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The devil is in the details here. For the super-rich, wealth is an extremely hard thing to quantify. Once a true wealth tax is established, all it will do is increase billable hours for financial professionals who know how to hide wealth in tax sheltered vehicles. And that will get litigated every year, when the bill is due. If you want to go after the extremely wealthy, I think the right place to do it is with a strong inheritance tax. That only gets litigated once, and the bill is paid by people who did not accumulate that wealth themselves. It also dilutes generational wealth, which is a good thing.
Plus, the US is unique in that it taxes citizens on their worldwide holdings, anyway. While there are offshore tax havens, they work a lot differently than the tax havens a wealth tax would target.
It's easy to say "We should tax the wealthy", but hard to make good policy that can't be gamed, especially when attempting to do it across multiple wealthy countries.
That's literally what Yellen is refusing to participate in...
Like, the reason we can't do it, is we're not doing it...
If that sounds confusing, it's because there isn't a logical reason not to do it, besides the wealthy may donate less money to politicians
There are very real constitutional issues with explicit wealth taxes. It took a constitutional amendment to authorize the federal government to collect an income tax, and it's quite possible that it would take another to authorize a wealth tax. Particularly with this Supreme Court, Congress probably doesn't have the legal ability to impose a wealth tax even if it wanted to, to say nothing of the general complexity and costs of collecting it. There are plenty of economists who support the general idea of taxing the wealthy more but who prefer other taxation schemes.