In a sense, inflation regulation is already taxing based on savings. When the value of the currency falls, everyone's savings is worth a little less (and the more one saves, the more one's relative wealth has diminished).
Which is why TIPS were created -- at maturity TIPS pay the greater of the principle adjusted for inflation or the principle without adjustment (so if there is an extended period of deflation you will still get back the amount you put in, and thus benefit from the deflation). TIPS also pay interest, and the coupon is adjusted for inflation as well.
Though this is intuitive it's not really true in a real sense because it's trivially easy to avoid this "tax". Any asset -- down to a humble CD -- will beat inflation. However, assets increasing in value also increases tax revenue due to capital gains!
Just looked and yeah, this is not a good moment for CDs (or high-yield savings accounts). I used to get over 1% from my Ally bank savings account. I suppose you can't beat inflation with CDs or savings accounts right now, though in a higher-interest environment you certainly could.
Inflation isn't a tax on savings because you're not supposed to be saving currency. You're supposed to be saving value by investing currency. That's how currency works: it retains value only for as long as necessary. Investments, on the other hand, retain value in the long run. No need to conflate the two. In fact it's a harmful narrative to try and conflate the two.
This is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of modern economics.
It's a "tax" on un-invested capital, sure, in the same way a fine is a "tax" on undesirable behavior.
I think tax is the wrong word because a tax implies a kind of tithe on top of desirable behavior. A fine implies that you are being penalized for undesirable behavior. I think the latter is a more apt description.
Your mattress full of hundos is detrimental to the economy and you are being fined for maintaining it.
Savings accounts are not an example of unproductive capital because they collateralize loans. That's why they're not subject to the inflationary haircut. They're not particularly productive hence the low return, which may be below inflation. However, that's an ROI below benchmark, not inflation. i.e. savings accounts are just a bad investment. Bad investments will exist in any market conditions.
Personally I maintain a small cash buffer in a savings account and I pay the (small) delta between inflation and interest rate as a fee for liquidity.
Where inflation gets people is typically with wages since wages rise slowly. People with large savings are not sitting on cash. They are invested in things that typically rise right along with inflation.
Wages have kept pace with inflation according to BLS data. Thing about wages though is that they're a social issue and a fiscal policy issue, not a monetary policy issue. Had there been no inflation, wages would have stayed flat in both notional and real dollar terms. The units don't matter, the quantities do. Pointing at monetary policy because the units shifted is not actually addressing the root of the problem.
