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The Cato Podcast: The Failures of Wealth Taxation

Ryan Bourne, R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at the Cato Institute, is joined by Adam Michel, Director of Tax Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, to discuss Michel’s co-authored paper (with Chris Edwards), Failures of Wealth Taxation.

Ryan Bourne: Taxing billionaires is back on the political agenda. This November, California voters will decide whether to impose a supposedly one-time 5% levy on the worldwide net wealth of residents worth more than $1bn. In Washington, Elizabeth Warren has reintroduced legislation for an annual wealth tax of 2% above $50m and 3% above $1bn, while Bernie Sanders wants an even higher charge. Their political case goes something like this. Billionaire fortunes have grown rapidly. Much of that wealth takes the form of unrealised capital gains which can go untaxed for years. So why not a wealth tax of say 2 or 3% per year? That sounds modest and supporters say it would raise revenue, reduce inequality and ensure that the very rich pay a fairer share. But a new Cato policy analysis argues that this pitch collides with both economics and practical experience. And to discuss that paper, I’m delighted to be joined today by my colleague Adam Michel, he’s director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute and the co-author of that paper, Failures of Wealth Taxation. So Adam, welcome to the podcast.

Adam Michel: Thanks for having me on.

Ryan Bourne: Adam, I’m guessing that you’re not personally implicated by this tax change.

Adam Michel: I am not. I’m not personally conflicted on this issue.

Ryan Bourne: But I think most listeners already would say, well, I do pay property taxes. Of course, there’s the federal estate tax. The tax accumulated wealth at death. So what exactly is the big deal here? What exactly is meant by an annual wealth tax? And why should we consider it economically different from these existing taxes on wealth?

Adam Michel: These proposals for net annual wealth taxes, or even the one-time version in California, are different in a couple of respects. The most important one is their sort of breadth. A property tax is a form of wealth tax. It’s actually different than these net wealth taxes because you don’t get to deduct your mortgage. So in some ways, it’s sort of more punitive. But a house is hard to hide. It’s easy to count. Whereas with taxes on a broader definition of wealth, you start getting all sorts of assets that are much easier to hide. You create much larger economic distortions.

Ryan Bourne: So things like financial assets, classic cars, jewelry, how much has been included?

Adam Michel: Exactly. The broadest version of it is all of these things — privately held businesses, land, houses, in addition to boats and jewelry and private wine collections. You sort of go down the list. And it’s economically distinct from the other types of taxes we have, like income taxes or consumption taxes, in that a wealth tax is a tax on a stock. It’s on the accumulation of that wealth and not the return that it’s throwing off on a regular basis, where income and consumption taxes are taxing a flow, something that’s happening every year. And so it’s particularly distortionary because you’re taxing that productive base — the accumulation of savings and investment is really what it is.

Ryan Bourne: So let’s go through a simple mathematical example, because at first glance, a two or three percent wealth tax on somebody who’s got a very high stock of wealth doesn’t sound especially severe. But as you say, it’s charged against the whole value of all those assets, not the income that those assets are producing. So what appears to be a very small wealth tax can actually be the equivalent of a very, very high income tax.

Adam Michel: That’s exactly right. So a wealth tax is often characterized as just a couple cents, just two or three percent on wealth — what could that really do? But if you make the assumption that you’re not going to force someone to liquidate their wealth every year to pay the tax, it has to be paid on the return that that wealth is throwing off each year, the income stream from it. And so something like a three percent wealth tax — a small number on assets that are making, say, a five percent annual return — is equivalent to a 60 percent income tax, in addition to the income taxes that are already levied on that stream of income, which for wealthy people are quite high in the United States when you take into consideration federal, state, and local taxes. And this setup is particularly perverse because it’s levying the highest effective tax rates on the lowest-return assets, which is actually the opposite of what a lot of the wealth tax rhetoric would have you believe. So if you’re an investor in SpaceX and it has this massive return, you’re paying a much lower effective tax rate on that wealth base than someone who’s invested in something getting a two, three, or four percent return each year.

Ryan Bourne: You invest in a house, and the value of the house goes up three percent that year — a three percent wealth tax on that part of your wealth is the equivalent of a 100 percent tax, whereas the SpaceX one will be much lower if it’s making a return of 15, 20 percent or whatever.

