The step up basis makes sense in a world where you still have to pay substantial inheritance taxes. But with minimal to no inheritance taxes, the step up is a giveaway.
The bigger difference between an income tax and a wealth tax isn't the numbers. A wealth tax, for better or worse requires some realization of paper gains that very wealthy folks normally go to great lengths to avoid because their wealth is largely based on a broadly shared polite fiction. So imposing some realization of that wealth requires accountability that doesn't always pan out.
Business PBX folks really like being able to forward calls off to a cell phone while preserving the original caller's caller ID. And making that work requires allowing arbitrary spoofing. There is some work being done to append the stir/shaken signature from the original caller in a different sip header so the call can still be traced, but ultimately caller id is just too limited of a data framework to relay all the info.
The problem with people invoking and using the castle doctrine is that while they might be right to engage in self-defense in that situation, they also would very likely be dead at the end of the encounter.
It will be interesting to see how they handle packages from the various f-droid repos. F-droid builds and signs all their apps themselves, so will all of f-droid be covered by a single signing key and developer account? Or will the fact that they take apps from lots of folks bar them from an account?
It doesn't need a lot of speculative value in order to be useful. It just needs enough value to make the transactions meaningful. And that means people are a lot less likely to drive up the price via speculation.
If someone isn't a violent threat to society, there isn't much social benefit to keeping folks locked up longer then 20-ish years. 20-25 (assuming he gets the 15% off for good behavior the feds allow) is plenty.