When President Obama delivers his State of the Union address on Tuesday, rising inequality is set to play a prominent role—and that’s to be welcomed. As the President pointed out last month, in a speech to the Center for American Progress, the facts are glaring: profits and productivity are rising but wages are stagnant; more and more of the nation’s income is going to the top ten per cent and the top one per cent; and the United States has low (but, apparently, not declining) rates of social mobility.

What can be done? The President will outline some useful proposals, many of which he’s called for before: a higher minimum wage, an extension of unemployment benefits, universal pre-K programs, changes in the labor laws, more spending on infrastructure and job training, the elimination of corporate tax loopholes, and—this is a new one—an agreement with big corporations not to discriminate against the the long-term unemployed when hiring. Sadly, Republicans in Congress are likely to resist almost all of this agenda—just as they have done for the past three years.

But even if the Republicans were to have a Damascene conversion, and pass the President’s proposals, the harsh fact is it probably wouldn’t make very much of a difference to overall levels of inequality. The problem is too large and deep-rooted to be amenable to modest reformism. And that means we might want to consider some policy options that are currently considered verboten.

Here are ten ideas, none of which are original. If you examine the work of economists and writers interested in the subject, you will find all sorts of suggestions for tackling inequality, several of which go back many decades. To be sure, there may be reasons not to pursue some of these ideas. Americans may place certain values—such as rewarding ingenuity and commercial success, and protecting personal property—ahead of equity. But if we are serious about putting a dent in inequality, especially the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the very top, we will eventually have to consider some of these proposals.

1. Establish a guaranteed minimum income for all American households. This is an old idea: back in the nineteen-sixties, it had the support of everybody from John Kenneth Galbraith to Milton Friedman. Raising the minimum wage would go some way towards achieving it, but only some way: many low-wage workers, particularly young ones, come from reasonably well off households. In addition, we could expand the earned-income tax credit, which acts like a negative income tax. Workers in jobs that don’t pay well enough to bring them up to the guaranteed minimum would effectively receive a wage subsidy from the government. It’s not such a radical idea, or it shouldn’t be. Back in 1970, the House of Representatives backed a very similar plan, but the Senate rejected it.

2. Abolish the payroll tax. If we want to boost wages, we need to increase the demand for labor. An obvious way to do this is to get rid of taxes that raise the cost of employing people. Under the current tax system, firms faced with a choice between hiring more workers or investing in new machinery have an incentive to go the latter route. Abolishing the payroll tax, in addition to making labor more attractive to firms, would render the overall tax system more progressive. Because of the upper limit on contributions, modestly remunerated workers currently pay more in payroll taxes, as a percentage of their income, than the highly paid.

3. Replace the payroll tax with a consumption tax. Payroll taxes pay for Social Security and Medicare. If we abolish them, alternative sources of revenue will be needed, and a national consumption tax, which most other advanced countries already have in place, may be a viable alternative. While consumption taxes can be regressive, they don’t have to be. The new tax could exempt staples, such as food, and levy a higher rate on luxury goods. And, as Robert Frank, of Cornell, has suggested, the I.R.S. could tax consumption above a certain annual amount indirectly. To do this, it would simply levy a tax on the difference between reported income and saving, which is consumption.

4. Raise the top rate of income tax. If you look at history, it appears that there’s plenty of scope to do this without causing the likes of Steve Schwarzman and Tom Perkins to decamp for Switzerland in order to escape the tax Nazis. In the nineteen-fifties, the top rate was more than eighty-five per cent, but it didn’t kick in until you earned four hundred thousand dollars a year, or about $3.9 million in today’s money. Now, the top rate is 39.6 per cent (or a few percent points higher if you include the taxes on high earners in the Affordable Care Act) and it kicks in at $406,750 ($457,600 for married couples).

Based on 2006 tax returns, the average income for those in the top one per cent by income was $717,000; the average income of the top 0.1 per cent was $3.9 million and the average income of the top 0.01 percent was $31 million. These figures are probably quite a bit higher now. One possibility is to combine a new top rate with a higher income threshold, or several of them. How high could the new top rate go? In a 2011 paper that sparked an interesting debate, Peter Diamond, of M.I.T., and Emmanuel Saez, of Berkeley, argued that, based on the costs and benefits to society as a whole, it should be set at seventy-three per cent—a bit below the level in the nineteen-fifties, but well above today’s rate.

5. Tax wealth properly. Most very rich people earn the bulk of their income from capital, and the distribution of wealth is even more lopsided than the distribution of income. The top one per cent accounts for about seventeen per cent of overall income. Its share of total wealth is even higher: about thirty-six per cent of overall wealth and forty-two per cent of financial assets. Over the past few decades, changes to the tax system have accentuated this inequity rather than tackling it. Taxes on wealth, particularly the capital-gains tax and the levy on estates, have been reduced. Last year, for example, as part of the agreement to avoid the fiscal cliff, Congress trimmed the estate tax in a way that saved the wealthiest estates about a million dollars each.

One obvious move is to reverse this trend. For high earners, the tax rate on capital gains is twenty per cent. In the nineteen-seventies, it was almost forty per cent. Another idea, and one with some sound economics behind it, is to introduce a wealth tax targeting the assets that rich families own but don’t cash in. Residential property, the most widely-owned asset, is already taxed. Why should financial assets, which are mostly owned by the rich, be treated any differently? They shouldn’t. In 2012, Ronald McKinnon, a Stanford economist, published an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Conservative Case for a Wealth Tax.” He proposed a three per cent wealth tax on households with assets of more than six million dollars. It sounded reasonable then; it sounds reasonable now.