Adam Michel: Correct. That’s exactly right. And so that’s one of many different margins on which a tax like this is incredibly distortionary and treats similarly situated people quite differently.

Ryan Bourne: So for about three decades, most countries have been repealing broad wealth taxes and cutting taxes on capital — that is, the number of countries that had wealth taxes has been falling. Yet wealth taxation seems to be back on the agenda in California, in Congress, a couple of other countries too, like Norway and Spain. And there’s a G20 debate about it. Why do you think advocacy for this idea is taking off at the moment?

Adam Michel: I have one theory, which is that in the domestic U.S. political scene, I think a lot of people dislike the fact that there have been many highly prominent supporters of President Trump who tend to be very, very wealthy people, some of whom have even tried to cut certain federal government budgets, which hasn’t gone down too well with the progressive left.

Ryan Bourne: But are there other reasons why this is becoming more salient today?

Adam Michel: So I do think, as you mentioned, this is not a new phenomenon. Other countries have had wealth taxes previously. Throughout the 1990s, Europe experimented with these taxes. So this idea comes and goes — it’s not like this is the first time it’s bubbled up to the surface. In the U.S. context, I think you’re right that part of it is the prominence of both large companies and loud, wealthy personalities in our daily life. But I think the piece that people maybe discount is the fact that the U.S. has a massive fiscal crisis ahead of us. We have $2 trillion annual deficits, our debt keeps going up, and the political process doesn’t want to deal with the driver of that, which is spending. And so things like this — wealth taxes, just increasing taxes on the wealthy in general — are the easy, one-line-seeming fix, or thing that can masquerade as a fix, in our broader fiscal policy conversation. It’s really a distraction and a nice sound bite, keeping politicians away from having to actually tackle some of these more challenging underlying problems.

Ryan Bourne: I want to come back to the revenue potential for these types of things a bit later. But I think there are a couple of other arguments you often hear to justify this type of policy. One is that you can get a scenario where a billionaire holds shares that keep rising in value, borrows against them to pay for an expensive lifestyle today, and avoids capital gains taxes because they never actually sell the shares. If they then hold those until death, their heirs may inherit them without much of that gain ever being taxed. So I think at least one of the more sophisticated arguments for a wealth tax is that it deals with this “buy, borrow, die” strategy attributed to wealthy individuals. How much of a problem is that?

Adam Michel: So you’re right, this sounds like a sophisticated critique, but economically it’s not a very big problem, in scare quotes. The most rigorous empirical investigation of how big this actually is in the economy found that for the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans — the wealthiest Americans who’d be able to use this strategy — this new borrowing each year is less than 1% of their economic income. So it’s a trivial share of the economic activity happening here. Wealthy people are wealthy enough that they’re generally consuming less than they’re earning at this level. It’s a nice talking point, but the solutions to it are often much more costly than any fix you’d get from addressing it. And the fixes, if you wanted them, are much easier. You could fix how capital gains are treated at death, transitioning to a carryover basis regime or something like that, or simply taxing consumption.

Ryan Bourne: Sorry, what do you mean by a carryover basis?

Adam Michel: So “buy, borrow, die” leverages what’s called step-up in basis at death. When you die, you don’t face any capital gains tax, and that’s what makes this strategy work. So you could just fix that “die” part by changing the taxation at death. You don’t want to force realization at death, which is the problem with the estate tax, but you could allow that basis to be carried over, and that would eliminate this strategy. There are other ways too — that’s not my preferred one; I’d rather move to a consumption tax, I think that’s the way to get around this problem. But at the end of the day, it’s not really a problem of any real magnitude.

Ryan Bourne: So people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, I guess, would say, okay, there are other problems with billionaires having such high wealth, one of which is perhaps that they have too much political power. I don’t think they’re arguing that campaign spending mechanically buys votes, but they think billionaires can fund advocacy, shape agendas, perhaps be appointed by the president to certain roles within the federal government — access ordinary people lack. So I’m guessing you reject the idea that we should have a wealth tax specifically to counter that kind of concentrated political influence. But why specifically do you think this would be a bad solution for that, if you think the wealth tax is poorly targeted to fix the problem you just described?

