Yakk

I personally would avoid "net". Just use "total worth" -- it might be far too easy to hide assets with fake debt.

Then again, if you tax the person who owns that debt, I suppose the hiding won't be very successful.

"Your net taxable wealth is the sum of your assets (determined by market price), minus the sum of your net taxable debt. Taxable debt is any debt that the person holding it counts as taxable wealth."

Or something like that.

Ideally you would want to charge for each asset "once", and you would want to charge for both assets owned by citizens, and assets owned by non-citizens residing here.

You could place the wealth taxation within corperations, and make equity in the corperations tax-free (because their assets have already been accounted for). Possibly an corperate minimium tax (based off a corperation's market value) to detect fancy-pants hiding of assets (people think the corp. is worth 1 billion dollars, but it only has 100 million in taxable assets...).

Tricky stuff.

Note that this doesn't have to be a change in tax rates -- it can be a movement of taxation instead (from income to wealth).

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.