1) I think a wealth tax is a reasonable way to look at raising revenue overall since it is neutral about _how_ the wealth was acquired (inheritance, cap gains,

1) I think a wealth tax is a reasonable way to look at raising revenue overall since it is neutral about _how_ the wealth was acquired (inheritance, cap gains, etc.). On a spectrum of regressive vs graduated taxation, sales tax is pretty evil, income tax is ok but too easy to dodge (AMT was applied to try to patch this but didn't do a great job of it), so it's really left to wealth tax to provide appropriately graduated taxation and hopefully coupled with a reduction in sales taxes. It should be anticipated that there will be clever loopholes here, such as having billionaire individuals appear near-penniless by having them grant their wealth to a trust whose only job it is to take care of said billionaire. :) Those more clever than I should map out best practices for closing these. 2) Framing things as a one-off tax is probably not a great idea. Once it's done once, there will be demands to go back to the trough, and it would be better for everyone to have the certainty around when and how that will work, so a proposal to have an indefinite 0.5%/year wealth tax I think makes a lot more sense than a one-time 5%. (Imagine how lucky you'd be if you become an overnight billionaire in 2021 and dodged the bullet!) Furthermore, the real net needs to help our society thrive long-term are far more than a one-time 5% billionaire wealth tax could capture. It reminds me a little of the meme that Mike Bloomberg could afford to give every American a million dollars. https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1235843592251301888 https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/123584359225130188... 3) Overall, a system more focused on taking wealth than creating it will itself crater. There's been a lot of dialogue roughly summed up as "eat the rich" that lays out all kinds of very exciting ways to spend money but just assumes that lots of wealth will magically get created, or that there's a fixed pie of wealth out there so we should just take it from those that have it. No, I'm not a Randian Objectivist (and yes, I've read Atlas Shrugged), I believe that society should intelligently invest in its human capital with a goal of maximizing everyone's human potential. A society that does well at that will generate lots of wealth and will have lots of good answers possible for how to share and spread that wealth. And the US is demonstrably not doing a good job at economic mobility, which is to say our branding of "anyone can make it" doesn't seem to be lining up with people's lived realities very well. So I find it less helpful to talk about "are you a bad person if you are a billionaire" and more helpful to talk about what factors are keeping portions of our society from achieving as much as they could and how we could collectively tackle these factors (or more to the OP's point, find effective ways to get out of these people's way instead of assuming we know how to fix their problems!). 4) A lot of the overall discussion about inequality decenters from the very real and tangible global progress that has been made on eliminating poverty. The data is staggering in its velocity, and wildly unreported since good news is nowhere near as exciting to link to and discuss as bad news. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-living-with-less-than-190-and-310-per-day https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin... - but the story in the US is much more grim, with poverty on the rise, stagnation in wages, and the hollowing out of the middle class. So we can say that the world (and China in particular) is trending in the right direction toward elimination of poverty and equitable wealth generation, and the US's policies and environment are trending the wrong way. There's some data to suggest that 90's era welfare reform is to blame, see https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2018/12/3/jg5hvxe1e4qpfk5srha9mn21jigwoj https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2018/12/3/jg5hvxe1e4qpf... for more on that angle. In short - I agree suffering doesn't need to be the way of things, we should halt policies that stifle opportunity to increase social mobility, and I don't think a one-time wealth tax is a good idea or gets us to where we want to go.