Implementation may be politically difficult, but the solution isn't rocket science: substantially raise the inheritance tax and abolish all trust loopholes.
In turn, fewer people in this class are investing in the future or hold stock, which means they feel little investment in the world. Instead of feeling like part-owners of the country, they feel like wage slaves with little power to escape the bondage of debt.
On top of this, it feels like just barely getting by with these things requires more time and effort than it used to. People are working more part-time jobs and both parents of a family need to work.
Taxing rich people does little to make these very real problems go away.
If you argue that insurance/college/rent etc would scale to accommodate the larger budgets the lower classes would suddenly have, then obviously some other legislation is needed there though.
This doesn't work because the rich can opt to do a lot of different things with their money including hide or invest it overseas.
Taking the money of the rich and using it to directly improve the lot of the less fortunate has been tried and actually works as one would expect.
Meanwhile a 70 year old seeing their BTL property appreciate by £45k a year due to crossrail (paid for out of income tax the 20 year old is paying) keeps 87% (£39,060)
One just needs to look at the land stratification California has been going through to understand why. Most of the issues they face are a result of the wealthy doing everything in their power to prevent land from being upzoned or rebuilt because that devalues their property or ruins their view.
In this case there's no growth happening despite a desperate need for growth because the wealthy don't want it.
Figure out the median property value, make the first 50% of that tax free. Then the next 50% is taxed at the previous rates. Then tax values above that enough to make up for it.
Could apply the same idea to land value taxes too.
The value is determined in a voluntary exchange, such as a sale, and results of sales of similar property serve only as approximations.
Same problem is with the land value tax. It's like trying to buy / sell your property every time you do taxes.
There is a known mechanism to limit attempts do show an excessively low value. Back in the day, the British Empire's customs reserved the right to immediately buy the entire freight of a merchant ship for the value declared at customs. That could work with land and even realty, too, but would be much more disruptive.
Plenty of jurisdictions do market-value property taxes by using market data and creating models to approximate the rest.
It’s never perfect, but the line in the sand must be drawn.
Other taxes have the same approximation issues. Income taxes don’t really tax all the value I provide. Any social person barters plenty of value that goes untaxed, but technically should be.
Can you elaborate on this/help me out with what to google for? I've never thought of this but it's actually a brilliant idea - would love to read more about it!
If the farmer is struggling because of property taxes driven by their own increased property value... sounds like a good position to be in.
As for passing them on, that argument could be made for all taxes. If true, at least this structure would lower rents for low-value dwelling occupants and increase for those in more luxurious situations.
And if so, how does this get applied to corporations and REITs? Do they get taxed out of existence, or do their holdings get apportioned to individual shareholders and included in their personal portfolio, so that individual progressive schedules are applied to each portion?
It seems unlikely to me that you can construct a sound set of rules for this that are workable (no glaring loopholes) and appreciably different from a progressive wealth tax, which might be much easier to formulate...
I don't believe it will ever happen. There's too much inertia and rot in what we have now, and nowhere to go to build something new.
The way inheritance should be solved is by not allowing a single person to inherit more than 50% of the total net worth.
With the wealth distribution curve we have today, I don't think your proposed solution goes anywhere near far enough to stop the consolidation of wealth in the hands of a very few who hoard it and use it to buy governments. But maybe your definition of "solved" in this context is not the same as mine.