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this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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income tax is whack, tax wealth.
Wealth tax should make capitalists happy: it encourages capital to be actively deployed & not passively hoarded. Make capital earn its keep.
The problem with a wealth tax is the feasibility of the tax. Every time it's ever been tried it has failed. Expecting the IRS to be able to accurately appraise everything a wealthy person owns is a tall task. As soon as you allow an exception, the wealthy avoid taxes by putting their money into that exception.
Fun fact: wealthy people actively brag about their company ~~earnings~~ takings to their shareholders.
Hold them to that math. If they contest it, they agree to pay the IRS to contract additional labour to investigate subject to a refund if the reported amount is accurate, at which point they should be forced to payout the difference to all shareholders and pay an equal amount as a punitive fine.
Congratulations, you just replaced the wealth tax idea with corporate income tax. A much more feasible system.
Alright, no exceptions
Okay, hire a shit ton more IRS agents and expect tax seasons to last forever as everyone gets literally everything they own appraised.
Worth it
Lol, if less complicated, that is, if there are no exceptions, then you need fewer agents
Tell me in what world do you need fewer agents to appraise literally everything owned by everybody every year? I bet you own things you've forgotten about, but some IRS agent would have to go over all of it.
In the world where you have so many loopholes, and with so much complexity, that you have to anyway keep track of who's got what, who owes what to whom, what something is worth, etc etc
Then close the loopholes. Much simpler.
So tax their income and asset movements to pay for an appraisal service? And carve out exceptions for non-luxuries like primary residence and farm equipment? Seems straightforward to me, but I'm far from an expert.
Build a primary residence the size of a city and sell parts of it to the poor class you keep homeless when you need to liquidate, easy
"Size of a city" should come with pretty hefty property tax I'd think. And billionaires love to be jetsetters so I image very few would want to stick to a single residence just to save on taxes.
The solution then is to abolish private ownership so that people cannot become wealthy by exploiting the labor of others in the first place.
Think about what you're saying. Nobody should be allowed to own anything? No books, no art, no jewelry, no anything. Because literally anything can be made to be luxury and become a store of value.
I have thought about what I'm saying. The problem is you don't understand what I'm saying, but I did just kinda throw it out there with no explanation (because we're on lemmy.ml, I didn't think I needed to). I am referring to private property in the Marxian sense, where a distinction is made between private and personal property. All of the things you listed are personal property, not private property. In Marxian economics private property refers to the means of production privately owned and involved in an economic enterprise employing wage labor (i.e. factories, offices, farms) while personal property refers to consumer goods or goods produced by an individual (i.e. books, art, jewelry). What I was presenting as a solution is the abolishment of the former and not the latter, replacing private ownership instead with collective or public ownership (when workers share ownership of their tools and place of work - the means of production). This is the core idea of all anti-capitalist ideologies, though it was first articulated in this way by anarchists.
So you are making broad exceptions allowing the wealthy to buy, trade, and store their wealth there. You've ruined the entire point of the wealth tax.
But without private property no one can accumulate wealth by exploiting the labor of others. I haven't ruined the point of the wealth tax, I've preempted the need for it.
A mean, maybe. Certainly we at least agree it's a better idea than a wealth tax.
I don't buy that.
Okay.. Well you don't have to believe it for it to be true.
But it isn't true. It's working right now in Norway, off the top of my head.
But I'd imagine very wealthy people would be willing to spend a pretty penny to convince people like you and me that it doesn't work.
Doing a quick search, it's not working out for Noway. Their tax revenue is down because the wealthy moved away.
They've had a wealth tax in Norway since 1892.
The article I looked at was an increase of the wealth tax that occurred recently. So you're right, not the start of it just a consequence of it.
What was the article? This one from November claims revenue has still increased - while ridding themselves of more wealth hoarders:
"Revenue from it has climbed despite the exodus and now sits at 0.6% of GDP"
https://www.reuters.com/business/norways-wealth-tax-trades-millionaires-equality-2025-11-24/
A big problem with wealth tax is that not all wealthy are what you think of as rich. Old grandma maybe lives in a nice house in a good area that her now dead husband bought for 2 pennies 60 years ago. Now that house is worth millions. That grandma is a multi millionaire, but she may have a very minimal pension. Wealth tax that house and she may have a larger wealth tax than her entire pension income and be forced to move out of her own home.
Another example would be many farmers. Most small farmers don't earn a lot. Some even go minus some years. But the land and machinery they own are worth extreme amounts of money if sold. Wealth tax them and they will go bankrupt.
So a wealth tax is a very uneven tax. It benefits those who don't save and those who own business which are not capital intensive. Why should a farmer pay a lot more tax than a work from home freelancer even though both may have the same income?
