We've done all this before - in the early 1990s, George HW Bush passed a 10% luxury tax on yachts, private planes, furs and a few other high-value items. Maybe

We've done all this before - in the early 1990s, George HW Bush passed a 10% luxury tax on yachts, private planes, furs and a few other high-value items. Maybe expensive cars, I don't remember perfectly. The government figured these measures would bring in X dollars in new revenue. It actually brought in much less, about 0.5X, as the purchasers of luxury goods changed their behavior. After the cost of unemployment benefits to people - thousands in the boat-building industry, among others, lost their jobs - the luxury tax ended up being a net negative for the government. It was repealed a couple of years later. The economy's too complex for us to experiment on without unintended and unanticipated side effects. That doesn't mean we should never experiment with it - as long as we do it cautiously - but we should at least learn some lessons from the experiments we've already conducted.