Piketty's 2% tax floor on wealth (for those with over $10M/$100M in wealth) is an excellent way to fix this.
Basically the idea is to just accept the fact that the super wealthy will find the loopholes, so instead remove the loopholes. Just flatly put a minimum tax all wealth over $XX million at 2%.
One nice aspect of the policy is that it's a tax minimum: so people with high incomes who are already paying that much, regardless of how wealthy they are, don't need to pay the tax.
Another nice aspect is it's relatively easy to implement. There aren't that many people with $XX millions in wealth.
I have land, and so I am appatently wealthy, but if someone wanted to put a 2% tax on it I would have to sell it to pay the tax since I have very limited cash.
This would result in a land grab only the super wealthy could afford.
I already pay high taxes on everything from fuel to food to tissue to wipe my ass. Taxing my land ownership might push people to the edge.
The super wealthy would avoid it by pyutting everything into an offshore trust. Us little people, with expensive houses their parents worked hard and paid taxes for would just see another tax.
Piketty's tax goes into effect only for wealth greater than a certain amount. The goal is to target people who are paying insufficient income tax, because they are so wealthy they can avoid having taxable income. So we'd start the tax at assets over $20-100M.
Normal people are completely unaffected by such a tax, since they already pay a high effective tax rate on their income (normal people generally cannot avoid income tax like the wealthy can).
I didn't follow your argument about offshoring, since a wealth tax taxes all wealth regardless of it's location.
So unless your parents left you a $20M mansion this is irrelevant
Basically the idea is to just accept the fact that the super wealthy will find the loopholes, so instead remove the loopholes. Just flatly put a minimum tax all wealth over $XX million at 2%.
One nice aspect of the policy is that it's a tax minimum: so people with high incomes who are already paying that much, regardless of how wealthy they are, don't need to pay the tax.
Another nice aspect is it's relatively easy to implement. There aren't that many people with $XX millions in wealth.