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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yeah, she wants to tax wealth! Not dumb at all. Easier than taxing income. [b]No complicated tax rules for deductions needed.[/b]

Yes people can try to hide their wealth, but this is already illegal so good if we can catch more people doing it[/quote]

You are so, so naive.  
Taxing assets is far more challenging than taxing income.  
[/quote]

Please cure me of my ignorance then[/quote]

WaPo. One day ago.

[quote]Consumption taxes such as sales or value-added taxes are easy to administer and raise lots of revenue. Income taxes are trickier but still simple compared with taxing wealth. Most people regularly receive payments that are easy to track and can be valued at .?.?. the sum of the payments. But what is the value of a business with one shareholder? A large piece of timberland that hasn’t been sold for 50 years? An irreplaceable antique or artwork?

Taxing those things means creating a lot of administrative capacity to track and price the assets, with the wealthy and their lawyers fighting every step of the way. That’s one reason wealth taxes, once popular among Western nations, are trending toward extinction; the paltry revenue wasn’t worth the administrative headache. Nor the capital flight and slower rate of capital formation such taxes tend to induce.

Those problems would be particularly acute with Warren’s plan because she has targeted the very wealthy rather than the merely affluent. Doing so mitigates the inevitable wailing about family-owned farms, as well as some of the pressure to lard the tax with those revenue-depleting exemptions. But taxing only the super-rich means taxing people with a lot of unique, hard-to-value assets, and who can confound auditors by shifting their wealth into even more of those assets.

And these are the minor problems with the Warren plan. The big problem is Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, which forbids “direct taxes” on people or property unless they’re “apportioned” — doled out among the states by population.

Instituting an income tax required a constitutional amendment to override that clause, and Warren’s plan might well require another. Warren’s team, and many other progressives, have offered ingenious arguments for the plan’s constitutionality. Probably not clever enough, however, to sway a conservative-leaning Supreme Court.[/quote]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/elizabeth-warrens-wealth-tax-is-no-way-to-run-government--but-a-good-way-to-run-a-campaign/2019/01/29/6faeeeb4-2411-11e9-ad53-824486280311_story.html?utm_term=.f0c3cfa809a8[/quote]

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