re: #91 Belafon

Considering she’s taxing the part of their worth that’s only being used to keep score, it’s going to help people more than it’s going to hurt the wealthy.

I have some issues with the wealth tax. There are reasons it has not been particularly successful in any of the countries where it has been attempted and generally ends up getting repealed, and I haven’t heard how Warren is planning on doing it differently to make it work.

Also billionaires wealth generally isn’t particularly liquid. What happens to the market every april when every rich person in the country has to sell off 6% of their assets to pay their tax bill? what happens to individual companies stock when a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos have to sell off a a big chunk of their assets every single year to pay taxes, and who is doing all the buying? Do Billionaires just have to start turning the shares over to the government and what happens after 20 years or so, does the government hold the majority stake in these private companies? What if your wealth is all in real estate, do you have to sell property to pay your taxes, and who is buying all the real estate?

Who determines total wealth? Does the IRS hire an army of new auditors to go through all the houses to tally up the value of artwork, stamp collections, coin collections, comic book collections, car collections and what not? It just seems fraught with problems to me.

I think we need to focus on a pretty ironclad high percentage estate tax to mitigate generational wealth accumulation.