Completely agree.<p>PG's only argument was that the tax compounds, and completely ignored the fact that wealth compounds much, much faster than tax burden grows.<p>Someone who inherits $3 million (not much from the point of view of the very-wealthy) can live comfortably on the growth alone while still compounding their wealth further every year.<p>The only way a wealth tax would compound faster than the wealth itself is if it is larger than the growth rate of the wealth. And since the growth of wealth (e.g. by just sticking it in an index fund) has averaged at ~8-10% over the past several decades, a 1% tax is not going to eat into a person's wealth over time. It's simply going to slightly slow that growth down.<p>The rest of the article on how PG's essay involved a slight of hand was interesting, I had missed that.
I'm just amazed that the threshold in the proposal is as high as $50M, meaning it only affects what I would call the super-rich.
Here in the Netherlands we have a wealth tax (but no financial gains tax) of 1.2% with a threshold under $1M, which seems fair enough.
Even talking about having a wealth tax has negative tax revenue. For California just losing Elon Musk and the Tesla HQ and all new Tesla employee taxes will hurt by billions if not tens of billions of dollars, much more than what they can really would be able to get from him realistically.
If the goal is to ensure money keeps flowing across every nook and corner of the economy, I don't see how this would work.<p>Have there been studies on a tax ruleset that looks like this:<p>Everyone taxed at 50% of yearly income, no special cases.
Additionally every dollar which would put individual accumulated wealth greater than (yearly minimum salary in dollars * median life expectancy in years) taxed at 100%.
The problem with a wealth tax is the definition of wealthy. The delta between the 1% and the 0.1% is astronomically larger than the difference between the 99% and the 1%.
The whole wealth tax thing befuddles me.<p>We have a wealth tax; the inheritance tax. It's at 40% for the super wealthy. Just fix the loopholes and be done with it.
I agree with the dead post below.<p>"Modeling a wealth tax correctly is to not tax anyone.
I reject your morality and economics."<p>The amount of waste by those empowered but unaccountable, to distribute taxes to programs of their choosing, is flabbergasting. I believe in taxes, but the abuse is unacceptable.