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Millionaires ask to pay more tax:
A group of more than 100 of the world's richest people have called on governments to make them pay more tax. The group, named the Patriotic Millionaires, said the ultra-wealthy were not being forced to pay their share towards the global economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
"As millionaires, we know that the current tax system is not fair," they said in an open letter. The signatories included Disney heiress Abigail Disney and Nick Hanauer. Mr Hanauer is a US entrepreneur and an early investor in online retail giant Amazon.
"Most of us can say that, while the world has gone through an immense amount of suffering in the last two years, we have actually seen our wealth rise during the pandemic - yet few if any of us can honestly say that we pay our fair share in taxes," the signatories said in the letter to the World Economic Forum.
[...] It said globally, $2.52tn could lift 2.3 billion people out of poverty and make enough vaccines for the world.
Gemma McGough, British entrepreneur and founding member of Patriotic Millionaires, UK said: "For all our well-being - rich and poor alike - it's time we right the wrongs of an unequal world. It's time we tax the rich."
Ms McGough added: "At a time when simply living will cost the average household a further £1,200 a year, our government cannot expect to be trusted if it would rather tax working people than wealthy people.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by deimtee on Thursday January 20 2022, @06:20PM (2 children)
Obviously a full proposal would be a lot more complex.
Some additional possibilities;
- You get the choice of a primary residence exception, but pay a double rate on everything else.
- You can be forced to sell any major asset at X% of your self-valuation. Only way to stop it is to re-value at the higher price and pay back taxes at the new value. (X is debatable, but I would vote for 150%, two years )
The problem with transaction taxes is they are regressive and intrusive. They also tend to climb over time. Taxing static wealth actually encourages people to do something with it.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday January 21 2022, @01:04AM (1 child)
>- You can be forced to sell any major asset at X% of your self-valuation...
I believe some states handle property tax that way. There's a few problems though, among them...
- it lets the rich run roughshod over everyone else, *especially* the poor. I want your property, I can force you to sell it to me by offering more than you can afford to pay the back-taxes on. If you're just getting by, that's almost anything more than the current "official" value.
- it lets the rich avoid taxes - you can value your property extremely low, but still higher than 99(.99...)% of people could afford - while the remaining potential buyers are all part of the same tax-dodging country club and are very unlikely to rock the boat by trying to force a sale. And even if they did, you have lots of other assets to pay the back-taxes with, unless there';s huge
- there's essentially no reason NOT to severely undervalue your property - someone tries to force a sale, and you've got to pay a few years taxes at the rate you should have been paying anyway? Score! You still dodged many years of fair taxes. There's no down side.
The last one could potentially be partially addressed by much more severe penalties - but that makes the first problem worse.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday January 21 2022, @02:23AM
Those are all easily corrected problems.
Have a low-value exemption for sentimental personal items. Also a minimum time between the offer and the forced sale so a rich asshole can't just pay $1500 for your $1000 clunker and leave you stranded in the desert.
If you value your home at say, $300,000, then [nasty rich person] has to pony up $450,000 to force you to sell. Cool. Take the money and buy a nicer house. They won't stay rich long if they get their kicks paying 150% of market value for the stuff the poor own.
Also, make them follow through. If someone lodges a "force a sale" claim, then they must lodge a 5% deposit. If the owner doesn't raise the valuation to match then they must purchase it, else the deposit goes to the owner to compensate for dealing with a frivolous claim. If the sale does go through you now have a new higher valuation to charge the new owner taxes on.
If the owner does raise the valuation then the claimant gets their deposit back and 5% of the additional tax revenue. A new occupation will arise of looking for undervalued assets.
Note that a forced sale is fundamentally different to just offering to buy. You can't harass someone by offering 140% and raising their tax bill. You have to lodge a claim and deposit with the taxman. The counter to any harassment is simply going to be to take the money.
Note that the probable outcome of this is that everyone will value things at about 2/3 of market value. Just high enough to make a forced sale uneconomical. There is a trade-off, and it might take some adjusting of X to find the best rate. Higher X leads to more undervaluing and lower taxes, but more penalties. Lower X leads to the overhead of more forced sales but higher assessed taxable assets.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.