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.

> However, I don't think wealth tax is a good tax. You'd be taxing something you want citizens to have: wealth.

Income is far more important to people than wealth is. Income is what let's you buy food. Yet we tax income at quite a high rate. Far better to have a mix of both than the current system of having a lot of one and basically none of the other.

I agree it should be progressive. But to me, the point is not to tax normal people who have worked hard and saved up some money. Many, if not most people will save up $500k over the course of their lives. That's not wealth, thats just a financially responsible person, it's one paid off modest house. These people already pay half their salary in tax every year, they are already severely taxed we don't need to tax them more. In fact I think normal people should be taxed less, even relatively high earners like medical doctors for example.

The point of wealth tax, to me, is to tax the obscenely wealthy people. Those few who are worth more than the entire rest of the population combined, while also basically not paying any tax at all despite their fortunes growing by millions or billions every year.

I actually think it would be reasonable to essentially put a "soft cap" on wealth. Like if you're worth several hundred million dollars you literally can't grow your fortune any more because you're just gaining as much as you pay in tax. Instead of one guy owning multiple companies worth billions of dollars he would have to sell shares to pay his taxes, and now many people own the companies instead. This prevents one person from amassing too much wealth and power.