Adam Michel: I think at a more fundamental level, there are very wealthy people on both sides of the political spectrum. And more often than not, their spending cancels out rather than colludes toward one preferred outcome. Look at the wealthiest members of Congress — they’re basically evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. So you don’t see a systematic outcome; if you thought billionaires were dominating politics in one direction, you don’t see that borne out in whatever metric you look at. So a wealth tax is fixing a problem, in my view, that doesn’t exist. And even if you do think wealth is dominating politics, you don’t need to get rid of all the wealth — there might be political reforms or something more targeted to whatever your particular concern is.

Ryan Bourne: Yeah. And I’m guessing a lot of people might say you don’t need to be a billionaire to influence politics — politicians are a lot cheaper than that.

Adam Michel: Correct. Right — maybe someone on the other side will say, well, this is why we need a millionaire wealth tax instead of a billionaire tax. But I think the broader argument is that a wealth tax is not well targeted to whatever your particular political concern might be.

Ryan Bourne: Just a final question on the fairness aspect of this, because I think a lot of people hear you talking about certain difficulties — you don’t want somebody to have to liquidate their assets, or whatever — and they’d say, pass me the world’s smallest violin. So somebody who’s a billionaire has to sell a property or a few properties to pay their annual wealth tax bill — why does that matter? I think a lot of the rhetoric treats wealth as if it’s piles of cash, physical assets that can be easily disposed of. But your paper shows that’s really not the case. So what are we really taxing when we tax a billionaire’s fortune?

Adam Michel: Most wealth in America is invested in productive assets. A very small portion of it is yachts and personal houses and jewelry. Most of it is stocks and shares in businesses that are employing Americans across the country. So when you talk about taxing the stock of wealth, you’re saying you want to levy a tax on the returns of all of those productive assets employing Americans in every sector of the economy. Sure, maybe you’d have to sell off a house, but you’re also going to be forced to sell shares in firms that ultimately have impacts on the jobs, the innovation, and the economic potential of all of that investment dispersed throughout the economy.

Ryan Bourne: So I’m guessing this would primarily hit privately-owned, billionaire-owned businesses — private businesses.

Adam Michel: Well, it hits those and stocks in publicly-owned businesses as well.

Ryan Bourne: More in the sense that if people have to sell part of their ownership of a business that they kind of manage and run themselves, that’s where it’s going to be particularly damaging.

Adam Michel: Correct. Especially if I’m the primary owner and I’ve put all this sweat equity into a business, selling that off is both a less liquid asset — it’s harder to sell and find someone to replace my particular expertise — but I don’t want to discount the fact that even in publicly traded companies, founders often retain enough shares to maintain control and management of the firm itself. Forcing them to fire-sell a certain number of shares can divorce them from the ownership stake that actually gives them control of where the firm goes. And often founder-led businesses have a competitive advantage and outperform, and you’re risking a lot of that by making them liquidate pieces of their ownership.

Ryan Bourne: So let’s look a bit at the international record of wealth taxes, because it is quite striking. 12 OECD countries levied annual net wealth taxes in 1990; only four do today. And those taxes have typically raised, according to your paper, about 0.2% of GDP — that’s about $64 billion in current US terms. When you compare that with estimated tax revenues for this year of $5.6 trillion, you can see that’s a very small component. So even if we matched the revenue potential of some of these other wealth taxes around the world, this isn’t going to get us anywhere near dealing with the fiscal problem the country faces.

Adam Michel: And I think you laid it out well there — that 0.2% of GDP figure is itself an overstatement, because you’re not netting out the lost economic activity: the lower incomes, the less revenue you get from other tax sources. So even that is an optimistic presentation of how much these taxes can actually raise, not to mention all of the additional economic costs — not just lost government revenue, but the broader economic costs they leave in their wake.

Ryan Bourne: So Norway is often a case that both sides point to. It raised its wealth tax in 2022 and saw a number of wealthy residents move abroad. Of course, it also changed some other tax policy — dividend tax, capital gains tax. But that obviously led to a lot of income leaving with those people. Supporters would say a few famous departures doesn’t establish broad economic damage. So what’s your read of what Norway really teaches us about this type of taxation?

