This paper explores the potential role for a wealth tax as part of the mix of taxes applying to assets in the Canadian tax system. The existing system taxes assets in a variety of ways. Asset incomes, such as interest, dividends, capital gains, and profits, are taxed in the income tax system,...

Atkinson and Stiglitz show that with weakly separability, differential commodity taxes are unnecessary given an optimal nonlinear income tax. Deaton showed that with an optimal linear progressive income tax, commodity taxes are superfluous under weakly separable and linear Engel curves. Using...