There are so many weird things that can happen. Imagine you own a small property of land. Then they discover oil on your property. Suddenly you are wealth taxed for an extreme amount of money even though you don't even want to let anyone drill for oil on that land. Maybe you will even be forced out of that land because suddenly you can't pay the wealth tax on it.
YAWN.
This is repeated frequently, and it's hauled out to mislead people every time this discussion pops up.
It's repeated frequently because it's true. A wealth tax that hits the truly rich is only a good tax if it doesn't have side casualties. If you have a suggestion how to make a wealth tax that also doesn't affect the examples I have mentioned I'm interested to hear it.
I think that instead of a basic wealth tax, a tax on rental properties and a tax on stocks and corporate ownership is more reasonable. The corporate ownership tax would also have to exclude small companies in which you are a worker yourself so as not to overly tax farms or other small capital heavy small businesses. I personally work with farmers and I know even a 1% tax on the total value of their farms would totally kill most of their profit. I personally know a farm near the city limits which is worth over 12 million dollars just because of the near-city land he owns and farms on. But his income is only average in the region. Yes he could theoretically sell the land to a real estate developer who could build over a hundred houses. But he only wants to farm so he doesn't. I don't think it's fair to tax him on the 12 million, it would kill his business.
Turn housing into a human right instead of a commodity.
It's repeated frequently because of Brandolini's Law:
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
Stuff like primary residences and farms have never been what the people proposing a wealth tax have been talking about, so bringing it up is damn near a strawman argument.
How do you design the wealth tax in order that only the"right people" are affected. And if income tax is totally abolished like the post above is proposing, how do we make sure that high income workers pay tax? One could theoretically have a high income but strategically keep ones wealth low by keeping spending and expenses the same. For example by renting a mega yacht instead of owning a mega yacht. Or leasing a luxury car instead of owning a luxury car.
Adding exceptions for residences and farms will just make those the most attractive places to store ones wealth and we don't want mega rich buying up all the farms or houses. None are more skilled at finding loopholes than the extremely wealthy.
I'm interested to hear suggestions.
Tax cash flows, financialization of assets, etc. Tax the use of collateral for loans and make it work like an advance in capital gains tax (I would be fine with an exception for direct reinvestment in the asset like home renovation loans). Tax the things which create purchasing power.
Dude, you're mixing up asset and wealth. Also, this might be a shock to you, wealth tax can be progressive
Wealth = Total Assets - Total Liabilities
Say I own a farm and I have a tractor worth 500 thousand dollars but I also have a 400 thousand dollars loan on it. Then yes I have 500 thousand in assets but only 100 thousand in wealth contribution. However say I own farmland for 12 million dollars and I have no loans on that farmland (as is quite common if the farm was inherited) then for that 12 million worth of farmland, asset = wealth. Same is true for the grandma example if she doesn't have a loan on the house.
A progressive wealth tax is a good idea however I agree.
proceeds to describe the rich
Like, not disgustingly, 1% rich, but rich nonetheless. You don't have to have a linear scale. We're not even proposing implementations, interesting how just the idea of taxing wealth is unacceptable to you.
Then sell the house, pay off your tax, and buy a smaller house or apartment?
This literally happens with inheritances all the time. Someone gets their parents' house, can't afford the tax on it, and have to sell it.
It's almost like the capitalist model of housing as investment assets is broken or something.
Farmers get more money from the government than basically anyone else. That work from home freelancer is almost certainly funding the farmer, not the other way around.
Yet, as we've seen in times like the COVID pandemic, tons of them would literally destroy their food to keep the prices and by extension their profits up than give out surplus food for free or at cost.
It's almost like the capitalist model of food production is broken or something.
Personal wealth and commercial assets are different things. But yeah, our paradigm of how businesses work are, again, broken.
Forced out of that land but with a couple extra zeros in your account? Look, I'm not saying I have no sympathy for them, but people, like Indigenous people, get forced out of their land with fuck all to show for it when someone discovers resources they themselves don't want to extract. So your hypothetical oil baron is pretty low on the sympathy scale.
Again, it's almost like....
TL;DR: I agree with you that a wealth tax would be broken and would fix very little. But because it's attempting to work within the bounds of a thoroughly broken system that cannot be fixed, period. Get rid of rule by capital.
For the grandma you tax the latest known value of the house that is the sell price 60 years ago.
For the farmer you subtract the debt they took to buy the equipment before you apply the tax.
It's not that hard.
Por qué no los dos?
Taxation of people with disgusting amounts of wealth in general is whack.
They're not giving up their wealth willingly. That's not how wealth works. It needs to be taken by force.