(12-20-2024, 12:42 PM)TDOSS Wrote:

(12-20-2024, 12:06 PM)The Real Marty Wrote: Can you show me how that is true?  Are you using unrealized capital gains when you make that statement?  And what accounting tricks do rich people use to greatly reduce their taxable income?

Economics 101.

Wealth can be taxed, and there's plenty of good reasons to.

Quote:Also, the top 10% does not have 95% of the wealth.

They own 70% of the wealth, and 93% of the stocks.

There are many components that can make up a person's wealth.  Many of them are very hard to measure accurately.  How would you measure the value of a unique work or art, or a small business, for example?  Taxing wealth would mean the government would have to hire tens of thousands of appraisers, and tens of thousands of lawyers, because rich people would hire their own appraisers, and fight the appraisals in court.  

The fact is "wealth" or "net worth" is an estimate.  It's a wild guess.  No one really knows what things are worth unless they get sold.  The very best way to determine the value of something is to put it on the open market and see what people are willing to pay for it.  That's why we tax income and not wealth.  Income is readily measurable.  

Think of how many arguments and court cases we already have over what is income and what is expense, and these things are measurable.  Think of how many arguments and court cases we will have when we send appraisers to guess at people's net worth, and the rich go to court about it.

Why a Wealth Tax Would Be Terrible for American Taxpayers | Kiplinger

A wealth tax has all the existing bad features of the current income tax — complex, expensive to administer, costly to comply with, subject to manipulation and avoidance by those with the most resources and badly distorting of economic activity and capital formation.

But it’s much worse. And here’s why, practically speaking.

First, a wealth tax violates the long-standing American principle that we’re allowed to build wealth and grow the value of assets and that we don’t pay taxes on that growth until we dispose of the asset. In effect, a wealth tax imposes what can be thought of as a third level of taxation — after income tax and capital gains tax — on the most productive drivers of the U.S. economy.

Second, no matter how it’s positioned, a wealth tax is not based on objective facts. It’s subjective, because wealth must be appraised, and appraisals are opinions. Marketable securities are easy to mark to market. But how about stock in private companies? How about large real estate holdings? How about a stamp collection? How about a franchise contract?

A large proportion of tax court cases come about because of disputes over what the IRS thinks an asset is worth and what the taxpayer says it’s worth. Can you imagine the chaos when every asset of every wealthy taxpayer has to be annually evaluated and assessed?

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