[jerf]

"Working" in the political arena has a flexible meaning. They "work" in terms of, yes, they collect money.

However, they always collect way less money than the people who made the initial promises said, because the people who were making the promises always assume that if they tax wealth at 75%, their income will be 75% of the current tax base, at the time the wealth tax is proposed and/or passed. The problem is, if you make staying within your tax zone suddenly cost, say, literally 3 billion dollars (and that's the sort of thing we're talking about here), then you just gave the wealth a 3 billion dollar incentive to leave before your tax can come into effect, and the end result is the tax base is much smaller than was anticipated.

So they don't "work" in the sense that they will not collect anything near what the advocates promise they will, and they also chase the wealth away, which, for all the rhetoric about inequality and such, isn't necessarily a good thing for a polity. Generally when people want "equality", they want their wealth level to be raised, not to attain "equality" by lowering the average wealth level. Chasing, say, Jeff Bezos out of the country, along with whatever bits of Amazon he decides to take with him, is not going to be a net gain for the US, just as one example.

They also "work" in the sense that the Gini coefficient probably will indeed go down, so advocates can claim success. But it may not be what you were looking for.

(Also, for the record, I am neither particularly celebrating nor particularly condemning anything or anyone here. This is just how the incentives line up. You can't wish incentive structures away. Effective law takes incentives into account and harnesses them for the desired result. Generally, solving the Big Problems requires something other than the most obvious, direct approach, because there's a selection effect; if the most obvious, direct approach solved the problem, we wouldn't have it.)

[zzzcpan]

> then you just gave the wealth a 3 billion dollar incentive to leave before your tax can come into effect

You can impose tax on leaving bigger than 3 billion dollars effectively removing leaving incentive.

Also you are assuming they are fluid and actually can leave and stay wealthy somewhere else, which is likely not the case for most of the wealth on the planet.

[jerf]

"You can impose tax on leaving bigger than 3 billion dollars effectively removing leaving incentive."

In the US, the country in question, you'd have some constitutional problems with that plan. That's a bad thing; you need this wealth confiscation to be clearly legal, because you have incentivized billions of dollars worth of legal expenditure to prevent it from happening. (There's those nasty incentives again.)

Also, it turns out that demonstrating to the entire world that you'll just take whatever you want, whenever you want, and punish anyone who tries to protect themselves from that, doesn't exactly incentivize a healthy business environment or encourage the kind of investment you need to create the wealth that you need to bring inequality down by bringing most people up. People need predictability to make plans for the future; this sort of thing extremely strongly incentivizes even shorter term planning than we sometimes get, because nobody knows whether you're going to come along and take most of their stuff tomorrow, or even retroactively. It's not a good plan to create a wealth-producing society.

It's really, really easy to "solve" the wealth inequality problem by simply destroying all (or almost all) wealth, everywhere. It's been done in several countries in the past century. It's not usually the solution people want when they're talking about wealth inequality... oh, they might take a small hit in spite if they knew it was really going to stick it to those "wealthy fat cats", but for the most part, people expect the end of "wealth inequality" to increase their own wealth, not destroy it.

"Also you are assuming they are fluid and actually can leave and stay wealthy somewhere else, which is likely not the case for most of the wealth on the planet."

It is the case for the sort of wealth we are talking about, though. Yes, you can indeed tax the lower and lower-middle classes very hard, because they tend to be unable to move. Not exactly a "wealth" tax anymore, though, is it? Billionaires can move wealth. After all, if we're talking a 75% confiscation rate, it's worth it to move overseas even if they take a 50% bath. Billions of dollars worth of incentives cover a lot of things.

[snarf21]

You are sooo right. I hate when people make a promise to change a system by changing one variable and pretending that all the other related variables will not change at all. Tax the rich is just a soundbite. There are lots of ways to close tax loopholes. We need to raise taxes by creating the right incentives.