Adam Michel: Norway, I think, is a good case study, because in lots of respects they had every advantage. If you could make a wealth tax work, it should be in Norway. They had an exit tax regime, which they’ve actually strengthened since all of these exits — so you’re taxed on your stock of wealth when you leave the country. They have a quite rigorous tax transparency regime, and a strong civic norm against tax avoidance or evasion. So Norway would be the place where you’d think you could make a wealth tax work. They still lost $14 billion of deferred income with people leaving when they raised their wealth tax most recently. And the response is then, well, in the future we can just design it better. That seems to always be the answer when taxes happen in the real world and produce negative outcomes: well, we can patch that hole, we’ll have a stronger exit tax, or a broader tax base. At some point you just have to come to terms with the fact that this is a tax that’s really hard to design in a way that doesn’t have all of these negative consequences. And that’s what we’ve seen time and time again, every time another country has tried it.

Ryan Bourne: So Switzerland’s local cantons impose wealth taxes, and that country remains pretty prosperous. The levy they impose seems to raise a bit more revenue than in most other countries. So is Switzerland a counterexample? Does it show that a wealth tax can work to generate revenue without causing too many distortions?

Adam Michel: Yeah, actually, to reinforce the point you’re making — people moving from Norway or other places with wealth taxes are often moving to Switzerland, which is interesting. But I think Switzerland works despite having a wealth tax, not because of it. Switzerland has a bunch of other peculiar features in its tax system compared to competing countries in Europe. They have no federal capital gains tax, a low corporate income tax, very moderate income taxes, and a relatively low consumption tax. So the rest of their fiscal system is offsetting the economic damage from the wealth tax. And their wealth tax rates are quite low — they levy it at the canton level, but at the lowest rate, and studies of Switzerland show wealth is very responsive to the rate, so most of the wealth ends up in the lowest-rate jurisdiction — just 0.13%. So they have both a very low rate, and it’s compensated for by having lower taxes on capital income in all these other ways.

Ryan Bourne: Yeah, and I think that’s a really important point — we always say in economics that economics happens at the margin. You have to consider the total marginal effect, the total effect of earning income from another dollar invested, the total combined tax burden on that. Switzerland offsets its wealth tax with much lower taxes on other capital. The US, compared to our competitors, and the OECD, has higher capital gains rates. Our marginal rates go — especially if you live in a place like California and put California taxes on top of that — we are not a low-tax place on the margin compared to some of these other places. So putting a wealth tax on top of all of that, without eliminating the capital gains tax or lowering the corporate rate further, or some other pretty dramatic reforms, I don’t think you can look to Switzerland and say this is what would happen in the US. So we’ve talked a bit about the California proposal before — that’s an unusually aggressive one, but supposedly a one-time wealth tax of 5% on worldwide net wealth above $1 billion, based on whether you’re a California resident at the start of this year. Supporters say that would raise $100 billion — sounds like a lot for one individual state. But reading your paper, I sense you’re skeptical it would actually raise any money at all. So why don’t you talk us through why you think it might actually lose the state money?

Adam Michel: Yeah. So I’m going to rely on some estimates put together by economists at the Hoover Institution. They break down that $100 billion figure and show that since it was calculated, and before that January 1, 2026 deadline, about 30% of the tax base they were counting on has already left the state. People are forward-looking — they saw this coming, and wealthy people have already started moving out of California.

Ryan Bourne: So 30% of the people affected — 30% of the potential revenue?

Adam Michel: And so, making those adjustments for people who’ve already left the state, the tax itself, by these estimates, would raise about $40 billion, not $100 billion. They make some other adjustments too, not just that 30% one. But then they say: you do this one-time tax, and you incentivize all these people to try to escape it and move out — what future lost revenue streams have gone with them? The billionaires targeted are estimated to pay between three and $5 billion a year in income taxes, and that’s a permanent loss every year going forward. So these estimates find it could be a net loss to California of about $25 billion, once you net out the gain from the wealth tax against the loss of other income tax streams. And I think these are actually relatively conservative estimates, because they’re only looking at what happens to the targeted tax base — the billionaires and above. But any forward-looking person would have to think, one, this is probably going to happen again in the future, and two, it most likely won’t stop just at billionaires — that threshold will eventually come down. So anyone approaching billionaire status has to be thinking about whether they should be setting up their business here, whether this is where they want to put their wealth. You should expect broader losses.

Ryan Bourne: So one of the big problems with wealth taxes is valuation. Valuing things like publicly traded shares is pretty simple. Valuing a private company, or a brand, or intellectual property, is much more complex. You have a great example in the paper about the Michael Jackson estate, which went through 12 years of litigation over valuation — his estate valued his name and likeness at a really minuscule amount, and the IRS said it was a huge amount, hundreds of millions of dollars, and they eventually settled somewhere in between, much lower than the IRS’s figure. So realistically, if this were a national policy, could the IRS even value tens of thousands of complex fortunes this way? There’d be endless disputes.

