Comment by danny_codes
2 days ago
That’s just a decision we made about what is taxable.
Purely an accounting artifact. We can pass a wealth tax tomorrow and it’ll suddenly be taxable.
Net worth is real money, and is usually a very accurate measure of what people can realize. There are a few outliers who own so much that they’d move the market if they sold it all. Selling 2% to cover taxes? Not going to move the market very much.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution would like a word (assuming you’re contemplating a federal wealth tax; states could do it, at the risk expressed in the headline of the article we’re discussing).
That’s a law my dude. We can change it at any time. We did already for the income tax (amendment 16).
Yes, that’s exactly my point.
That is what makes the timeline GGP laid out impossible:
> We can pass a wealth tax tomorrow and it’ll suddenly be taxable.
Unless we don’t share a common definition of “tomorrow” or “suddenly”. (For reference, the 16th Amendment process took about 3 years and 7½ months from Senator Norris Brown’s initial formal proposal to ratification by the then-necessary 36th state. [You would need 38 states today.])
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