He is proposing an income tax, rather than a property tax.
That's not what I read. What I understand is exemplified in the following example (and Chénier, please correct me if I am wrong).
Suppose you have 500 gold and 500 bonds. Further suppose that at tax day, you should:
-Receive 50 pieces of gold of income
-Pay 100 gold and 100 bonds of taxes.
then what should happen is:
-Your bond total is reduced by 100 due to bond taxes
-Your gold income is entirely taken away by taxes, so you receive no income.
-The extra 50 gold you owe, however, cannot be taken by the bureaucrats without actually raiding your pocket. Instead, they instruct the bank to write off your bond for the remaining value.
At the end, you are left with 500 gold and 350 bond, instead of 450 gold and 400 bond as in the current system.
