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EU-funded report calls for wealth of super-rich to be taxed, not income
- darthoctopus 3y agoabout time
- Khelavaster 3y agoPrinting more money effectively taxes the super-rich as well.
- anonylizard 3y agoCompletely false. Real assets hold up much better under inflation than savings accounts of ordinary people.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Condition1952 3y agoFreshly printed money goes directly into the pockets of the mega-rich
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- usrusr 3y agoIt's exactly the opposite: the super rich don't just have all their wealth in assets, they have far more than all their wealth in assets. They buy real estate using mortgages just like everybody else. They are billionaires in net worth, but their debt is usually much bigger than the sum of their cash-equivalents. They win from money devaluation just like any poor mortgage serf, just magnified by some trailing zeroes. Printing money taxes the guy with the savings account and nobody else.
- okokwhatever 3y agoI would clap if I could
- rahen 3y agoNo, inflation concentrates the wealth into the hands of the government, banks and the wealthiests, not the people. This is called the Cantillon effect.
- Copenjin 3y agoEasy target, why not.
- rewmie 3y ago> Easy target, why not. If the super-rich are such an easy target, how come the article states they also avoid any type of income tax?
- JonChesterfield 3y agoIt's pretty easy to avoid income tax by not making any income. Works for rich and poor alike.
- Copenjin 3y agoBecause there are specific laws that can be bent to avoid paying taxes. And politicians have never targeted them, for various reasons.
- bluescrn 3y agoBecause over time the threshold for the 'wealth tax' will be lowered until the middle-class are taxed out of their homes
- blueflow 3y agoThe same middle class that is currently not able to afford a house?
- okokwhatever 3y agoexactly, because in the end the idea is to increase taxes for everyone. But hey, lets lower the bar of the super rich to those who own a car or a house or those who travel by plane or those who eat meat....
- bluescrn 3y agoYeah, the middle class is already being wiped out, leaving the working class with nothing to aspire to. Soon there'll be nothing left between the elite and the wage slaves/serfs.
- badcppdev 3y agoAn interesting thought experiment for me is to imagine a wealth tax in the 0.1 to 0.5% range and figure out if the difference is might make to the different groups. I'm a firm believer in incremental changes and experiments which is of course hopelessly politically naive.
- ImPleadThe5th 3y agoI think the tax rate they suggest in the article is 2%, which feels pretty incremental.
- labster 3y agoOften a problem in politics is that people are pretty inelastic when it comes to what they want changed. They want a program fully funded or not funded, a tax issued or no tax at all. A small wealth tax will be seen by foes as a stepping stone to further overreach, and proponents won’t want to fight the same fight again later to get what they feel is owed now. Your naïveté is not the problem, but rather partisanship means we can’t have nice things.
- badcppdev 3y agoPartisanship is bad but I also get the impression that all major parties in the US and UK are very uninterested in increasing taxes on their donors
- blitzar 3y agoThe core problem is how you define and observe wealth. It is not like income, which is a transfer that can be observed directly. It becomes not dissimilar to the "Window tax" (not the bill gates kind) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax - a form of daylight robbery where people brick up windows of their houses.
- hugh-avherald 3y agoWhy not just ask the taxpayer to identify the value of all their assets, with the condition that they must sell to the government at the price given, if requested? Note that in practice income is also quite complicated to pin down in tax law.
- dappermanneke 3y agowish the EU was half as focused on promoting economic growth as they are on taking things from people
- ImPleadThe5th 3y agoTaxation is not "taking things from people". Everyone benefits from the public services Taxes fund, even the super wealthy.
- f233f2 3y agoIf we are to tax people because they benefit from public services, then poor people should be taxed more than rich people since they benefit from those services more.
- badcppdev 3y agoNo rich people benefit more. They rely on the rule of law in a nation state to protect their assets and provide a supply of goods and services. And they don't pay much for it (in percentage terms definitely).
- f233f2 3y agoPoor people cause much, much, much more work to law enforcement and the judicial system than rich people.
- sho 3y agoI hope this is the beginning of the pendulum swinging back towards a more sustainable tax regime. A lot of people forget - or pretend to forget - in the "golden age" of america's great works, the top tax rate was above 90%! And somehow all that innovation and wealth creation still managed to happen (and is now all beginning to fall apart). I'm not advocating for a return to those levels, but right now the truly rich effectively pay no tax at all,basically a result of regulatory capture at the individual level. Hopefully, this is the first step in that finally beginning to swing back in the other direction.
