Americans, when are we going to get our heads back where the sun shines and implement a wealth tax?

How many tax outrages by the super rich do we have to witness before we actually pass the only reasonable measure that would end them?

How much longer are we going to moan about Congress and special interests and banks in Panama and various other scapegoats before we actually start taking more responsibility as a nation for our own affairs?

Ain’t nobody here but us, folks. Do you think we could do something?

“ Republicans and Democrats have settled on a tax code that is both ... grossly unfair and grotesquely overcomplicated. ”

The revelation that Donald Trump, self-professed billionaire, has probably paid no income tax for at least 20 years has provoked shock in the public, including among many conservatives.

What is wrong with everybody? Did you not know how the system as it currently operates actually works?

Nothing Donald Trump has done seems to have been illegal. Nor remarkable to any knowledgeable tax expert. Indeed, I know how even Joe and Jane Sixpack could game the system to achieve similar results, so long as they didn’t mind being as amoral as someone like Trump.

Donald Trump claims that only a guy like him who knows how to play the tax system knows how to fix it. That might be a plausible argument, except that his own tax proposals do absolutely nothing to shut down the loopholes that he used, or many others.

Trump’s legal tax dodge is just the tip of the iceberg. The richest people in the country need to pay hardly any tax, if they choose, because their wealth consists of assets, and we don’t tax assets.

The only time the people pay attention to this is when a rich guy runs for president and we actually get a look at his tax returns. Four years ago it was Mitt Romney. This time it’s Trump. No wonder Trump is fighting tooth and nail for the principle that rich guys running for president shouldn’t have to release their tax returns anymore. It’s making the peasants restless.

Donald Trump says he 'brilliantly' used U.S. tax laws

We are becoming like France before the revolution, where the poor were taxed worse than the aristocrats. Check out the federal government’s tax receipts and you’ll discover a massive shocker. More than 40% of all federal government income now comes from regressive payroll taxes, Social Security and Medicare. These actually hit the poorest the hardest and leave the richest largely unscathed.

The system is both a scam and simultaneously a mind-bending farce. Republicans love a tax code that is simple, but grossly unjust. The Democrats want a code that is supposedly more fair, but is grotesquely overcomplicated. (And no wonder they came up with the alternative minimum tax in the late 1960s. Somebody had to be tripping.)

So the two parties have settled on a tax code that is both ... grossly unfair and grotesquely overcomplicated.

Really? We’re the country that built the atomic bomb in three years and put a man on the moon. And we can’t come up with a tax code that is simple and fair?

That is idiotic. The problem is solvable. It shouldn’t even be a hugely partisan issue, given that most conservatives agree that the rich pay too little in tax.

It is a bizarre convention that we tax transactions, such as income or capital gains. It would be simpler and easier to tax assets. It is philosophically sensible too. We owe our ownership of assets to civil society, and the government that supports it. There are no investments in the wild, and real estate falls to the guy with the most guns.

We are already used to one wealth tax: the property taxes we pay every year to support local government. We should have something similar to pay for the federal government, and levy it on all assets, not just real estate.

The Federal Reserve recently calculated that the total net worth of U.S. households is $89.1 trillion. Technically, we should tax gross assets, not net, but on the basis that your mortgage is someone else’s asset, we can take that $89.1 trillion figure as a good starting point.

A simple 2% tax on assessed value every year would generate almost $1.8 trillion, about 55% of all federal revenue. No exemptions. No exclusions. No sliding scales. Simple and fair. Honest people across the political spectrum should be willing to accept it.

That could replace a large chunk of current income and corporate taxes. The point is not to raise extra revenue, but to levy taxes more rationally. If Trump is worth $10 billion, as he claims, he would pay $200 million a year.

It would be relatively easy to collect as well. The government already knows where nearly all assets are. They could just demand of U.S. residents what they already demand of expats — an annual declaration, with severe penalties for evasion.

The best thing? We already know that the rich don’t mind paying a 2% annual wealth tax, because that’s the bare minimum they pay each year to Wall Street in the form of hedge fund and private-equity and advisory fees. Actually, in 2012 I worked out Mitt Romney was paying more to Bain Capital and his other financial managers and advisers than he was paying to Uncle Sam in tax.

They can stop paying that vig to the Street of Shame, and start paying it the country that made their wealth possible. And if they don’t like it, they can always offset the extra cost by dumping all those high-fee financial products and putting their money in index funds.