re: #359 Obdicut

The taxation of wealth is mainly done through the gift/estate tax.

How do you feel about the estate tax?

It’s rather arbitrary, to say the least.
If I was re-writing the tax code from scratch, I’d drop it, and tax assets over “X” amount at a very small annual rate, like 1%, which would raise several hundred billions depending on how exactly it was structured, and on how much money left the country to avoid it.
I think you’d also get a lot of capital coming in though, if the capital gains tax was zero, and that would be taxed at the rate of say 1% or so annually.
Then I’d replace income, corporate and capital gains taxes with a national sales tax.
I’d also drastically reduce the scope of SS, medicare etc which just seem to me to be very inefficient transfer payments which shuffle money around among basically the same people.
I just can’t see why Federal spending needs to be 25 % or so of GDP.

None of it gonna happen of course, and the reality is that if, say, a VAT was introduced, we’d be stuck with that in addition to, rather than instead of, the current tax system.