Valuing assets is difficult. Doing it every year would be infeasible. Doing it at the point when someone dies and their estate is distributed is much easier. In a lot of cases assets will be auctioned off anyway so you get a valuation for free.

(But there must be a lot of cases in which someone sells for a large sum of money a work of art or a copyright that they inherited and people then think: Hang on, was the value of that thing taken account of when the estate was distributed? Should additional inheritance tax be applied now, even though X years have passed and we really can't guess what the value would have been at auction X years ago?)

Is it though? - land and real estate (commercial and residential): already valued and taxed annually ! - company stock is re-valued on a regular basis as part of the audit process. - commodities like gold etc - easy - possessions like art, boats etc - small % of wealth except in the most expensive items, which can be appraised every few years, just like real estate.

seriously: what else is there?

If the government were to start taxing people on the value of their assets you can be quite sure that within a year or so most rich people would have their assets in a form that makes it much harder to value them.

But there's a problem also for ordinary people, who have most of their assets in the form of their house. In the UK land isn't valued annually.* Unless your house is very similar to a nearby one that was sold recently, nobody really knows what it's worth. Speculation concerning what development might be permitted in the future can have a big influence on the value. It would be scary if some bureaucrat's guess were to significantly affect one's annual tax bill. And it would be expensive for everyone if that resulted in disputes going to court.

* Local taxation is based on the "rateable value" of property, but this is inaccurate, banded, often out-of-date, and only a small part of a typical family's total outgoings.

> If the government were to start taxing people on the value of their assets you can be quite sure that within a year or so most rich people would have their assets in a form that makes it much harder to value them.

Switzerland, which tends to be viewed as a haven for the rich, has a wealth tax. It would appear to be a counterexample...

Note that it has other tax features which may make it appealing to the rich (no capital gains tax, e.g.).

>Doing it every year would be infeasible.

In the Netherlands, there is an asset tax. Your assets (money, stocks, bonds, etc.) over a certain threshold are taxed 30% annually on an assumed investment gain of 4%, so effectively a 1.2% tax on everything over a threshold of a couple ten thousand euros.

I think the numbers are different this year, but nonetheless it certainly isn't infeasible.

Not that I'm a fan of it due to double taxation.

How is that fair? If in a bad year, your assets lose value, you are still paying a tax, that defies logic to me.

Does NL have capital gains taxes in addition to this asset tax?

Personally, I don't find it fair and in the past the 4% assumed gain is absurd.

There is no capital gains tax.

I suppose ideologically a wealth tax presupposes that all wealth is bad, whereas an inheritance tax just targets unearned wealth.

How would a wealth tax differ from a capital gains tax? The net effect would seem to be similar?

> ideologically a wealth tax presupposes that all wealth is bad

Isn't it the same as saying that income tax presupposes that all income is bad. We should tax wealth not because wealth is bad but because doing so might have a positive effect on society.

> How would a wealth tax differ from a capital gains tax?

capital gains tax taxes realised return on capital. wealth tax is based on the total wealth regardless of it's performance.

Re ideology. Its an choice between 2 similar taxes. And there are many, many reasons for structuring taxes.

Re captial gains tax. Over the very long term, you would expect your investments to at least track inflation, and you would expect to sell of those investments to buy things. Its not clear to me that these 2 taxes necessarily end up very different. Should we not expect to get at least a flavour of what to expect by looking at capital gains tax?

I am curious to see the comparison as well. I suppose one difference is that capital gain tax can be delayed far into the future. Wealth tax could also have a cooling effect on stock market bubbles.

Capital gains tax might also be a tax deduction due to a loss of capital. With a wealth/asset tax it doesn't matter if you actually gain or lose.

It doesn't presuppose that wealth is bad. The tax would just be repayment for creating a society that allows that wealth to exist.

That's not really what taxes are for, historically. Paying for the things that everyone uses in common, that's what you get taxed for. That and discouraging unwanted behavior.

> I suppose ideologically a wealth tax presupposes that all wealth is bad, whereas an inheritance tax just targets unearned wealth.

I don't agree with that framing, but even so if you look at the debate about income inequality today, you'll see people have issues even with earned wealth, in astronomical amounts (eg Bezos, Gates, Koch brothers, etc).

"The Koch brothers are the sons of Fred C. Koch, who founded Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held company in the United States" wikipedia

"His [Bill Gates] father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates' maternal grandfather was J.W. Maxwell, a national bank president." Also wikipedia.

So these aren't exactly people who worked their way up from the gutter.

But yes some people probably do have problems with earned income, I still think the distinction is worth it though.