Anybody who was crying about a wealth tax last year looks like a damn fool. Bezos lost 25% of Amazon in a divorce and is richer today than he was before the divorce, He's also sold large chunks of his shares too and yet he's richer than ever. A wealth tax as proposed by Elizabeth Warren on 2% over $50 million and 6% over a billion is needed.
We already have a tax for when people get a lot richer in a particular year, it's called an income tax.
If that's the issue why not raise rates, maybe creating some new brackets, rather than a whole new kind of tax?
Because this taxes economic activity and the rate at which one amasses a certain kind of economic power, not the power itself. That can have negative effects in the wider economy beyond a certain level (n.b. not net negative at the current level by a long way, IMO) and also cannot account for people who are so wealthy that they amass power off of interest. Slowing the rate at which more wealth is acquired does not really solve the problem of a class of people wielding excess influence off of the wealth they’ve already amassed.
Scaling down from billionaires as an example, there are often vast differences in the standards of living between households earning the same income because of ownership (or the lack of) property (in addition to other costs-of-living issues, although it’s far more important than most of the rest). Indeed, the black American middle class has especially suffered since the 2008 crisis (compared to exclusively white households with similar income levels) precisely because of property ownership. Income tax can be useful, but often too blunt a tool in isolation.
