Wealth taxes in general are challenging to execute. Property taxes are much easier, as well as deal with the extra issues brought on by land ownership that cash-equivalent wealth does not.
You're absolutely right - a property tax is a type of wealth tax. I completely agree, which is why I attempted to differentiate between a general-purpose tax on all wealth in any form and a tax on real property. Please accept my humble apologies for my failures to be less clear than I could have been - my communication skills are a work in progress.
With that said, I have been under the impression that countries that have attempted to levy general-purposes taxes on all forms of wealth have in many cases run into practical difficulties. This requires things like finding a fair way to value and re-value an art collection or shares in a company not traded or liquid. In several cases - like France - these difficulties and others have led to dropping general-purpose wealth taxes.
Have I been laboring under a misapprehension? Can you help me understand what I've missed?
I don't think you're wrong. There's easy parts (ie. publicly traded equities) and hard parts (eg. art collections).
I've been skeptical of skepticism (lol) of the wealth tax mostly because the easy parts dominate the hard parts. Most wealth is in the easily identifiable areas (ie. equities and property) not the hard areas. Even with private companies like some startup, surely the shares have some known valuation right?
My point is though that we've already built a bureaucratic apparatus to evaluate wealth in our property assessment system so surely it's possible to extend this.
A possible implementation would be to mostly ignore the "hard" sectors of wealth (eg. car collections/art collections) or do random audits of the tricky parts just to keep people honest.
My -- perhaps overly cynical -- expectation is that a "focus on the easy stuff" wealth tax would just cause wealthy people to move their assets into the "hard stuff" as much as possible.
I think the hope would be that there'd be would be some limit to the willingness for someone to shift money into relatively illiquid assets (ie. cars) that aren't really that good of investments instead of keeping their money in equities and simply pay the tax. There's a balance to find there in the policy.
Do you think it's perhaps worth looking at places that have tried wealth taxes? I think it possible that there might be some lessons to be learned from the well-intentioned and sincerely tried efforts of others. Perhaps our basic assumption that what works for real property will surely work for everything might not be trivially true, for example.
Yeah sure, but we should also be aware that the wealthy do not want these taxes, and will use every means to ensure they are not enacted. This includes spreading FUD about their implementation and results.
I, personally, hesitate to characterize the lived experiences with policy choices of other polities as FUD. I understand that this is a deeply personal choice, and as such some might differ.
I'm speaking mostly to the media (owned by whom?), politicians and the surrogates of wealth that appear as a talking head to speak about the wealth tax.
The "Taxes were repealed in Europe so case closed" message that wealth is all too happy to push is a deflection from a thorough examination of the policy. Why were these policies "failures" in Europe? Some of the flaws of the European taxes have been already directly addressed by more recent Bernie and Warren proposals. For another example the issue some European countries had of their wealthy fleeing the country to avoid the tax isn't even possible US's tax system which will tax you regardless of where you live.
