[pinky1417]

Perfect *is* the enemy of the good here.

Major components of the economy are not valued regularly, e.g. private businesses. Sure, if a buyer paid $10MM last week for a private business, we might say it's worth $10MM today. But what about a business that was started from scratch by the founder? Or one that was last sold 30 years ago? Or one in a very niche industry?

Put simply, valuation is not only a science, but an art... and it's an expensive art. The cost and difficulty of administration alone would be reason enough to steer clear of a wealth tax.

Lastly, although I'm not a fan of higher taxes on anyone, even simply a more progressive income tax would make more sense than a wealth tax.

[slg]

We aren’t talking about the economy as a whole or $10m businesses. The wealth tax wouldn’t care about values that low. We can start by focusing on billionaires. Most of those people own businesses that are either publicly traded or have some type of semi-public valuation.

[pinky1417]

I'll give you this: If you only applied a wealth tax to the wealthiest-of-the-wealthy, say billionaires only, the number of individuals might be small enough such that it's not an insane administration challenge. Forbes lists about 600 billionaires in the USA, so I'd guesstimate there are actually 1,200 (I know of at least three individuals who'd, conservatively, be worth at least $1B... but they're not on any list because they own under-the-radar non-VC companies).

I'm not a fan of taxes on most stocks (eg wealth) rather than flows (eg income). But if you held a gun to my head and said "design a wealth tax!", I'd set the minimum wealth far above the $32MM proposed by Bernie Sanders or $50MM proposed by Elizabeth Warren.

And keep in mind, even if there are actually only 1,200 billionaires in the US, a number of people slightly below the threshold will still have to be analyzed; I might not know if I'm worth $800MM and owe no wealth tax or $1.2B and owe tax on $200B of wealth.