The suggestion that I've heard to solve this problem is if the wealth tax applies to you, you have to offer to sell your property to the government (not all of it, but you could claim so much under a threshold that isn't being sold, this isn't the full idea).

If the government believes that it's worth more than that, they are allowed to purchase it for that price, and resell it at auction. If they think it is reasonably priced, or over priced, you have to pay the wealth tax on your proposed price.

This will drastically simplify the problem. There won't be a negotiation on the price, there would be two independent evaluations, rather than one complex one where there's a large amount of back and forth.

I don't know where I heard it, but it was mentioned offhandedly as a simple solution to valuations for a wealth tax.

That's assuming that a sufficiently detailed inventory to allow appraisal is reasonably possible; and then that the government will pay the costs associated with valuing all the assets.

And then don't asset owners end up paying a surtax on their emotional attachment to their property? i.e. the only way I can hold onto something I would never want to sell is by paying a "wealth tax" that is decoupled from its market value.

That seems fair to me because it results in a tax based on how much the property is worth to you specifically. The "value" may be inflated from real market value, but as long as that is true for everyone it doesn't matter.

Also if it's too much of a burden to value all these assets, you can list them publicly and let people bid. If you expect the government to protect your ownership rights, I think it's not too much to ask that you list your major assets.

>major assets.

Such a scheme could also require you to list a value of "all unlisted assets". If you try to hide a gold bar by lumping it in with all your trash, then the government can buy out and auction "all of razorunreal's unlisted assets" as a job jot. Companies would pop up specialising in identifying people with hidden assets to profit from them.

> And then don't asset owners end up paying a surtax on their emotional attachment to their property?

You always have the option of letting the government buy it from you for your declared value, and then buying it back at auction for actual market value, potentially making a profit if the government were wrong.

> Thats super hard to value anyway, since without selling an item, you can't be sure what it would sell for.

Actually it's quite easy. For land, governments do it all the time:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

For many other type of property: what is the insured value?

Certainly not exact, but probably with-in an order of magnitude of accuracy, which may be 'good enough'.

This is a really good point actually, insurance firms are already licensed and regulated. You could effectively implement a wealth tax simply through added taxes on insurance policies.

I'm not following your last statement. Land is already taxed on its assessed value, which changes regularly, and things like cars have easy to find residual value estimates from third parties. You wouldn't necessarily get the true market value to tax, but getting some baseline value wouldn't be particularly difficult. The only exceptions I can think of are really intangible value stores like artwork.

Would you say that the majority of your wealth is in your bank account, as opposed to being in housing or a retirement portfolio of stocks and bonds?