So... some (much?) of your criticism of wealth tax is true. The wealthy just put their assets into things which are hard to value like art (look at recent art prices, there is nearly zero correlation between the previous sale price and the next sale price), or which have no value until they are sold.
One of the big tricks the wealthy use to obscure their money from the IRS is to never actually turn their assets into a capital gain, instead they value the asset and use it as collateral for a loan (see: Musk, Elon). Under the current tax code, the wealthy are rapidly heading towards 0% tax exposure. Something clearly needs to change, because it is unsustainable to have the wealthiest paying less and less taxes both as a percentage of the whole and as a percentage of their wealth, at the same time they are owning an increasingly large percentage of the country's wealth.
That said...
... this article is horrifically bad. You jump from trying to explain income tax to criticizing wealth tax. You present a table of data with no row or column headers, we literally have no clue what you are trying to show with it. You have a chart where both the X and the Y axes have units of measurement, but we don't know what is being measured. Even if the rest of the article was well-written, these kind of basic issues would lead a lot of folks to call into this whole thing into question.
And the charts and tables seem to depend on a UBI scheme which not only does not exist in the US, but isn't even on anyone's radar politically at this point. We are more likely to get a universal healthcare system than UBI, and UH isn't going to happen any time soon.
If there is a valid point to be made here, I'm all ears. I'm with you that various "let's soak the rich!" ideas rarely seem to actually soak the rich. I am also strongly inclined to favor a flat(ter) tax code for a variety of reasons; I note that the Canadian and European governments that work in a way I respect all seem to lean fairly heavily on VAT, which is a signal to me that there is likely a reason for it.
But this article is a mess.
J.Ja
