Consensus of economists agree
Saez 19, Professor @ University of California, Berkeley, with Gabriel Zucman, Professor @ University of California, Berkeley (Emmanuel, “Progressive Wealth Taxation,” Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Saez-Zucman_conference-draft.pdf)//BB
A well-enforced wealth tax would reduce wealth concentration. That seems to be a consensus view among economists: In the IGM poll on wealth taxes, 73% of economists agreed and only 12% disagreed with such a statement (results weighted by self-reported expertise).70 The reason is simple: if the rich have to pay a percentage of their wealth in taxes each year, it makes it harder for them to maintain or grow their wealth. Changes in consumption vs. saving decisions can exacerbate this effect: with a wealth tax, wealthy taxpayers may decide to spend more today and save less (this is the substitution effect: consuming now rather than later becomes relatively cheaper). Changes in consumption vs. saving decisions could conversely dampen this effect if the wealthy decide to spend less to preserve their wealth (this is the wealth effect, as the wealth tax reduces economic resources of the taxpayer). In any case, the wealth of people subject to the tax is expected to rise less fast after the introduction of the wealth tax than before. There is relatively little empirical work evaluating whether a progressive wealth tax can reduce wealth concentration. One recent exception is Jakobsen et al. (2019) who exploit compelling identification variation with the Danish wealth tax and find that the long-run elasticity of wealth with respect to the net-of-tax return is size-able at the top of distribution.