Yes, this is WaPo mission declaration

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.

Alright, no exceptions

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.

The solution then is to abolish private ownership so that people cannot become wealthy by exploiting the labor of others in the first place.

Every time it's ever been tried it has failed.

I don't buy that.

A big problem with wealth tax is that not all wealthy are what you think of as rich.

YAWN.

This is repeated frequently, and it's hauled out to mislead people every time this discussion pops up.

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.

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

not all wealthy are what you think of as rich

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.

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.

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.

Another example would be many farmers.

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.

those who own business which are not capital intensive

Personal wealth and commercial assets are different things. But yeah, our paradigm of how businesses work are, again, broken.

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.

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.