> wealth tax is a colossal privacy and administrative burden on _every single taxpayer_
I have not seen a single wealth tax proposal that doesn't have a gigantic cutoff where it would do nothing for 99%+ of the taxpayer base. Most proposals have a floor in the tens of millions.
> Assets must be accounted for when calculating wealth, so the tax service will be required to track and value assets including vehicles, homes, and material good etc. for every citizen to see if the wealth tax would apply to them -- if we didn't report material goods, the wealthy could sock money away in expensive cars, artworks, jewelry and other material non-real-estate assets as they already do for investment.
I will admit to not knowing much about a wealth tax, so maybe there is an established solution here. But it seems like the default would be a privacy and administrative burden even on those people not paying the tax.
"Do you have assets in excess of $X million?"
If you claim you don't, and the IRS has reason to suspect you do, you're opening yourself to a brutal audit and potential jail time.
Most people would not have to deal with this.
It doesn’t matter what the floor is, you still have to report all your assets to the IRS to prove you don’t meet it.
Many countries already have self reported high value assets as part of their tax filing process. Pretty easy to add a self-reporting step "Do you have over $25M in assets"? Most people can confidently leave that unchecked so they don't even need to waste any ink. Lying would be tax fraud and is already possible in the current system anyways.