100%
readers of this blog know i'd prefer to pay taxes on my wealth than to pay taxes on my income. while this seems like a good idea to me that's frankly kinda obvious, others don't see things this way. when i suggest abolishing income tax and replacing it with a wealth tax, otherwise intelligent people go apeshit crazy. their faces turn red. their eyes roll around in their heards. their tongues flap around in their mouths to the point where the only coherent word they can splutter is asinine. okay. let's go there anyway. just for fun. i'm going to make the extraordinary claim that income tax is a front loaded wealth tax. when you deposit your paycheck in the bank, that's wealth. or what's left of it after the tax man took his bite. consider the median household. they have no wealth to speak of. and not much hope of accumulating any. imagine we got rid of the income tax in favor of a wealth tax. using numbers from yesterday's post, at the end of the year, the median household would have accumulated $14k in wealth. assuming they live exactly the way they did before and socked away the surplus. now to maintain the status quo equivalence to the income tax, they'd have to hand over all of it as a wealth tax. ouch! so apparently, people would rather pay a wealth tax of 100% and call it an income tax. than pay an actual honest to god wealth tax of 1%.