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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

I think a wealth tax sounds good, but the implementation scares me.

What I worry about most with a wealth tax is calculating your wealth. Income tax is already hard enough. Now start adding up the value of your stock, your real estate, your personal property, etc.

And are you committing tax fraud because you have a million dollar painting that was hanging on your parents wall for decades that you inherited and never realized was valuable? Are you committing tax fraud if you have some crypto currency that you forgot about that has skyrocketed in value? If not, then these things can be used as tax dodges by the wealthy. If so, then it just makes everybody a potential criminal.

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How about: you're committing fraud if you bury a jar of gold coins in your back yard. What business is it of anyone elses' what you do in your own home? This idea of 'you have something; give it to us!!!' is very disturbing at some level.

Its different from other taxes, that tax an interchange with another person or entity. That is supported by society and its mechanisms, for which government (e.g. all of us) have some responsibility.

But just to start taking what I have simply because I have it, is upsetting at a very fundamental level.

Interestingly, what you see as completely normal (other taxes) was once as disturbing as capital tax seems to be:

> Window tax was a property tax based on the number of windows in a house.

> At that time, many people in Britain opposed income tax, on principle, because the disclosure of personal income represented an unacceptable governmental intrusion into private matters, and a potential threat to personal liberty. In fact the first permanent British income tax was not introduced until 1842 [note by me: not until 1914 in France!], and the issue remained intensely controversial well into the 20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax

I don't think it's normal, and the bits were right, it is a direct threat to liberty.

> Its different from other taxes, that tax an interchange with another person or entity.

yes, taxing transactions between entities makes sense, because transactions is where wealth (or value) is generated.

Taxing accumulated wealth does not make for a good policy, since this erodes stored wealth. Unless it's somehow paired with a reduction in other taxes (and thus defeat the point of the wealth tax in the first place as a way to levy more revenue to the gov't).

This is why a consumption tax is, in my opinion, the best kind of tax.

How interesting. Gold has been seen as a miraculous material for ages because it never tarnishes and is scarce enough to retain some allure.

But a wealth tax could cause gold to begin to "tarnish" like anything else.

> What I worry about most with a wealth tax is calculating your wealth.

This is an issue that the vast majority of people will never have to deal with. And the people who do have to deal with it won’t have to waste time worrying about it either because they will outsource their worry to an army of lobbyists followed by an army of CPAs.

That's what they said about income taxes too. It will eventually expand to include most or all people.

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