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Comment by gipp | Hacker News Reader

How are those "ridiculous scenarios?" Any attempt to base laws around the net worth of an individual is going to run into a hundred thousand such scenarios instantly. A person's "wealth" is simply not well defined. Neither ownership nor valuation of any kind of asset, other than cash itself, is nearly straightforward enough.

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this is true, I asked the IRS agent to define wealth and they couldn't do it, therefore meaning I no longer have to pay taxes

Income -- being funneled through the unifying medium of US dollars usually, and having some other counterparty to the transaction available to verify things -- is a lot simpler to account for than wealth, and look how complex that still is, and how readily it is already circumvented. And that's with a hundred years of refining and reforming the tax code to stop it, which a wealth-based taxation scheme would not benefit from.

If we had to have a perfect system with no flaws on day one in order to implement this, you would have a solid argument. But while that would be ideal, we don't actually have to have that, so your argument is completely beside the point.

Worse: Most of the circumventions of income tax are to increase in wealth without having income (as recognized by the tax system). A wealth tax is therefore a fix for your complaints about income tax.

Look, I'm not convinced a wealth tax (or worse, cap) is the answer. I suspect it may be worse than the disease. But your arguments against it seem pretty weak.

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