A wealth tax is just a warning shot to your wealthy neighbors, if they can afford to flee, they'll flee.

If you're planning a peasant revolt you should really consider going all-in, bloody revolution, you give the kulaks less time & space to plan for contingencies.

They said millionaires would flee when Massachusetts implemented an income tax surcharge. The amount collected from that tax was in fact more than expected.

If the wealthy in California were willing to give up quality of life to save an amount that's not very meaningful to them, they'd have already moved to Texas. Or North Dakota. Or even Washington, which is an actual small-government state without a personal income tax.

People really want to push wealth taxes to the point of confusing income and wealth taxes, and assuming the willingness to accept an income tax surcharge equates to a willingness to accept a wealth tax, when we have lots of data showing that whenever you tax capital that is mobile (e.g., not real estate) then you get less taxes than you expected as well as capital flight.

It's annoying to list your income, but people do it because the disclosure is limited to one year, and more importantly they can control their income, particularly whatever income is earned in a given state. Only realized income is taxed. But a wealth tax involves questions of valuation - of taxing unrealized gains -- that are in many ways arbitrary and subject to abuse, and a level of disclosure and state control that makes many people feel uncomfortable due to the massive expansion of state power it requires.

I don't know why people are so stubborn about this. Next up, they will argue that because people accepted a higher sales tax, they will accept a higher wealth tax, too. After all, you let the state mandate childhood vaccines, so you should be OK with the state mandating your diet, right? Anyways, we'll see how things work in out in California. The state already has massive deficit problems, so let's see how this addresses their fiscal problems.

Conveniently an article just dropped studying the effects of a new wealth tax in Norway. As usual with these sorts of taxes there were a lot of threats that all the high net worth individuals would emigrate to Switzerland or wherever. In reality, it turned out that threat was mostly hot air and bluster. (And of course, you can combine a wealth tax with some kind of exit tax for those that want to take their ball and go play somewhere else.)

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35854/w358...

But yes, you're certainly right that taxing unrealized gains is difficult for many types of wealth. But e.g. property taxes are often already based on some estimation of the market value of said property anyway, so no change there. And similarly publicly traded stocks and such have a clear market value. For other types of wealth, sure there are difficulties, but usually it's possible to do it in some way, be it by estimating the worth somehow or then delaying the tax until the thing is sold or the owner dies etc.

Yes, in Norway, an oil state with very little mobile capital. Basically what I said about immobile versus mobile capital.

And I guess we will just pretend that Hollande's wealth tax experiment never happened, when 60,000 millionaires left, the state lost $200 Billion in capital, and the wealth tax cost the state twice as much revenue as was generated by the tax. That was for a country, France, whose wealth was not in the ground.

A study from norway? As broadly applicable as studying Saudi.