The distinction between wealth and property seems pretty fuzzy here and it's hard to clearly reason about this without addressing it. Property taxes are a great example - you're paying them on things like houses to support local infrastructure, right? And you still have the property afterward.

So let's say you don't want to pay a wealth tax on the money in your bank account - buy a house with it. Now you're not paying a wealth tax, because it's a house instead of US dollars. Instead, you're paying a property tax! If the wealth tax is too onerous you can just park that wealth in a house or something instead, maybe rent the house out (with the help of a management company) and make money off it. That's good, right? Get the economy going, create jobs, and you get a return on your investment.

To me even if a wealth tax isn't the right solution here (I'm not convinced, and I'm not sure it's feasible to implement), the distinction between "wealth" and "taxable property" is kind of arbitrary nonsense at this point.

If everyone is taxed fairly, you can eliminate lots of means testing and systemic complexity because everyone's paying in so everyone has equal right to access all of the systems and benefits a functioning state can have to offer, whether it's health care, public transit, education, etc.

Just a clarification

> the person's wealth would decrease to a minimum at some point.

under the Warren plan (which is pretty representative) that minimum is $50M which is still a ton of money... and taxes do decrease your held assets, sometimes this decrease may be visible on the property itself (property taxes preventing you from affording a reno you think is necessary) more likely it's visible in the form of your debt (being a bit slower to pay down a mortgage because of the loss of revenue to taxes).

So I think you may want to re-examine your statement about having just as much property as you started with, also it might help to examine the corollary related to a reduction to a minimum - that statement is technically correct, but I'd consider it meaningless at scale.

> I pay property taxes every quarter and I have just as much property as I started with.

But you don't have as many assets as you started with.

Your total assets are relatively liquid, divisible assets, like cash, combined with relatively illiquid, indivisible assets, like your house.

So instead of chopping off 1% of your house every year and giving it to the government, you give them the value of 1% of your house in cash.

In the same way you'll at some point have to sell property to get the money to pay your taxes.