Actually it is much harder to tax income than wealth hence why there is so much tax avoidance. The simplest way is tax the asset directly and let who ever owns it pay the tax. The block of land is taxed, the bank account is taxed, the bond is taxed, the factory is taxed, the truck is taxed, the cow is taxed, the patent is taxed, the copyright on a movie is taxed, etc, etc.<p>If you did this you would not need a very high tax rate (my guess is something around 1%) and it would encourage efficient allocation of assets. Of course the owners of all these assets won’t be happy and since they are very powerful this idea has zero chance of ever being adopted.