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Comment by aosaigh | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question as I’ve been interested in the conversation around taxing wealth: how do we do it?

I assume a new government dept. has to be set up to oversee it. Or do the wealthy self assess? Are things like shares and investments valued once? Once per year? How is a company valued? How do you know if you qualify as wealthy? Do we value everyone’s wealth? Can’t the wealthy just relocate or move assets out of reach?

I don’t expect answers to this, I’m just thinking out loud as there seem to be a lot of challenges.

A few countries seem to have tried and continued to tax wealth but it seems far from proven and only seems to “work” in Switzerland, which is a bit of an outlier

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Switzerland does it and my understand is they basically just ask you to fill in a tax return every year and say how much wealth you have (all the assets you own).

Presumably they do have a department of people checking this to make sure people aren't lying, but also Switzerland is a relatively high trust society, and taxes are reasonable, so people probably don't mind paying too much.

In the UK in 2025 I'm not sure this would work, people would try and evade it and the UK government isn't competent enough to stop them

I think by "asset" OP actually means "real property", otherwise the subsequent statement of "if you own most of Mayfair, you can't just move your assets elsewhere - they are very clearly tied to the location" doesn't really make sense. You could easily move corporations around, for instance, so the statement is only really true when applied to real estate.

This isn't limited to property.

Britain could just as easily tax profits on the sale of shares in British companies, regardless of the country of domicile of the company or individual that sold the shares.

We don't need wealth taxes, we just need parity between tax on earned and unearned income.

My answer to this (good) question is: do whatever banks do to value illiquid assets when they lend against them (this is how the wealthy largely have cash at all), then levy taxes accordingly. Hell if you want, add the taxes to the interest rate.

I think The Netherlands has it running quite OK.

You don’t need new govt. dept. tax authority is enough. You do your yearly tax statement.

In NL they have access to your bank accounts or more like banks and brokers are obliged to provide state of accounts as per 1st of January.

Downside is you pay wealth tax on „possible gains” not actual gains on wealth above 40k€. If you have mortgage it of course is deducted from value of your house or any debts that you have documented.

In case you think collecting watches can make you hide the wealth, there are of course tax authority checks most likely if your wealth suddenly changes.

The Netherlands is an accountant's wet dream. Everyone with assets here has a personal double-layered corporate structure where the assets are held by the one company, but they're nominally employed by the second one. Even cars for every-day use can be business-owned and then leased back to yourself. And the corporate tax rate is nowhere near the personal wealth tax, people here don't even bother with registering their assets in foreign holdings.

Just tax land and you'll get 80/20

I don’t think the wealth taxes, fundamentally workable because you have issues you raised above, but other things like liquidity and indivisibility of assets.

I think the simpler solution if simply passing along the original cost basis to heirs (and without documentation it’s assumed to be zero). That way people or even families can defer taxes on income, but eventually they get paid.

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