When you are retired you are on a fixed income. One advantage of buying a house over renting is that you don’t have to worry about increasing housing expenses besides usually small increases in property taxes and homeowners insurance. Of course, there is an unscientific rule of thumb that you should set 1% of the value of your home aside for repairs and maintenance (no one took into account the rapid rise of house prices when coming up with that rule of thumb.)

Especially in retirement but even while you are working, It could easily come to the point where you are priced out of your own home because you can’t afford increasing property taxes. You can’t sell part of your equity your house to pay taxes like you can stock.

Not being taxed on “wealth” and being taxed on income and capital gains makes a lot more sense. Also, many counties don’t make senior citizens pay school taxes.

It seems like everything you are saying boils down to moving being some sort of terrible atrocity and that people with millions of dollars in equity in their house are so poor they have to be protected.

What if we had a wealth tax on equity grants where you had to pay tax based on the value of your equity in a privately held company? Would you like to be forced to sell your equity to pay taxes?

Would you like to have to pay taxes on your equity after every series of funding raises the paper value of your equity?

Or if you hold stock and don’t sell it, would you like to have to pay tax every time the value of your stock increases or when you sell it?

That sounds like an interesting proposal but I don't know why we'd want to encourage people to sell their investments in companies. Long term investments in businesses help the economy grow. Fencing off land and not allowing other citizens access to it has several negative externalities (eg. what we're going through in California now).

http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs-comment/winston-... says it better than I can

From a tax policy standpoint it would be the same thing -- you're taxing wealth instead of capital gains. We don't do that for any other asset class.

But, if you're "investing" in a public company by buying stock, unless its at the IPO, the money isn't going to the company, it's going to someone else who owns the stock, the same could be said if you force people to sell private investments to other people.

No, I'm not proposing we tax wealth instead of income and capital gains.

I think it would actually be positive for other places in the country if companies decide to open offices outside of California to locations where everything is cheaper.