For the vast majority of human civilization, all taxes were based on wealth. Your emperor, pharaoh, czar, or whoever was in charge sent a dude around to take a bit of everybody's stuff. Not how much income they made but how much stuff they actually had. It's only been the last 120-ish years that the idea that wealth and income were totally different things as far as taxation is concerned emerged.

I think almost everybody would be better off if taxes were something like 1% of total assets rather than off the top of your income.

This sounds completely made up. The medieval taxman has no idea how much gold you have squirreled away, and even finding everyone to tax them was hard enough. Most peasant taxes were based on productive land and observable yields thereof, and the rest were import/export duties. IE income and not wealth, because nobody was stupid enough to implement a negative growth rate until the 21st century (unless they were actively trying to loot holdings for redistribution, e.g. varlık vergisi)

> I think almost everybody would be better off if taxes were something like 1% of total assets rather than off the top of your income

No thanks. Any discussion about tax reform has to start with government spending otherwise it's not serious. Nobody wants to give away a slice of their net worth to pay for bullshit wars and ballrooms.

I think that could generally work domestically, as in, "I don't have anything to give you, I gave/lost it all to Bob...go get it from him". But it would need to be modified with a tax on any wealth leaving the country/jurisdiction, so I can't just make $1B and then send it all to my aunt in $COUNTRY / $STATE / $CITY with low/no wealth taxes and then claim that I don't have any wealth (unless there were sensible reciprocity agreements for tax revenue reapportionment).

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But I'm not sure if your historical claims are accurate. I believe a lot of taxes were a fraction of the expected yield of land, which is more complicated than just "taxing wealth vs. income". Yes, the taxes would go up if you owned more land, which sounds like a tax on wealth. But the imputed tax base would be based on historical yields (income) because the quality of the soil would vary (which also could be construed as a tax on wealth because higher quality soil meant land might be worth more per acre). It was also based on the weather during that growing season, if yields were down in that area then taxes would be lower that year, which sounds more like an income tax than a wealth tax.

You also said "its only been about 120 years since wealth and income were different":

The Christian tithe that became de jury under Charlemagne in 779 A.D. was a strict 10% tax on land yield each year (~income tax) but other empires and lords used fixed quotas (~wealth tax), and records exist that these could have brutal effects during years where weather resulted in lower yields.

There was the 600-year long sales tax on salt in France, which definitely wasn't a wealth tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabelle

In 1899 the UK instituted a 10% levy on annual incomes over £200, with a graduated rate for incomes between £60 and £200. Income taxes had a hiatus from 1816-1842 but has been permanent since the "Income Tax Act of 1842".

The Mit'a (Inca Empire, Pre-1532) taxed individuals "time". Which I think most people would consider kind of an income tax - it's literally paid in labor. Adult men had to spend a certain number of days each year working on state projects - like building roads, farming state lands, or fighting in the army. They didn't have currency. Their economy was based on centralized planning, labor taxation (mit'a), and state redistribution of goods.

The Saladin Tithe taxed revenues at 10% in 1188.

For the vast majority of human history, only the ultra wealthy had any money. And then, just as now, taxing only those people would not yield sufficient resources to fund the state.

The problem is, and always will be, what happens to me is I am out of work. No one wants to force people to liquidate assets they might need to work, live, etc in order to pay an asset tax.

Then you get to the dividing line of, but what about the ultra wealthy? Well, sure, but then you write an insanely obtuse tax code to try and capture that wealth while leaving everyone else alone and the targets are highly motivated to find loopholes.

Progressives intuitively understand that it’s not worth the hassle to try and means test entitlements yet seem to miss the fact that trying to manage a confiscatory bureaucracy would have the same issues.

We have property tax, sales tax and inheritance tax.

We also have mountains of loopholes through all of these.

If you can afford a tax attourney your outcomes will be far better than those who cannot.