- inglor_cz 3y agoTax rates are meaningless signalling to low-information voters. The real devil is always in the loopholes. In practice, American tycoons never paid 90 per cent taxes, not even half of that.
- joe__f 3y agoThen start funding more regulatory bodies to close loopholes
- robertlagrant 3y agoYou're missing the point. Saying that once upon a time taxes were 90% and it was fine is wrong because there were ways round it. Therefore there is no historical evidence that this level of taxation would be a good idea.
- blitzar 3y agoTherefore there is no historical evidence of anything.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI don't understand the point behind your statement.
- badcppdev 3y agoI wonder how much the super-rich pay for the protection of their assets? I don't mean the physical security around their property or the fees to whatever vault holds their art collection. I mean how much to the super-rich pay to national governments for security of the national borders, court systems, general policing, financial rules, auditing, banking systems, and all the education and infrastructure required to run that system. I wonder if measured by a percentage of wealth whether the ultra rich are actually getting subsidised by the rest of the population.
- teamonkey 3y agoIf you believe in market rates, the cost of protecting large assets from taxes will be very slightly less than the cost of paying those taxes. Or actually it should cost somewhat more, if you think that holding on to those assets has significantly more utility to you than paying tax.
- badcppdev 3y agoI don't believe that market rates are applicable in all of these situations. I think that the super rich benefit from economies of scale which means that they spend £X on accountants and benefit £1000X
- michaelt 3y agoNot if there's more than one supplier of tax avoidance services. The Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and the British Virgin Islands all have to compete against one another, after all.
- pjc50 3y agoThis is quite significant; especially this is why wealthy people from less stable or rule-of-law states tend to park their wealth in the West. There's a lot of money in London from Gulf states, Russian oligarchs, Chinese "property investors" and so on. To some extent it's a benefit, but it also prices out locals, and the distorting effects of that concentration of money start to affect the local rule-of-law as well...
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- RandomLensman 3y agoThe mentioned $200B globally per year is an irrelevant sum compared to global tax revenue - might shift some distributional things, but not adding noticeable amounts to taxes raised.
- okokwhatever 3y agoDeclare residence in an isolated island. Stay away of the world for 6-9 months a year. Use a third-party proxy person who signs everything in your name (obviously for a profit), and so on, and so on... profit. All the tricks were already invented during this century. The taxes to the rich guys, at the end, will only affect those in the middle class with medium-high salaries (do you recognize here my friends?).
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoIf you are an american citizen, you are taxed no matter where you live.
- okokwhatever 3y agoif you're an american citizen you're just a small percentage of all the human race paying wild taxes.
- jwestbury 3y agoTrue -- but the ultrawealthy are largely concentrated in the USA. There are substantial impacts from renouncing for tax purposes, as well -- for instance, the Reed Amendment means that people who renounce their citizenship to avoid paying taxes are barred from entering the USA in perpetuity. Additionally, there is an exit tax which captures unrealized gains upon renunciation. So, yes, American citizens are a small percentage, but if the USA adopted wealth taxes, it would have an outsized global impact.
- okokwhatever 3y agoYes, but my point was global. Everybody knows where the wealth is located but taxes and confiscation affects every country around the world event the poorer ones.
- gwnywg 3y agoThat's exactly what I thought. Calls to tax the rich are not affecting them since they have means to avoid being taxed. We have no means at all and those laws will be directed at us at later stage (thresholds lowered, definitions changed, etc.).
- amelius 3y agoYes. There should be no objection against people being paid for honest work, but if these people use that money against other people in any way, we have a problem. And this is almost always the case, where rent seeking is just one example.
- okokwhatever 3y agoTL;DR: - Everybody in this post is sick of paying taxes - Everybody will pay more taxes in the near future. Period - Rich guys will pay mostly the same taxes in the future - Taxes are collected to repay debt not to sustain a sick society. Anything else is wishful thinking and academic ideology far away from the real live.
- Trow83949 3y agoYou are missing the point. EU has about 200 billions EUR in frozen assets of Russian oligarchs. Those money are ripe for taking, but EU needs justification. Taxing it over several years seems like a good strategy. It is not like they can move it to Dubai...
- okokwhatever 3y agoGood point
- freefaler 3y agoAlmost all income is taxed in one way or another. For the capital to occur it must be taxed at least one. Capital gains taxes for financial instruments, dividend taxes for dividends. Inheritance taxes are also high. There are also consumption taxes when "the rich" buy land for the "mansion" or their yacht. So every dollar in that capital has been taxed in some way. Taxing this again would be a double taxation and it's not fair to tax the same dollar twice. (even if the person can afford it) And it wouldn't work properly because for the really wealthy it'll be cheaper to optimize than to pay. The AML laws are more "anti-tax evasion" laws. If you try to move money or open a bank account with more than 50K the amount of information you need to provide is mind boggling. And the rules are arbitrary... I don't want to think what'll happen when they offload this cost to an AI model.
