The elephant in the room is why governments need more money: old age benefits like social security. I fear that taxing wealth will just be a tax on future investment while funnelling that wealth to the elderly. Already, folks are pushing to make the key asset owned by the old - housing - free from property taxes (if you're over 60, naturally)[1] which will only push housing prices up and drive more budget deficits that needs fresh tax revenue.

I don't expect Social Security (or my country's equivalent) to exist in anything like its current form when I'm old enough to retire. This is the last hurrah and it's shocking how we're pulling out all the stops to make it happen.

[1] https://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advi...

Wow, exempting people over 60 from property tax is such a fiscal self-own... The way to do it is to provide a deferral with interest which becomes a lien on your property. This way you can still live in your house, take advantage of your asset appreciating and the county still gets its taxes in the end (and can better handle the delayed cash flows). King County in WA does this for example.

Well, healthcare is an increasing piece of government spending all over the world, and the population is aging, so politics and policy aside, that number is going to go up.

I am okay with a certain percentage of society's production being collected and funneled to the elderly, the poor, the sick, the young, the disabled. We can argue on what that percentage is, but it's clear that no matter how we slice it, we either give them a percentage of our production, or they die. We can slice it by taxes, we can slice it by investments (where everything costs more because a percentage of it is getting funneled to retiree shareholders), we can slice it by interest on treasury bonds (where we pay for it in taxes with extra steps). At the end of the day it's still taking a percentage of real production. I think the less complicated a system we use for that, the better, so I'm in favour of just agreeing that we can afford to give, say, 20% of everything society produces to those kinds of people.

Again, we can argue the exact numbers, 20% is just an example. Some percentage is also needed for public infrastructure works and stuff like healthcare, and we don't want the total to be too high, nor the component parts to be too low.

The cure to that, unfortunately is more corruption and here America is leading proudly

Even if the government took the money and burnt it that would be a net good for society since it would lower inequality and thereby decrease power imbalances.