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TZubiri 2 hours ago

As others have mentioned this is wrong. Here's 3 accounts on how it is so:

1- Fundamentally, they are magnitudes of different units, one is tax/income, the other is tax/wealth/time. Not only is the denominator different, one being calculated over income, the other over wealth, but there is an additional inverse time factor.

In income tax, whether the period is yearly or monthly or hourly, is an administrative matter that doesn't materially change the rate, 1%/month is the same as 12%/month, however in wealth tax, 1% wealth tax per year is not the same as 1% wealth tax per month. In many respects one might consider wealth tax to be a second order derivative of income with respect to time. Which is again very similar to a progressive income tax. Anyone that studied polynomials knows that there is no such equivalence between ax and bx^2, they are irreducible mathematical forms.

2)Trivially, in the scenario Paul proposed, Wealth tax is comparable to income tax only with respect to capital gains. That is, if he did find an equivalence between income tax and wealth tax for capital gains (which he didn't), income tax would still apply non capital gain taxes. But I will concede that there may be an argument that, if such an equivalence were found, it could be considered that there exists an Income Tax which will always yield more tax than another specific wealth tax.

3) The equivalence between wealth and income tax cannot be linear. The example given applied to 1% wealth tax and was compared to 20%, and a risk free interest of 5%. If the wealth tax were of 2%, 5% or 10%, would that be equivalent to 40%, 100%, and 200% income tax respectively? The last one is especially ridiculous.