Even wealth taxes don’t force you to sell. But welfare with wealth threshold does.

> Even wealth taxes don’t force you to sell. But welfare with wealth threshold does.

How are you going to pay those wealth taxes? (Assuming you have no income.)

With a wealth tax, if you got no fresh incomes, you can sell some of your stuff to cover your taxes and restart.

Of course, same applies to welfare - you can only sell part of your stuff. But the caveat is you won't have access to welfare till you sell all of it AND spend the money you got.

Personally I like welfare-with-net-worth-threshold. Obviously it should not apply to unemployment insurance which is, well, insurance.

Unemployment insurance (and health insurance etc) should be split in two: the pure insurance component, and the solidarity component. The former can be handled by the private sector just fine, the latter can be done by governments.

> Personally I like welfare-with-net-worth-threshold.

The only thing that really matters are net payments (and marginal net payments, ie how many cents can you keep from the next gross dollar you earn). It doesn't really matter whether the effective marginal tax rate is made up of income tax or a phasing out of welfare benefits or a combination of both (and throw in some other taxes etc, too).

In the name of simplicity, you might want to have a single government agency that assesses your income and net worth. Instead of having both the tax people and the welfare agencies do that and duplicate work.

(Though ideally, we'd use forms of taxation like land value tax where the government doesn't need to assess your income nor net worth in the first place.)