A wealth tax survives only by mutating into a tax on something observable.
Recurring levies on unrealized value drown in valuation disputes and administrative cost, so governments from The Hague to Paris substitute taxes on realized gains, minimum incomes, and identifiable luxury assets instead.
The same conclusion keeps arriving from across the workspace's research — 1 topics independently instantiate this theme. Filter the evidence by where it came from:
Hungary's own finance ministry names annual valuation of untraded assets as the binding obstacle — the same failure surface that forced peer governments to retreat to observable bases.
The Hague retreated from taxing unrealized value under Senate resistance and administrative cost, substituting a levy due only on realization — the mutation into an observable base the theme predicts, with no European peer still taxing unrealized gains.
France's 2026 Finance Act replaced a binned broad wealth levy with taxes on identifiable luxury holding-company assets and a minimum income tax — the observable-base mutation enacted in statute.