Reply to Turns Out Americans Actually Do Want to Tax the Rich

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[quote=Anonymous][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]

Haha, me too. In my ignorance, I thought taxes on property had been a thing since the founding of the Republic. [/quote]

If the two PPs are truly interested in learning...

Taxing income is straightforward because income statements are prepared by the entities that are the payers of that income - they do it in order to properly deduct it from *their own* income. So for example a business issues a W2 because they want to deduct wages from the income they've generated so that they are not taxed on that income. Businesses generate 1099s to each other to report sales for tax purposes. I'm just listing a couple but essentially the transactional nature of income producing activities in conjunction with reporting requirements makes it easy to track.

Wealth is entirely different. A PP pointed to taxes on property but property tax is not a wealth tax - this is why you are taxed on the market value of the property and not what your actual equity is on the property. Property taxes are also fairly well focused on specific things: homes, cars, etc, things that have a reasonably efficient market to determine the current market value. Plus, homes and cars have fairly steady markets and do not suffer from the same volatility that stocks would have. Many other forms of wealth have values that are very tough to determine the market value of. What's the value of the Washington Redskins franchise - certainly it has a value, but now the IRS has to develop expertise in NFL franchise valuation? Aside from the difficulty of valuation is the fact that wealth is not transactional and many forms of it is simply not in a form that can be known or therefore audited. Someone's substantial wine collection doesn't have to be registered anywhere, nor their art collection, or jewelry collection. And speaking of precious metals, someone holding wealth in actual bars of gold has no reporting requirements and therefore no way to audit.

For the above reasons, the countries that have tried a wealth tax is generally moving away from it. Take a look at France - they are one of the nations to have recently tried a wealth tax. The law was tweaked and adjusted to excluded all kinds of "wealth" but was eventually abolished altogether and replaced with a real estate tax.

So here we are trying to institute a tax that even the French have given up on. What a sad and ironic world we live in. [/quote]

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