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Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't always work because there are too many tax havens. If you increase the taxes too sharply, the rich will simply take their wealth elsewhere, and then the government gets nothing. The recent situation in France (which ended up being averted anyway) being an example, many of the countries rich debated moving their assets and businesses to Belgium or Switzerland...

Taxes can be an effective tool, but they have to make sense. You can't kill a businesses ability to compete, nor can you remove the incentives to build wealth.

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there isn't enough rich to tax to fix debt, unless you count everyone above the poverty line.

If the top 10% controls 80% of the wealth, there are definitely enough rich to fix the debt.

Wealth is not income though. Higher wealth taxes would go a long way but then you again have the problem of the wealthy simply moving their wealth out or not bringing it to the high-tax country in the first place.

> the problem of the wealthy simply moving their wealth out

I could easily see any nation trying to implement higher taxes on the rich to also implement a wealth export tax that takes a tremendous portion of their accumulated wealth if they try to jump ship and take it overseas.

> not bringing it to the high-tax country in the first place.

This is the larger concern, but if a society can't survive without the good graces of the lucky rich, it is already their slaves.

The IMF is talking about global monetary policy - if all countries did implement tax on high net wealth individuals, then it could have an impact.

Or they can penalize countries who operate tax havens - it's not like tax havens represents a significant amount of either trade or GDP.

As so many hackers have found out, it doesn't matter where the money is. It matters where YOU are.

People aren't taxed based on net worth and I've yet to see that proposed, so I'm not sure how it would work. Either way, it's orthogonal to the proposal linked by the OP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax

Morally, our personal share of national debt should be related to how much wealth we have. $52k sounds like a lot of money to most of us not in the 1%, and especially someone who is poor, but really, it sounds like a lot just because we have such a small share of the GDP.

Practically speaking, ya, it would be a challenge to make the system fair. But either the rich will pay, or there will eventually be some kind of destructive revolution to bring things back into balance (probably by making everyone poorer).

> If the top 10% controls 80% of the wealth, there are definitely enough rich to fix the debt.

In many cases wealth isn't liquid. Wealth exists in the form of securities and assets. If you were to attempt to tax these, there would be absolute chaos - bank runs, stock market crashes, etc..., as everyone tries to liquefy their assets or move to protect them.

You could potentially tax cash savings, but that's not going to change much.

Your claim is that people would rather destroy their wealth in an asset crash, over giving a piece of it up?

No. But if everyone worth a billion had to liquidate even 5% of it, it would cause huge dip in the market, and in turn funds and retail investors would sell off shares, people would hoard cash overseas, and a crash would be the end result.

We saw in France a huge uproar over the threat of a 75% tax, thankfully the courts declared it illegal...

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