They get punished by wealth tax because the crooks who implement wealth tax put the limit at some ridiculous point that ends up impacting "normal people". The whole point of wealth tax is to tax the ultra rich, so you could put the limit extremely high like $5M or even $20M and it wouldn't affect anyone except those who can easily afford it. But they don't do that, I assume because they want people to hate it so they can remove it later.

If your point is that it costs money to "move money around" to "save money on these sorts of taxes" you've missed the point of having a wealth tax...

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Is it though? Those same unrealized gains are used by those same alleged paper-billionaires to borrow money and live lavish lifestyles ("Buy, Borrow, Die").

They literally get to eat their cake and have it too.

Such a wealth tax surely should be progressive. If I have $500k I'm not necessarily wealthy-wealthy but I'm heck of a lot more wealthy than someone who only has $5k, or even $50k. I could afford to pay something for the sake of being lucky enough to have a have half a million. Someone with $50M could afford to pay much more.

However, I don't think wealth tax is a good tax. You'd be taxing something you want citizens to have: wealth. It seems that wealth tax is often used as an easy fix to "we can't somehow tax the income of high-earning wealthy people because they arrange the legal ownership of their wealth so that it's hard so let's tax their wealth". What should be fixed instead is profits slipping out of the taxable base. In general, a lower but wider tax base is always better than higher spot taxes that encourage people to optimize. Wealth tax is just a slap-on solution that mostly just encourages tax planning.

The inequality of the distribution is the true issue, and indeed not taxing the wealthy enough does accumulates that. A country should be proud to tax widely and moderately, even the highest earning people and businesses. A country can't compete with a tax haven but a tax haven can't compete with a functioning state and society. Working to tax wealthy people more in par to what ordinary people are taxed would work towards a more equal society. Some of the wealthy people would move away but the country should recognize and maintain that it has other factors of appeal than the tax rate.

That’s the deal. You are asking the hand to tax itself and for sure it’s going to make sure the rest of the body feels the pain.

That’s why it is extremely difficult to make even modest improvements in a dug-in system.

Netherlands is €60,000 single / €120,000 married before it kicks in; implemented as a 36% yearly tax on assumed 6% returns (e.g. married; have €200k in investments; you owe something like [200-120] * .36 * .06 = €1728). I think there's some nuance for bad years.

In practice its basically an additional 2% "drag" on market returns as its a yearly tax; not capital gains on sale.

Sole reason we turned down a job there. I don't hate the idea of a wealth tax, but having it kick in at €120,000 is nuts. IMO it's not even functioning as a wealth tax, its a barrier to the middle class accumulating even meager non-property wealth.

(I'm sure I have some details wrong, but broad-strokes this is what I remember from when we turned it down a few months ago)

At $5MM farmers are affected. Land is expensive, and it takes a lot of land to farm. At $5k/acre, the old standard 1k acres farm is $5MM, and nowadays that’s probably not enough land to raise a family (only $65k profit), so you really need more land. Estate tax means the kids can’t inherit all the land.

And, you’d better pin it to inflation, or in 50 years, you’re back to the same granny problem.

>That the rich will flee, leaving us.... better off in every possible way??

Can you explain why would we be better off when the rich flee? I see this "we gonna be better off without them" sentiment quite often, but never an explanation how would we be better off? What metrics have you used?

This article is about American wealth inequality so I’ll assume you’re talking about the US. The US already taxes global income, so moving away is not enough. You could renounce citizenship, but then you lose all the benefits of citizenship and you must pay capital gains an all assets whether you sell them or not.

The “they’ll just leave” argument doesn’t really hold up in this case.

There is not one discussion without this "argument".

But, let's say, they do. And they also have to stay out. Wouldn't that be.. kinda nice actually?

Your taxes would stay the same either way. Yes, of course, there would be less luxury spending, but the millions of normal people still exist. And they spend and they produce.

Why not let the ultra wealthy just leave and idk go to mars or something? Kick them out, seize their assets, run society without them if they do not want to be part of it anyway.

Seems unlikely all these people would give up living where they were socialized. Where was it tried before and fleeing observed?

I found a study saying the effect was minuscule in Norway, Sweden and Denmark https://taxjustice.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Taxing-ext...

Hey so this isn't true. In places where they have researched this, a small number of people do move, but the additional tax of those who don't completely outstrips what was lost.

They can personally move, but they can't move the source of their wealth. Bezos can move, Amazon can't. Bezos moving away will only reduce his taxes if we let it.

Where are they going to go? If they wanted to go live in a 3rd world country with no taxes, they already would. Everyone is getting tired of their BS and your lame, repetitive arguments.

Moving from America? They'd still owe taxes.