Adam Michel: Yeah, it would create an entire new cottage industry of accountants, tax lawyers, and valuation specialists. You see that in miniature form in the current estate tax, where it only happens once a lifetime — hence examples like the Michael Jackson estate taking 12 years to settle on a value. The IRS processes about 7,000 estate tax returns a year. By one estimate, the Warren wealth tax would mean the IRS having to do this for 75,000 returns every single year, instead of once a lifetime, coming to an agreed-upon value that’s then taxed — with the taxpayer having a strong incentive to undervalue these assets and play as many games as possible, while the IRS tries to stop those games. The administrative burden is just tremendous. That’s actually one of the primary reasons a lot of European countries repealed their wealth taxes over time — we mentioned there were 12 in the ’90s, and there are four today. The reason cited over and over for repealing these taxes is the administrative cost — not just to individuals, but to the government itself, in trying to figure out where the wealth is, how much it is, and how to tax it. It just wasn’t worth the small amount of revenue they actually got.

Ryan Bourne: Yeah. So in the real world, politics usually answers that problem with a ton of new exemptions. But of course, the more exemptions you create, the easier it is for sophisticated taxpayers who can afford expensive lawyers and planners to rearrange their wealth and get around paying the tax. So there’s a clear trade-off between the degree of complexity and the actual revenue potential of the tax, even in theory. So is there any realistic wealth tax that’s broad enough to resist that avoidance problem? Are there any proposals that, even if you might be against them for the economic damage you think they’d cause, don’t create all of these new bureaucratic challenges around valuation?

Adam Michel: Some of the on-paper wealth taxes are broad enough — a very broad base without a lot of these exemptions — where you can say, we’re going to value a privately held company based on this metric, and there’s no room for negotiation or alternative evidence. But when those proposals hit the real world, what we see every single time is that politicians aren’t that rigid, and these exemptions are always added over time, until the tax base ends up as a sort of Swiss cheese — a wholly compromised tax base that creates all of these incentives to reorganize your wealth. It’s more than just holes for compliance simplicity — maybe you want to exempt forests for conservation reasons, or exempt artwork to keep priceless collections together, or, as in France, exempt wine because it’s a big industry there. You don’t want to break up priceless wine catalogs. But that opens opportunities to buy assets in those exempt classes, often with debt, and then deduct that debt against all your other taxable assets — becoming one more way to plan around these taxes, which reduces the revenue raised, increases the administrative burden, and nets out as a negative.

Ryan Bourne: So another way you can get around paying these taxes, as we’ve touched on, is mobility — a billionaire can just move to Switzerland, as you described. Now, there are some more utopian advocates of global net wealth taxes — people like the left-wing French economist Thomas Piketty, who’s been banging the drum for a long time about the need for a global minimum wealth tax to close those exits. Would international coordination solve that enforcement problem?

Adam Michel: The OECD has spent the last decade or so trying to put together a globally coordinated corporate income tax, and it’s been nothing short of an abject failure. So I think doing that type of coordination for a wealth tax is beyond the pale. But even if it were possible, technically, you’d still have all the problems we’ve talked about — sure, you might coordinate at a global level, but you’re still going to have a tax base full of holes, still going to have all the compliance problems, and you’re actually amplifying the economic damage of the tax, because if it were truly global, the wealth would have nowhere to hide — you’d simply be depressing the amount of investment in the world economy, which would have even more dramatic impacts on workers and the broader economy.

Ryan Bourne: So I think that’s a really important point, and one we haven’t explored as much yet, because it’s a good example of the difference between who the tax is legally imposed upon and who really bears the burden of the tax. A lot of people think, well, this just applies to wealthy households, the billionaire class — but your central economic claim is that, in fact, they wouldn’t bear the whole burden, because this is taxing productive assets; on the margin you get fewer of them, so you get less saving, which means less investment, which means lower productivity for workers, which ultimately feeds through into weaker wages. Now, wealth tax advocates usually respond with something like: okay, those people might have to sell some assets, but other Americans will buy them — the factories will still be there. On net, maybe there’s not much in the way of fewer jobs than before. So why are you confident that ordinary workers would actually bear a meaningful share of this tax? Is it just the productivity-feeding-through-to-wages effect I outlined, or is there something more?

