this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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An income tax would be pointless for the wealthy. Most of their wealth is in unrealized capital gains or other investment vehicles, not from salaries.
There would need to be a mechanism to tax unrealized capital gains, or just networth in general.
I don’t know that there’s a fair way to do that, since they are unrealized: people can’t really use that wealth yet.
However, let’s worry about taxing capital gains: why is that rate so much lower than income tax
Let’s worry about hiding wealth through corporations to lower tax rates
At one point there were reports that Donald Trump managed his real estate through a network of over 500 companies. While I don’t know anything beyond the news articles, I find it believable that it could be both legal and could be used to hide both income and expenses from taxes and lenders. We need to use things like this as an example of what not to allow
While I completely agree on your later points, we do have a system already in place for taxing unrealized gains. They're called property taxes. I'm sure we could create a similar system for taxing other types of assets.