The coming battles over wealth taxation may prove especially bitter and polarizing. Most wealth has already been subjected to income and other taxes, perhaps multiple times. It doesn’t seem fair to the holders of that wealth to suddenly pay additional taxes on assets that they thought were in the clear, and such taxes would signal that previous policy has failed.
Read the whole thing. Almost five years ago, I wrote,
That leaves the option of declaring a national emergency and enacting what is known as a wealth tax or a capital levy. The idea is you undertake a one-time confiscation of assets and promise never to do it again. You hope that this has zero adverse incentive effects but brings in a boatload of money.
And why does anybody think this would actually work as you say one hopes?
“zero adverse incentive” – really? Wouldn’t one expect, say, civil war as a likely outcome?
There’s another very serious problem with this – who actually believes that a government which has just seized a lot of money will actually use it to discharge obligations to debt holders? They’ll just spend it, and when all is said and done, the debt will remain the same.
I assume that FATCA and other regulations designed to keep Americans from holding assets overseas, are a precursor to wealth confiscation. To confiscate wealth, the first step is to know where it is. We see this coming: we are just powerless to stop the men with guns from doing whatever they feel like doing, in the end.