Warren Gorlick’s Oct. 15 op-ed, “Tax the rich? Follow Switzerland — not the left,” is right that Switzerland’s fiscal model is worth copying. But its wealth tax is the wrong feature to emulate.

The Swiss government is much smaller than ours. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in 2024 total government spending in Switzerland was only about 32.5 percent of gross domestic product, compared with about 39.6 percent in the United States. Swiss voters have also locked in fiscal discipline with a constitutionally required debt brake — a form of balanced-budget rule — that ties spending to projected revenue, permits deficits during downturns and requires the government to run surpluses to pay them back.

Yes, Switzerland also has a low-rate wealth tax, but the rest of its fiscal system offsets the damage. The country generally has no individual capital gains tax, low corporate income taxes, and moderate value-added and individual income taxes. And even with the rest of the system compensating, researchers have found that small decreases in the wealth tax rate have large positive effects on reported wealth.

The lesson from Switzerland is not that the U.S. needs a wealth tax or more revenue. It’s that the U.S. needs to spend less. Switzerland is a model despite its wealth tax, not because of it.