alt Hacker NewsThere's a secondary side effect of wealth taxes: they redirect investments (I'm Argentinian and we have wealth taxes).
Investments shift to things whose tax value updates slowly, for example property which typically adjusted more slowly than other financial assets. This tends to rise property prices and concentrate ownership.
It causes other distortions in allocation depending on the tax details, but wealthy people tend to adjust more aggressively to changing conditions.
Replies
warkdarrior • today at 7:03 PM
> This tends to rise property prices and concentrate ownership.
We are already there in US. Real estate is already controlled by companies, and rental costs are through the roof.
In Norway the valuation of publicly listed stock companies is different than the valuation of non-traded companies (for publicly traded stocks it's the market value, while for the other companies it's their assets minus debt, so usually roughly 10x smaller). The effect of this is increased investment in small and medium sized companies compared to keeping the money passively in index founds.