Saw someone the other day saying Labour is the only party that will acknowledge that trade offs exist, but also that they keep picking the side of the trade off guaranteed to annoy their voters, which seemed like a pithy summary of politics.
EDIT: I see we’re once again failing the simple reading comprehension test.
So I agree that we should tax wealth. My point (and that of the article) is that there’s no panacea where we tax wealth (or only ‘billionaire wealth’) and thereby achieve a progressive outcome. Billionaires are a tiny fraction of ‘the rich’. Redistribution that only targets that tiny fraction will always be ineffective, not because there isn’t enough money there but because there aren’t enough people. I’m not saying this speculatively: successful redistributive systems always have steep progressive income taxes, with everyone contributing and the richest contributing the most.
You can essentially tax assets through effective taxation of capital gains and rents, which will also discourage rent-seeking behaviour in investors - which is also good.
So, yes, by all means find ways to tax wealth (just sensible council tax banding would be a good start). But on its own this won’t achieve much.
I think we agree with each other, but are kinda talking past each other. I was just trying to say that income tax is an ineffective way of addressing billionaire wealth in particular. Taxes in general should be higher for everyone, but especially the rich (I’d be a terrible politician). Any successful progressive regime needs to kill the idea we can have Scandinavian services with American taxes.