Despite polls showing they are popular empirics prove wealth taxes are a political catastrophe

(Monica, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/11/02/hard-tax-rich-518383 , 11-2)

Taxes on the rich increased dramatically during the First and Second World Wars, but other than global catastrophes with mass casualties, nothing seems to produce the desperation that leads to broad, bipartisan consensus on raising taxes on the rich. Indeed, even a global catastrophe with mass casualties can’t always do it, as the pandemic has shown, because low interest rates have made it easier for the government to borrow instead. Where are Democrats in the tax hike fight? SharePlay Video Thus, since the Second World War, the top marginal income tax rate for individuals has declined steeply, as Democrats came around to the position that cutting taxes for the wealthy stimulates the economy (under John F. Kennedy) and then Republicans came around to the position that deficits are not a big problem (under George. W. Bush, and because of Ronald Reagan). Even if you account for all of the loopholes in the 1950s tax code, the effective tax rate for the top 1 percent — that is, the taxes they actually pay — is considerably lower now than it was at mid-century. In fact, in 2018, one study found that the top 400 billionaires were, for the first time in history, actually paying a lower tax rate than the bottom 50 percent of families. A few recent U.S. presidents have successfully raised taxes on the rich, but those efforts didn’t pay off politically. Under Bill Clinton’s administration the top marginal tax rate rose very slightly in 1993, but it did not help Clinton in the 1994 midterms. Under Barack Obama tax rates for the wealthy went up in 2013 — and then the 2014 midterm elections produced the largest gains for Republicans in the Senate since the 1980s, and in the House since the 1930s. The midterm defeats were not caused by the tax increases, but increasing taxes on the rich didn’t help either Clinton or Obama. Although polls always show majorities favorable to taxing the rich, people don’t seem to vote based on that issue. The awareness that taxing the rich doesn’t gain votes must be part of what makes moderate Democrats cautious. And because the rich can pay people to figure out how to legally violate the spirit of the law — an old standby is to find ways to turn income into things that don’t get taxed as highly, like capital gains, and a newer trick is to borrow against your assets so you don’t have to sell them and incur taxes at all — it takes a complex administrative machinery to stay ahead of them. Wyden’s wealth tax plan, which received support from over a hundred organizations, would have run into questions about whether it violated the constitutional requirement that direct taxes be proportional to a state’s population. It would also have required new procedures for valuing people’s wealth. It’s difficult to value assets as it is; you can guess how much a painting is worth but how do you really know until you try to sell it? And valuing those assets in the middle of an adversarial exchange between government and taxpayer is even harder, which may be why most of the countries that have attempted wealth taxation have ended it. It’s not impossible, and nothing says we have to restrict ourselves to what has happened in the past. But it is a big push on an issue on which notional support in polls does not translate into electoral support.