- deely3 3y agoUnderstand. Nothing to see here, billions of revenue, income - few thousands, all taxes already paid.
- rich_sasha 3y agoI'm frustrated with repeated attempts to introduce yet another final tax on the rich, while the humdrum ones that most people pay are quietly falling by the wayside. I don't want the ultra rich to pay a wealth tax, that no doubt they can avoid in some new way. Maybe take out loans, or deflate their assets in some another way. I want their income to be recognised and taxed. VAT paid. And so on...
- AnonC 3y agoI’m not clear on how exactly a person is expected to calculate their wealth in the first place. If someone has assets in the form of stocks, mutual funds, real estate, gold, bonds, bank accounts and so on, how are they supposed to track these and come up with “this is the value of my assets and hence X% of that for the tax equals Y”? Which day’s values should they take and which currency conversion rates should they consider (if their assets are spread across currencies)? How would a tax agent check if the declared numbers are correct or close to being correct or are under reported? It’s easy to tax income and expenditure because those happen at specific points in time and have a specific value. But wealth could vary every second throughout the year. It could also fluctuate a lot over the course of a tax year. Taxing the peak value in a year won’t go well, and could possibly push people to move their residency (and tax resident status) to other places (thus losing out on consumption taxes to some extent).
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y agoThe way I see it the super-rich were just lucky winners, a multi-billionaire had as much agency becoming such as the President of the United States. He is just the lucky beneficiary of a great filter and unprecedented tail-wind which propelled him into the stratosphere of wealth. If you expropriated Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook etc. from the hands of billionaires and handed over the expropriated equity to Vanguard, BlackRock, StateStreet and the myriad of Pension Funds nothing would fundamentally change. These big organizations run on autopilot, organization achieves a great success CEO shows up to take the honors, organization has a great failure and there is a whole apparatus put in place to distance the CEO as far as possible from the failure. The most preposterous lie that wealthy people ever managed to sell to the population is that they are instrumental for the delivery of goods and services that people love, in fact the smartest among the wealthy (Gates, Buffet, Bezos etc) understand that this lie can collapse at any time and have pivoted towards a more secure lie being "yes the money is from the lottery winnings , but they are being returned at a steady rate to the population via philantropic foundations" except the wealth is untaxed and they decide the steady rate at which the returning is happening and by coincidence it's always steady but very slow and enables them to keep accumulating and so even if the descendants decide to keep their word it would take a dozen generations before it happens.
- tamimio 3y agoWhat’s funny in Canada, having a company and doing your work under your company name will get taxed less than doing the same work as an employee..
- snapplebobapple 3y agofor an otherwise fairly intelligent forum, there is a lot of dumb on display on this thread. Taxing assets is an extremely bad idea and it doesn't solve the actual dead weight loss to society caused by the oligopolistic corporations the super wealthy own as their primary assets and it primarily harms the up and coming billionaires who are actually doing a great job at inventing and/or capital allocating to grow their wealth (think the elons of the world giving us wonderful new technology like starlink) and won't do very much against the old money families where the people smart enough to grow the fortune are long gone and all that is left is their mostly incompetent offspring living off the oligpolies their ancestors created. The much better strategy is to go after all the oligopolies and break them up similar to what the USA did pre Rehnquist supreme court (although not quite to the same level, those guys were breaking up small regional gas station chains, for example). This will cause a flourishing of new companies, with new and often better business practices/technology and make us all better off. Taxing assets just makes people invest in less easily tracked assets held in less easily tracked locations if they can (read if they are already billionaires aka mostly incompetent offspring of people that made the fortune) and harms the next round of up and coming (and competent) challengers.
- snapplebobapple 3y agoalso, all you people pining for the 90% tax days go look at what sort of loopholes were available at that time. You basically had to be one of the unlucky few primarily earning income as salary to be exposed to that because there were so many loopholes. It wasn't the tax regime that made that the golden age, it was that antitrust broke up the trusts and world war 2 crushed a lot of the incompetent offspring billionaires, making the usa more equal than it ever had been and the golden age came from the cream of the crop striving and making it to the top over the following decades (and leaving us with the oligopoly problem we have now, along with their incompetent offspring broadly in control of the oligopoly).