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Comment by decimalenough | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: Norway imposes a wealth tax that taxes unrealized gains at approximately 1% annually. "Wealth" here includes the book value of private companies, which presents cash flow problems for founders of startups with high paper valuations (like the author, who founded unicorn Dune Analytics).

I'm still finding it hard to be terribly sympathetic towards the author, and the constant Ayn Rand references don't help. If you're worth 100 million dollars on paper, is it really that hard to come up with 1 million to pay the taxman? Sell 1% of those shares, get a loan secured by those shares, etc.

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Not to mention that the general findings from Norway's wealth tax is that it works. A few millionaire's leave but the benefit far outweighs the cost of some capital flight

https://www.reuters.com/business/norways-wealth-tax-trades-m...

I still prefer Warren's proposal in the US which only proposed a tax above a net worth of $50m. The biggest criticism of wealth taxes is the massively complicated added bureaucratic burden of measuring everyone's wealth. Only about 0.14% of USians have a net worth above $50m.

Thank goodness it’s $50 million because if it were a quarter of that then $174,000/year salaried senator Elizabeth Warren, worth $12 million, would be liable too.

It's only a tax on wealth above $50m. If she ever reaches that level of net worth, I highly doubt she'd have trouble paying a 2% tax on it.

The 1935 Revenue Tax was essentially a wealth tax and it brought great levels of prosperity as well as continued entrepreneurship

> If she ever reaches that level of net worth, I highly doubt she'd have trouble paying a 2% tax on it.

The point is that politicians (and political influencers) have a habit of proposing thresholds for taxation on rich people that manage to stay above their own personal level of wealth (or income). It comes across as self-serving.

The thresholds should have some actual calculation behind them that doesn't appear motivated by the speaker's personal situation.

I understand your point and was responding directly. That is, I don't think you're point is supported.

The cutoff is far above what she makes. For her to pay anything significant she'd have to have a net worth well above $100m.

She also justifies the $50m explicitly. That is roughly the percentile where 0.1% of people would be affected. The other cutoff (where the tax goes up to 3%) is at $1b. That is where 0.05% of people are affected.

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