With rising (finally) interest rates in Europe, European governments are starting to hatch what they’re pleased to call windfall tax plans.

European banks have started to reap higher profits from rising interest rates—and governments are already starting to clamp down on them.
In Spain, the government has laid out plans to tax lenders on their rising income and use the money to alleviate higher living costs for the population. Hungary has imposed a similar measure, and the Czech Republic, where inflation is above 17%, is also considering such a move. In Poland, where mortgages carry variable rates that are quickly rising, the government placed a moratorium on repayments to help borrowers.

In his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, Travis Nix reminds us of this tidbit regarding IRS private letters that’s buried in President Joe Biden’s (D) latest budget proposal:

IRS private letter rulings—the agency’s written answers to individual taxpayers’ questions, which the IRS itself says cannot be relied on as precedent.

Here’s a small tweak: make the IRS stand by its rulings by making those rulings binding on the IRS, applicable to all taxpayers, and precedential. And require the IRS to answer the question that was asked—to issue its letter ruling—within 30 days of the question being asked, or failing to do so authorizes, as a matter of tax law, the questioner to answer the question (formally, via its tax return) in its own way.