Adam Michel: That’s essentially the story. I think the piece of the argument you left out is that wealth tax advocates don’t just say other Americans will buy the firms — they explicitly say that if you levy a wealth tax in the US, foreigners will buy those firms. So you won’t see a decline in investment in the United States, because people exempt from the wealth tax abroad will buy up those assets without facing the lower after-tax return. In their model, they’re explicitly assuming that American firms, and all the profits associated with them, simply get exported abroad — which is an interesting claim to rest “wealth tax has no bad economic outcomes” on. But I think even that model is way too simplistic for the real world. As we’ve talked about, most productive businesses in the United States are privately held or owned by founders. So if you’re forcing them to sell their businesses abroad — if that’s even possible; your local laundromat isn’t going to be sold abroad — you’re changing the fundamental makeup of the capital stock in the United States. It’s just going to face a lower after-tax return, and you’re going to see lower levels of investment across the economy. And we see time and time again — one of the most predictable results in the economics literature — that when you have less capital per worker, workers are less productive and command lower wages. Some of the estimates out there modeling these wealth taxes in the United States find that one estimate put 63 cents of every dollar raised by a wealth tax as ultimately coming out of workers’ pockets in the form of lower wages, because of this mechanical link between less investment and lower wages.

Ryan Bourne: For similar reasoning to the corporate income tax, for example.

Adam Michel: Correct. Yes — the corporate rate, capital gains, and dividends taxes all have a similar story. To the extent they lower investment in the United States, it means we all have fewer tools, less cutting-edge technology, less future innovation that requires investment. And those are the engines that allow wages to go up, because wages are driven by productivity.

Ryan Bourne: So even if a federal wealth tax were good economics — which we’ve discussed, and we disagree that it is — it also faces a constitutional problem. Direct taxes are supposed to be apportioned among the states. The 16th Amendment created an exception for income taxes, but Supreme Court decisions have left it unresolved whether taxes on wealth and unrealized appreciation would qualify. Do you think a federal wealth tax would necessarily be struck down, or could Congress design it to look like a form of income tax and skirt those definitional problems?

Adam Michel: Yeah, you’re right that this is sort of an open question before the Court. The most recent case they heard, the Moore case, didn’t directly address it — they explicitly wrote the opinion around not addressing this wealth tax question head-on. My armchair-lawyer analysis is that this Supreme Court would likely be very skeptical of a wealth tax, and skeptical that Congress could write the rules to be just cute enough to be a wealth tax in substance but not one on paper. The uncertainty that adds to the equation means that, likely, at the federal level, real policies will be pursued to tax high-income people in a bunch of other ways before a wealth tax ever makes it across the finish line. But really, the legal arguments are secondary to the disastrous economic consequences of something like this. At the end of the day, we should be winning on the economic terms first — and of course, I’d hope the Supreme Court would overturn something like this, because in my view it’s clearly unconstitutional.

Ryan Bourne: This seems to be something that comes around every five or six years, so I salute you and Chris for attacking it again with this great paper. I think the central takeaway is that taxing wealth sounds like a clean way to tax idle riches, but wealth is rarely idle — as you say, it’s usually business ownership, accumulated savings, and capital out there financing production. That doesn’t make every fortune virtuous, or every feature of our current tax code defensible — there are real arguments to be had about loopholes and inadequacies in our tax system. But an annual wealth tax asks government to value every complex asset every year, collect cash from people whose wealth may be illiquid, and stop highly mobile taxpayers from changing their behavior much when they face that new tax. And the international record you outline in this paper is that carve-outs, avoidance, emigration, lower revenue, and lower investment are a big cost that ultimately, in part, feeds through to ordinary workers. So Adam, I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got time for today. Thank you for listening to today’s episode of the Cato Podcast. Once again, I’m Ryan Bourne, joined by Adam Michel. If you enjoyed today’s discussion, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. To read Adam Michel and Chris Edwards’ paper, Failures of Wealth Taxation, you can visit the Cato website at cato​.org. The Cato Podcast is a production of the Cato Institute, dedicated to advancing individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. Join us next time for more insights and conversations on the issues shaping our world.