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Comment by teachingassist | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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

That's interesting, can you expand?

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.

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