alt Hacker News> I think almost everybody would be better off if taxes were something like 1% of total assets rather than off the top of your income
No thanks. Any discussion about tax reform has to start with government spending otherwise it's not serious. Nobody wants to give away a slice of their net worth to pay for bullshit wars and ballrooms.
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> Any discussion about tax reform has to start with government spending otherwise it's not serious.
I'd say almost the reverse. What we need most in terms of "tax reform" is to move away from thinking about taxes as solely a means of funding government operations, and towards thinking about taxes as a way of directly redistributing wealth. That is, the revenues of a wealth tax could simply be given to the non-wealthy as direct payments (possibly in the form of refundable tax credits). Unavoidably there will be some overhead, but there doesn't need to be anything for the money to be "spent on"; it can just be straight-up given to different people than those who paid it.
> Nobody wants to give away a slice of their net worth to pay for bullshit wars and ballrooms.
The vast majority of people in America are already doing this, because their wealth is entirely derived from their income. Your complaint isn't relevant to the discussion of wealth vs income taxes.