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There’s a template. I live in Switzerland and I pay a wealth tax every year on my global assets. Lots of countries do it.

It’s rare. Here in Austria regular people fight against an inheritance and wealth tax because they seem to believe very hard that one day they will become rich somehow. But ofc we at least have real social security. In the US, all of this seems more unachievable than ever now.

Nice idea but tax systems only levy tax on capital gains when they're realized & most billions are unrealized stock gains. Would you trust government not to spread the "sell your asset because its value went up" net more widely? Or the richest not to find way to avoid paying?

Yes. If you own a house a car etc some taxes assumption you have a level of income that goes with it. (Which fails for the old living alone in homes their families have left) But if your house doubles in value the tax man doesn't make you sell it and give him 20%.

So I’m not sure what you’re going for here, are you arguing that it’s just an impossible problem? You have a couple of hundred million dollars, it’s just such an intractable problem that it can’t be solved? That the only solution is to take money from the middle class?

If Mr Gates is reading all this and thinks Microsoft may soon require a slightly less charismatic software engineer to do whatever it is that Scott does there, I can make myself available. Happy to run on a platform of not taxing billionaires and Making Windows Great Again šŸ˜„