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Comment by bmcooley | Hacker News Reader

How does a wealth tax work when the majority of your assets are illiquid? Stake in a company, real estate, etc. are difficult to tax and still have predictable recurring tax revenue, right?

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It works great! We shouldn't be allowing people to avoid taxation, or a wealth tax, by structuring their wealth into illiquid assets, purposefully or accidentally.

You’ve just made it completely impractical for anyone to invest their cash in, say, heavy machinery or a new fabrication plant.

Is that your intention?

It's pretty clear he wants to tax people out of spite.

Guessing the intentions of others is an ugly look.

Did I? If you invest in a piece of heavy machinery does it just sit around doing nothing, i.e. not generating any sort of profit.

No it's an item that produces work, unlike a painting which I'm totally OK with making it impractical to invest in.

"illiquid asset" was all you wrote. That's completely orthogonal to "doing nothing."

How would you have handled taxing commercial/investment property (illiquid asset) from 2006-2012. Do you mark to market? If so, how? How can you do this at scale so the process is fairly applied in all regions, repeatable and trackable?

IANAA(I am not an appraiser), but I'd assume there exists processes to value these assets already. Maybe these processes were gamed in the lead up to 2008, but that doesn't mean safeguards can't be implemented(or not purposely weakened) to prevent this.

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