I'm not an expert in this, but I thought one of the biggest arguments for why a wealth tax is needed the whole "buy, borrow, die" thing where the ultra rich can use their assets as collateral to take out a never ending series of ultra low interest loans until they die and then have most of the tax burden of selling assets to pay off those loans wiped out because the tax code is much more favorable to selling assets to pay off the debt of someone's estate.

If (big if) I'm remembering that correctly, I don't get why we just go after the problem directly and do something like treat putting down collateral for these type of loans as a taxable event. I'm sure it's not as straight forward as it sounds, but I can't imagine it'd be more convoluted that needing to track the wealth of every high net worth individual.

Maybe I'm in the minority on this, but I actually don't care if Jeff Bezos' net worth went up by $5 billion because Amazon had a good day in the market. If the shares are just sitting in an account doing nothing other than proving ownership it's all kind of just numbers in a computer, IMO. A painting is probably a better example than stock, but if I have a painting on my wall that was worth $1 million dollars yesterday and today it's worth $10 million that change in valuation is essentially meaningless as long as the only thing the painting is doing is hanging on my wall.

What I do care about is when he's able to access the cash value of that $5 billion of Amazon stock without paying the taxes that would come along with selling the stock. If he wants to leave $5 billion in Amazon stock just sitting in his account doing nothing until the day he dies, that's totally fine, but the second he puts it up for collateral we should tax that. I think this has the added benefit of simplifying things by avoiding a lot of questions around fair valuation of assets. If I have a $10 million dollar one of a kind painting on my wall that I'm never planning on selling, it's kind of hard to put a valuation on that and it can be easily manipulated by finding the right appraiser. If I put a painting up as collateral for a $10 million loan it becomes a lot harder for the owner to argue that it's actually worthless or the IRS to argue that it's actually worth $1 billion.

>why a wealth tax is needed the whole "buy, borrow, die" thing [...]

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48239802

Moreover if the bug is that income isn't tax at death, why not just fix that bug? Otherwise it's like arguing: "wow there are people in poverty? Better have a communist revolution to fix that!"

This is exactly the reason -- or a tax against borrowing against assets once your net worth is high enough -- or not reseting capital gains at death. The entire system is currently basically rigged such that these ultra rich people pay no taxes.