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> Basically zero support for it.

Wealth taxes are extremely well-supported, despite the media as an industry [and politicians] being owned by people strongly motivated to campaign against it all costs, e.g.:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-inequality-p...

Wealth taxes don't work. It was tried in Europe in many countries and they ended up rolling them back.

First, this is not true. I live in a country in Europe and I paid a wealth tax today, in fact.

Second, please re-read my comment above as to why you might have understood that.

Nothing you said contradicts what I said.

That's interesting, can you expand?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax#Past_repeals

There are two studies cited. One on the repeals is by "Institut de l'Entreprise" which seems to be a wealthy people's think tank [1] and the other is about why the wealth tax wasn't introduced in the UK [2]. I'm not convinced by the evidence here.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_de_l%27Entreprise

[2] http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/42582/1/Why_was_a_wealth_tax_for_th...

And yet that haven for the rich, Switzerland, has a wealth tax. Explain please?

America which claims global tax jurisdiction may have slightly different results.

It's true that a number of European countries that previously had wealth taxes no longer do. However, European countries only collect taxes on residents. If you wanted to avoid wealth taxes you could simply move to another country (and the bar to doing so is very low in the EU...), whereas the IRS collects taxes on US citizens regardless of where they live. So the situations are not totally analogous and it's not clear that a wealth tax in the United States would also fail.

The "idea" of wealth tax is liked, the reality is that is has never been implemented successfully. Everywhere it has been tried, it has been rolled back.

> Raising capital gains would be a decent idea that forces the rich to pay more. Basically zero support for it.

Zero support among whom, the wolves or the sheep? Taxing the rich more is generally popular[0] and this would accomplish that; it would seem like that's support.

> Taxes on the sale of a primary home is not as rare as you think.

I would need to see a source on this; I can't imagine a scenario in which any middle-class person pays any tax on their home at all, unless they live in an extreme-outlier of a neighborhood or find gold in their backyard.

0: https://money.com/wealth-tax-rich-tax-rates-2020-presidentia... for example

> Taxing the rich more is generally popular[0] and this would accomplish that; it would seem like that's support.

This is a circular argument. Taxing the rich is popular, but the argument is that it would hurt everyone else. Hurting everyone else is not popular.

> I would need to see a source on this; I can't imagine a scenario in which any middle-class person pays any tax on their home at all, unless they live in an extreme-outlier of a neighborhood or find gold in their backyard.

Could you elaborate on why they wouldn't pay tax on their home?

Because there's a tax shelter for that case - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxpayer_Relief_Act_of_1997

Are you referring to this?

> The act permanently exempted from taxation the capital gains on the sale of a personal residence of up to $500,000 for married couples filing jointly and $250,000 for singles. This exemption applies to residences the taxpayer(s) lived in for at least two years over the last five. Taxpayers can only claim the exemption once every two years.

As I interpret the text, the middle-class homeowner will have to live in a home for two out of five years before they can claim an exemption. This matches the experience of my father, who sold his home after about four years and had to pay federal tax on the profit.

Is there something I'm missing or interpreting incorrectly?

You are misinterpreting that part; you can claim the exemption in a house you've lived in for two years. "Two years out of the last five" means you can live in the house for two years, then move out of it (presumably because you bought another house) and rent it for up to three years, and then sell it and still claim the exemption. Even after that, you can sell it and still not pay taxes on it if you use the proceeds to purchase a different investment property (this is the "1031 exchange" that's been mentioned several times).

I don't see how our interpretations differ. You showed that there are ways for middle-class homeowners to pay the tax. Sell the house after less than five years and don't use the proceeds to purchase another house. That scenario seems to happen often enough from what I see, and it appears that the IRS will be collecting money in those cases.

> Sell the house after less than five years

You need to live there two years, not five[0].

> You showed that there are ways for middle-class homeowners to pay the tax...

I said... "on their home". If you move out of it and rent it out, it's not your home anymore, it's an investment property, which is taxed differently, as it should be. Regular people (not real estate investors or landlords, people who just own one home at a time) almost never pay taxes on a home purchase[1].

0: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

1: https://www.letmegooglethat.com/?q=do+i+need+to+pay+taxes+on...

> You need to live there two years, not five[0].

Thank you. That wasn't clear to me. I interpreted it as you needed to have it for five years and live in it two out of those five. Makes me wonder why my father had to pay tax when he sold his house. But then this is just by memory, he doesn't have his 1040 anymore.

Arguably capital gains should be paid earlier so it’s a sunk cost. Being able to put it off is market-distorting. It’s hard to come up with a fair way to do it though.

Maybe a requirement to save money in advance based on market price, like payroll deductions? Then once you actually sell, you might even get a bit of a refund, encouraging turnover. But that would affect people with cash-flow problems the most.

And the biggest problem is that many people don’t want to sell and will resent any attempt to encourage it. Because encouraging turnover is equivalent to penalizing people who stay.

There is no “natural” way to do this, anything can be considered a market distortion depending on your point of view.

For large residential buildings in California, I’ve heard that apartment owners will essentially swap buildings for some kind of tax advantage. (I forgot what it was, though.)

I think being able to put off capital gains on assets like homes and start-up stock is necessary for the tax system to not do awful things like force people to sell a home because it becomes too valuable or bankrupt someone who has stock options in a company that reaches a high valuation but has untraceable stock.

We consider these awful because of tradition.

The land tax advocates would say that people who own valuable real estate should sell, they are hoarding valuable property.

My scheme (which I’m not too serious about) would not force bankruptcy in the stock options scenario because you could give up some stock options to get your money back. Or possibly get a very low interest loan since it would be fully collateralized by the forced savings.

> For large residential buildings in California, I’ve heard that apartment owners will essentially swap buildings for some kind of tax advantage.

You might be thinking of the federal-level 1031 exchange [1]. California’s particularly distortive Prop. 13-based market has led to a separate Prop. 60 tax base exchange mechanism that might also fit what you saw [2].

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0110/10-things-t...

[2] https://www.bosinvest.com/blog/tax-planning/dreaming-of-down...

The problem with selling your home isn't the income tax on the gains. That would be new money you have. The problem is that the closing costs are very high and that you have to pay yearly property taxes on it whether or not you are selling it.

In NYS, you would lose 2% for selling a home in transfer tax (of the value not the gain); and then if you are financing another home 1.25% of the mortgage value. So right there you've lit 3% of the two transactions on fire. That doesn't even count the non-government fees like commissions, attorneys (for you and the bank), title insurance, etc. that eat quickly eat up many thousands of dollars.

Income tax on the gains tends to be bigger than these if you hold on to a property a while in a hot market. 20% of 400,000 is much bigger than 2% of 1,000,000 if you buy at 600,000 and sell at a million for example.

I think the only thing that would solve almost all the issues is taxing the movement of money in all forms at a small rate. there have been some thoughts on it by people smarter than I but the gist is you tax money every time it moves at a tiny percentage rate. the rate is so small that for the commoners are not affected much but the people that trade money or move money off shore or buy up large commodities would be the ones that pay the most. I'm sure there are some downsides to it but there are many upsides too.

I would say in general that you want to motivate money to move as much as possible - and the problem with excessive wealth is that the money is not moving.

In an ideal world, I would tax money only when it is static.