I do agree that sidestepping income taxes is too easy in the first place, but that is on legislators, too (and lowering those top tax brackets is just unhelpful

I do agree that sidestepping income taxes is too easy in the first place, but that is on legislators, too (and lowering those top tax brackets is just unhelpful in any case). I find the notion that you should pay less tax on capital gains asinine, too; it makes no sense to me that people should have to pay less tax on income that they didn't even work for. My belief is that people were blind to growing income inequality and flawed taxation schemes because there was enough growth to paper over the resulting issues, but this stops being the case. Specifically housing, I'd argue, has not become so expensive because of greedy construction workers (or immigrants, or regulation) but because average homeowners have to compete against an increasingly wealthy upper-class that sees real estate as a pure investment/rent extraction mechanism.