[scarmig]

"Buy, borrow, die" is a bit of a bogeyman of the Left; it's not a common strategy for HNW or UHNW individuals, and to the extent it is used, there are much better ways to close it than a wealth tax, which is coarse and rife with implementation issues.

[kccqzy]

The main implementation issue with a wealth tax is that it doesn’t at all interact with the capital gains tax. It’s easy to fix the implementation issue by integrating the wealth tax into the capital gains tax (call it unrealized capital gains tax for starters), make the tax refundable when an asset loses value, and netting it against the actual capital gains tax.

With this framing, the wealth tax isn’t a new tax; it is only prepaying the capital gains tax instead of allowing it to be deferred forever.

[trollbridge]

Unrealised capital gains tax requires some way to assess the value of assets. This is a lot harder than it sounds.

It already exists in the form of property taxes, which are quite unpopular.

[vannevar]

>It already exists in the form of property taxes, which are quite unpopular.

For an unpopular tax, the property tax is remarkably ubiquitous. Are there really any popular taxes?

[pzo]

at least all financial assets (stocks, etc) are easy to assess value so why not start with that? same with gold, silver etc. Some minimal amount you can make it nontaxable to reduce administrative burden.

[deeponey]

this a million times. Land easy, already being taxed. Any regulated financial instrument, also easy, take the minimum average yearly price of held assets. Tricky things like privately held companies, maybe we solve that one later, but even then there are valuations made at various points, anchor to those, be conservative in every case. If the gov primarily exists to enforce property rights... then people should pay in proportion to the rights that are being enforced on their behalf.

[lacewing]

> Tricky things like privately held companies, maybe we solve that one later

So I spend 30 minutes to set up an LLC and then transfer my assets to that LLC. Now, I don't hold the assets; I hold a stake in a privately-held company.

Ultimately, the solution you come up with needs to be at least somewhat airtight; otherwise, it just penalizes people who spend less money on tax advisors. The generation of income is a fairly well-defined point where assets change hands and you can apply some quasi-clear rules. Ongoing taxes on the potential to make money are a lot harder. So I buy some gold bars or valuable paintings and stash them in the attic. Gold / Picasso appreciates. How do you tax me on that? Do I submit an inventory of everything I own to the government every year? How does the government check - do they get to rifle through my stuff every December?

And hey, here's a cool one: if my parent owns a company and puts it in their will that it's mine when they die, is that promise an asset I owe taxes on every year? It's clearly worth something: it's potential money down the line.

[phil21]

> So I spend 30 minutes to set up an LLC and then transfer my assets to that LLC. Now, I don't hold the assets; I hold a stake in a privately-held company.

Beneficial ownership is a well established concept in law, and this strategy simply would not work. If those assets are easily valued and liquid (stocks or whatever) then the taxes will just end up being passed through as the entity won’t be relevant for tax purposes. Sure you could try to hide assets or offshore them or whatever but you’d be running headlong into outright tax fraud at that point.

You would probably instead see less new public companies, more companies/divisions being sold to various groups under opaque structures and taken private, and a lot more weird borderline legal transactions done between private parties to pretend valuation of private companies or other assets are lower than reality.

> Gold / Picasso appreciates. How do you tax me on that? Do I submit an inventory of everything I own to the government every year? How does the government check - do they get to rifle through my stuff every December?

Yes, of course you would owe taxes on such things assuming they were over whatever exemption limits and such. The government can’t realistically check everyone. They just throw the more obvious offenders in prison when found and keep enough background “random audits” to keep folks scared enough into compliance.

And obviously the government has been making “hiding” such assets harder every year with the ratcheting up of KYC/AML laws. Over time you’d see these requirements for pretty much every major on/offramp for such assets like gold bullion dealers, coin shops, or auctions. A lot already are required to verify your identity and even report transactions. There is no more showing up to a car dealer and paying for a new car with a duffel bag full of cash, much less anonymously. Such a transaction is reported and you’d see this simply expand.

Property taxes exist at least in part because the asset is impossible to hide and more difficult than most to play games with valuation.

> And hey, here's a cool one: if my parent owns a company and puts it in their will that it's mine when they die, is that promise an asset I owe taxes on every year? It's clearly worth something: it's potential money down the line.

Presumably your parents would already be paying the wealth taxes owed on the asset in question. That someone might loan you money against a future inheritance seems immaterial but perhaps I’m missing something here?

[vannevar]

If you properly taxed real estate in a progressive way, you wouldn't have to bother with taxing paper wealth at all---the collective value of paper is already reflected in the price of land. People with large paper fortunes inevitably buy real estate, and when they do, their paper wealth inflates the price. This is why median residential housing prices have dramatically outpaced median wage increases, along with anything else tied to real estate, like sports and concert tickets.

[trollbridge]

What level of property tax are you proposing?

Raising property taxes raises housing costs for everyone.

[rileymat2]

We already value private companies with a 409a valuation.

[trollbridge]

Most businesses in America are small and the owner has probably no idea what it is worth.

They are illiquid assets, not traded anywhere.

[WalterBright]

The value of stocks fluctuates every second. Sometimes wildly.

[vineyardmike]

Weakest of the many weak arguments.

Let’s do the bog-standard obvious and sane thing and pick a single point in time, once a year and use the value then. Maybe, i don’t know, close of market on the last trading day of the year. At which point it won’t fluctuate again until the new tax year. Then, we can call it “mark to market” because we’re marking the value to the market at a point in time.

Finally, we stop with silly bad faith arguments because fluctuations in stock have been successful taxed for decades. This is how day-traders pay taxes, and it’s not even a little challenging to do.

[WalterBright]

A friend of mine, a few years ago, had his stock options vest. He didn't sell the stocks. The stocks tanked a few months later. The IRS said he owed income tax on the value of the stocks when they vested.

He owed more tax than his net worth, lost his house, everything, and wound up in a trailer.

He never saw the money he was taxed on.

> bad faith arguments

A person's net worth can have wild gyrations on a daily basis. It's not unusual for a stock to move 10% in a few hours. MSFT dropped something like a third of its value last year. What something is "worth" is an utterly arbitrary notion, and basing taxes on that is inevitably unfair an inequitable. (A lot of effort and handwaving is done by accountants trying to guess at what something is "worth".) Heck, what is your house "worth"? Do you agree with the tax assessor? I once told the assessor that if he believed my house was worth what he assessed it at, I'd sell it to him at a 10% discount and he can flip it for what he thought it was worth. He wouldn't take the deal.

With taxes on income, that is fairly well understood and can be accounted for to the dollar.

[kccqzy]

Not an issue. If you trade section 1256 contracts, the current tax code already requires you to report unrealized gains by calculating the gains as if they are sold on the last day of the tax year. Brokers have no issues calculating that and reporting that single number to the IRS.

[WalterBright]

Reporting them is not the same thing as paying taxes on them.

The next day, the stock could tank.

BTW, do you think that a mortgage on a house should be taxed as "income"? How about credit card debt? Is that also "income"?

[tinktank]

Calling everything a bogeyman without providing evidence or justification is a bit of a common deflection tactic of billionaire bootlickers.