Except that -- as a practical matter
-- identifying all assets and assigning a dollar-amount to each one requires enormous overhead and intervention.
This is even more true when you consider the incentives people have for hiding assets and cheating the system, and their ability to do it over many years or even cooperatively.
That's one major benefit of the income tax option, that measurement is actually easier, even when you consider all of those non-wage incomes.
This is absolutely true, I was thinking you could certainly structure it differently than the annual tax system we have now, and certainly in similar property taxes there's an assessment problem.
I don't have any answers for those things, but it's an interesting thought experiment - what would such a thing look like for relatively easily valued assets vs very difficult to value assets, etc
Perhaps you could simply structure it as a transactional cost, but of course, that causes overhead on every transaction. Backdating would be ruinous and cause people a strong incentive to transact often which is probably perverse.
This is even more true when you consider the incentives people have for hiding assets and cheating the system, and their ability to do it over many years or even cooperatively.
That's one major benefit of the income tax option, that measurement is actually easier, even when you consider all of those non-wage incomes.