This guy Arnold seems to take the position that the ProPublica piece is somehow invalid because…you can’t tax unrealized gains?
1. I don’t understand how the latter follows from the former.
2. Of course you can. Property taxes are just that.
3. Wealth taxes are also just that, though elsewhere in this thread I see Arnold has argued that they aren’t really that.
Whether you should tax unrealized gains is a policy debate, but it’s not an outlandish or ignorant position to say you should—though ProPublica doesn’t say that, so I’m still not sure the relevance.
While I disagree that property taxes are unjust, most date back 200+ years to a time when almost all wealth was in the form of land. If a state wanted to tax wealth, they taxed land. (Though this sounds progressive in theory, such taxes were almost universally levied at very low rates. Combined with very low inflation, this meant was it was very easy for the wealthy to accumulate capital by living off the rents of their land.)
