Modeling a Wealth Tax

Tax rates for the wealthy were cut? That's great, for them. Were tax rates cut for the middle class? Did any of the lower class no longer have to pay income tax? That's what would be a response to nemo44x. (What would be a response to me would be for there to be no income tax for anyone in the lower 90% of income. That would be back to the original intent, and would reverse all the years of scope creep.)

All European countries either don't have wealth taxes anymore, or they're fractions of a percent, not 2-3%. The German supreme court even ruled the wealth tax unconstitutional.

> Commonwealth countries like AUS and CAN are likely to follow suit with a wealth tax -- capital flight to the US would be a big factor for them implementing it now but an American wealth tax opens the door.

Of course not, they would prefer the inflow of capital over the meager revenue from a wealth tax.

> And never mind that you're also asking people to give up their US citizenship to dodge these taxes -- the risk of which is probably as lot higher than just paying.

If you have a lot of money to lose, it's probably riskier to entrust a lifetime of tax obligations to a bankrupt state than to give up its citizenship. Rich people tend to be welcome abroad everywhere.

Got a peer-reviewed citation that there is zero evidence? Or is that your opinion?

Here's some evidence on Swiss rich mobility [1]: ".. tax records of two cantons with quasi-randomly assigned differential tax reforms suggest that 24% of the effect arise from taxpayer mobility .." [4]

Taxpayer mobility.... means rich people moving for tax reasons, correct?

Many countries had a wealth tax; almost all of them dropped it because it did cause capital flight and didn't generate much revenue compared to the costs. Switzerland was late to that party, and will likely drop theirs for the same reasons.

Here's but one paper on the actual effects of the Switzerland wealth tax:

[1] "We estimate that a 0.1 percentage-point rise in wealth taxation lowers reported wealth by 3.5% in aggregate. Expressed relative to taxable capital income flows, this implies a net-of-tax elasticity of roughly 1.2, which is large compared to the elasticities typically estimated in the income literature. The elasticity of tax revenues with respect to tax rates is only -0.2"

So you see it's already pushing wealth out of the tax base.

As to where wealthy people settle, look for the papers on wealthy moving between Swiss cantons to get the best tax advantage (the tax rates are by canton). So there is absolutely evidence of rich moving to take better tax advantage.

>Wealth taxes and their effect have been studied quite a bit in economics literature, and there are various peer-reviewed papers that attempt to measure the effects, but the Silicon Valley crowd is strangely avoidant of examining evidence or explaining their opposition with real-world data

Yes, there is ample economic evidence. It's odd that those pushing for one in the US ignore the past case evidence.

For example, [2] shows that a wealth tax does lower entrepreneurship, in [3] Stiglitz shows that a wealth tax does have a negative effect on investment and increased risk-aversion.....

Google scholar has lots of papers on what happened to countries that implemented such taxes, and why those taxes got dropped.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w22376

[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/097135570801700...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012780...

[4] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3471248

This sounds like a funny inside joke, but I don't get it. We are talking about the French actor, right?