Editor’s note: Abigail Disney is an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and member of the Patriotic Millionaires. His latest film, “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales,” co-directed with Kathleen Hughes, had its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Morris Pearl is the chairman of Patriotic Millionaires and former CEO of BlackRock. The opinions expressed in this comment are my own. See more opinion on CNN.

Tuesday is Tax Day in the United States, one of the most stressful days of the year, when many taxpayers will finally stop procrastinating, file their federal returns and wait for a refund from the IRS. But for many of the country’s wealthiest, it’s just another Tuesday.

Tax Day is not just a deadline for filing returns; It’s also an annual reminder that the ultra-rich exist in a completely separate world when it comes to taxes. For us, the loopholes are bigger and the rates are sometimes lower. Meanwhile, the rich continue to get richer, and the wealth of billionaires in particular has increased by more than $1.5 trillion in recent years.

This status quo is unfair, but more importantly, it is unsustainable. Such high levels of inequality are pushing our economy and democracy to the limit. That is why we must examine how we can prepare our country for long-term stability and prosperity. And we should start by ensuring that the ultra-rich pay more than they owe to the country that made their success possible.

There are three changes to the tax code that would help us do just that:

Right now, the American tax system values ​​money over sweat. If you work hard for your money instead of earning it passively, you will essentially be penalized for it. People who earn a salary pay significantly higher tax rates on their income than wealthy investors who passively earn capital gains income.

Inheriting money is an even better deal. Thanks to former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law, the first $12.92 million (or $25.84 million for a married couple) is completely exempt from any estate taxes, and the expanded loophole allows wealthy families to permanently erase millions in capital gains taxes by resetting the market value of those assets to their value at the time of the original owner’s death. With this, it is relatively easy for the rich to inherit tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars, and pay almost nothing in taxes. Someone working for that money, on the other hand, would pay more than a third in federal income taxes.

Why do we have a tax code that says workers should pay more taxes than wealthy investors and those who became rich simply by being born into the right family? At the end of the day, money is money, whether you worked for it or inherited it. As an heiress and investor, we should not pay lower tax rates than people who earn their money by working.

It’s time for the tax code to treat all income equally, taxing all capital gains over $1 million at the same rates as ordinary income, and replacing our loophole-riddled estate tax with a simpler estate tax that treats inherited wealth as income.

However, we can’t focus solely on income, because many of the wealthiest Americans earn basically no taxable income of any kind in a typical year. Capital gains are only taxed when assets are sold, so instead of selling them, the ultra-wealthy use their assets as collateral to borrow large sums of money at extremely low interest rates to live on, and then report small or even negative “income” on their tax forms. This “buy, borrow, die” strategy is one of the main reasons why billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate in recent years than working-class families.

By rethinking what is taxable, we can access the trillions of dollars of multi-trillion-dollar wealth that are untouchable under our current tax structure. That’s why President Biden has proposed the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax, which would tax the unrealized capital gains of the wealthiest households, and why others have proposed wealth taxes on billionaires.

Finally, one of the most direct changes needed is to simply tax the extremely rich more than the merely rich. Our income tax is capped at 37% for any income over $578,125 (or $693,750 for married couples). No matter how much more someone earns, they will never pay more than 37% in federal income taxes.

While someone who makes $600,000 certainly makes enough to live a very comfortable life, they are in a different world than someone who makes $600 million a year. To reflect the real differences between the rich and the ultra-rich, we need to return to the top rates we had during the most prosperous decades of the 20th century and add many more tax brackets. They should reach up to 90% for people earning more than $100 million a year.

These three changes certainly won’t solve all of our country’s problems alone, but they would go a long way toward stemming the steady flow of our country’s wealth to an increasingly smaller group of people, a change that would make our democracy and our economy more stable. The tax code can be a powerful tool for social and economic change. We just need to use it more effectively.