It is unfixable.
This isn't a political issue. It's just a fact. Absent a complete totalitarian economy where every transaction is acrurinized, it will always be an easy tax to avoid.
Consider income tax... consider the massive involvement of the govt required to enforce this tax. That is, employers are required to deduct the tax from every paycheck, reams if forms, thousands of agents... all that for one simple transaction: namely, paying someone for services.
You can't have the same type of scrutiny for the totality of transactions that can effectuate the tranfer of money from one person to another.
I don't know what you mean by functioning. The US had an estate tax systems. It functions. The issue is whether it serves the purpose for which it was created.
I suspect that European billionaires find it just as trivial to legally avoid estate taxes as they do here.
There seems to be a naive understanding of the manner in which the 'rich' hold their money and wealth. It's not sitting in a nice and tidy 401(k) that is easy to identify and tax. Instead -- if they know what they are doing -- it's a convoluted web of interests in international companies, foundations, and contractual rights. If he wished, for instance, Bill Gates (just to use an example) could easily arrange things so that he 'owned' nothing, yet still lived like a billionaire.
Consider income tax... consider the massive involvement of the govt required to enforce this tax. That is, employers are required to deduct the tax from every paycheck, reams if forms, thousands of agents... all that for one simple transaction: namely, paying someone for services.
You can't have the same type of scrutiny for the totality of transactions that can effectuate the tranfer of money from one person to another.