelector( '.entry-submit-correction input[type=\"submit\"]' ).style.display = 'none'; \t\t\t\t\tdocument.querySelector( '.entry-submit-correction .firefly-sc-submitting-img' ).src = firefly_loading_gif_url; \t\t\t\t\tdocument.querySelector( '.entry-submit-correction .firefly-sc-submitting-img' ).style.display = 'inline-block';  \t\t\t\t\tconsole.log( 'ma subbing' );  \t\t\t\t\tif( firefly_post_id ) opts['post_id'] = firefly_post_id;  \t\t\t\t\t\/* Send the data using post with element id name and name2*\/ \t\t\t\t\tvar posting = jQuery.post( firefly_ajax_url, opts );  \t\t\t\t\t\/* Alerts the results *\/ \t\t\t\t\tposting.done( function( response ) { \t\t\t\t\t\tif( response.success ) { \t\t\t\t\t\t\tconsole.log( response.data ); \t\t\t\t\t\t\tdocument.querySelector( '.entry-submit-correction .firefly-sc-submitting-img' ).style.display = 'none'; \t\t\t\t\t\t\tdocument.querySelector( '.entry-submit-correction .firefly-sc-confirm' ).style.display = 'block';  \t\t\t\t\t\t\tdataLayer.push( { 'event': 'submit-correction' } ); \t\t\t\t\t\t} \t\t\t\t\t}); \t\t\t\t}); \t\t\t} \t\t<\/script> \t     \t\t\t\t\t\t     \t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n<p> \t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t<script>console.log(\"ad slot (BA1)\")<\/script> \t\t<\/p>\n<div class=\"ff-fancy-header-container\"> \t\t\t \t<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<p><\/body><\/html><\/p>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Supreme Court had a clean opportunity two summers ago to tell Congress whether it can tax money you haven\u2019t received. It passed. In Moore v. United States, decided June 20, 2024, the Court declined to resolve whether Congress can tax appreciation you haven\u2019t received. That refusal was deliberate and strategic. It carries nine-figure implications<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2613722,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.westernjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Supreme-court-at-night.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33651],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2613721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-western-journal"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.westernjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Supreme-court-at-night.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2613721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2613721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2613721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2613722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2613721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2613721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2613721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}