[tapland]

Because a yearly tax rate isn't a flat fee and yearly rates compound.

For example, from the widely shared article from business insider the other week.

If there was a 3% tax on money past $1B Jeff Bezos wouldn't have beat $86B in fortune, but he's at $160B today.

That's a 100% increase caused by what you call a 'rounding error'. Over not-even-that-many-years.

[rayiner]

The vast bulk of taxes in the OECD are payroll and income taxes, which do not compound yearly. Taxes on property account for just 2% of tax revenue in the OECD: https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-highl....

As to Jeff Bezos--what is the point of taxes? Raising money to pay for public services, or trying to make Jeff Bezos have less money? I'm in the former camp. I don't care how much money Jeff Bezos has, I care about raising revenue to pay for public services.

Estimates are that an 8% wealth tax would raise between $60 billion and $430 billion annually: https://www.manhattan-institute.org/issues-2020-taxing-the-r.... Total U.S. government spending (at all levels) is somewhere between 12 and 86 times as much as what an 8% wealth tax would raise. (Of course, an 8% wealth tax would be completely insane and we would never do it. Sweden and France topped out at 1.5% before they realized it was a stupid idea and ditched it.)

I don't see the point of doing battle with billionaires (and potentially driving them all to Canada, or Sweden, or France) to maybe optimistically collect 8% more tax revenue, and realistically more like 1-3%. We could raise $500 billion+ (an extra 10% of revenue) by adopting a Canadian style VAT. Which has the major advantage that it's not insane and everybody else in the OECD has one.

[xyzzyz]

Corporate income taxes are not annual taxes on wealth. They do not compound.