Oh, sure, tax the rich! Specifically, I would start with break up the untaxable trusts and corporate holdings exemptions, and cancel the real estate “unrented properties” tax rebate so that they’re forced to lease at
market rates or otherwise sell dormant property holdings. But that’s not going to have any effect on inflation, so I’m not going to discuss that further it in this inflation-focused post.
If you tax corporations directly, they’ll just raise prices to pass the tax on to workers — but if you don’t tax corporate profits properly, they’ll just raise prices to consume all worker income and suffocate the dual competitors of entrepreneurs and of quality of life gains by households — so you have to tax corporations in a way that charges them extra revenue tax when their profits go up faster than their wages, neutralized only by paying workers more and maintain or lower prices. That’s what this proposes: either they help the Fed meet inflation targets by raising wages rather than prices, or they see their profits reduced in a way that can’t be charged to workers — as doing so would raise prices and thus inflation, which would further amplify their tax against their profits, resulting in a death spiral for their corporation between shrinking demand and growing overhead. (And, in times of deflation, the opposite: they are compelled by threat of reduces profits to raise prices rather than wages, just as they do today exclusively, until inflation stabilizes at the Fed target of whatever percent.)
This all works because, in the U.S., the uncontrolled component of inflation is the growth in profits minus the growth in wages. You can’t specify a wage floor or companies will just lay people off or raise prices, and you can’t impose a simple tax on corporate profits or companies will just lay people off or raise prices. The only way to prevent that is to tax (growth in profits – growth in wages – inflation target), which in an excess-inflation climate such as today — combined with the classic U.S. revenue-scaled tax rate schedules — would cost corporations who don’t invest excessive profit growth back into their workforce more than the simple cost of the wage increases would have.
(The R&D exemption that Amazon abuses would, as previously discussed, need to be restricted to less than 100% of research costs; use the same profit tiering schedules as above so that R&D for a billion-dollar gross-profit before-deductions company is capped at one half of the annual inflation rate — once you’re making that much, you don’t need the exemption to grow.)
(Offshore labor would need to be estimated at the federal minimum wage rate adjusted for currency strength/weakness to the country hosting that labor, unless explicitly documented otherwise through worker counts and wages, which would significantly worsen the value of offshoring: offshoring-to-cheap-labor companies would be at a significant disadvantage for growth taxation versus those that simply paid the costs of domestic investment, training, and wages.)