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Global billionaire tax could yield $250 billion annually, study says

cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/7812500

PARIS, Oct 23 (Reuters) - Governments should open a new front in the international clampdown on tax evasion with a global minimum tax on billionaires, which could raise $250 billion annually, the EU Tax Observatory said on Monday.

If levied, the sum would be equivalent to only 2% of the nearly $13 trillion in wealth owned by the 2,700 billionaires globally, the research group hosted at the Paris School of Economics said.

bundes_sheep ,

If they don’t like their “tax evasions”, then they should change the laws and remove the loopholes that allow it. I’m not a supporter of a wealth tax (i.e. being taxed on something repeatedly because you still happen to own it) no matter who it is that would suffer from it that we all collectively dislike.

rchive ,

I know in the US, if we taxed 100% of all US billionaire wealth, dropping their and their companies’ productivity to zero, you could fund the federal government for only like 7 months. You’d squander tons of production for comparatively little gain. The problem isn’t that we don’t tax the rich enough, the problem is that we waste money left and right.

n3m37h ,

Is this a fact or a “fact” you pulled out of your ass?

rchive ,

PolitiFact article about it

Pretty much a fact, with slightly fuzzy details.

_haha_oh_wow_ ,
@_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works avatar

That seems really low…

isles ,

OK, I need some help here. The arguments I always see against taxing the rich are along the lines of “they have very little income by design, so taxing their income doesn’t help.” I saw somewhere that a lot of the ultra-wealthy get spending money by taking loans out on assets.

What are the implications of taxing loans greater than $10 million, or some such?

BraveSirZaphod ,
@BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social avatar

There are other pre-existing tax structures that make a lot more sense. It'd be much simpler to simply tax the consumption of the kinds of goods that those loans buy. If you have a large tax on hyper-expensive yachts or whatever, that simply has to be paid when the sale is made, no matter how many layers of shell companies or whatever other trickery you try to bury the purchase in. Trying to tax the loan, beyond not really making much inherent sense since net worth hasn't actually changed, simply incentivizes a lot of loopholey nonsense that's hard to track.

For instance, if my direct loan is gonna be taxed to hell, then I'll just set up a shell company that takes out the loan instead. Sure, maybe there could be rules against it, but now the IRS has to spend a ton of time and money going down all these rabbit holes. Consumption taxes are essentially impossible to avoid, since you simply cannot buy your penthouse or yacht or diamonds or whatever without somebody paying the money.

Illuminostro ,

Those assets are usually tons of stock which is used as collateral for the loans they live off of. Tax the stock.

scytale ,

What if the IRS waits for these big companies to release their annual earnings report boasting about their profits, then tax 15% of whatever amount they state in that report?

Spaghetti_Hitchens ,

Stop. I can only get so erect.

BraveSirZaphod ,
@BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social avatar

Corporate taxes already exist. It's 21% at the federal level, with some additional state taxes.

The profit number that's reported to investors already is taxed.

So I guess you're happy now?

bobs_monkey , (edited )

That’s honestly pretty pathetic. Even a 5% tax on their $13 trillion (per the article) would yield $650 billion, and that doesn’t even come close to the annual proportion the average person pays. It’s time we stop treating the rich a special sunflowers and make them pay their fair share like the rest of us, and close the loopholes that allow them to exploit us.

Edit: should’ve said taxing income not wealth, these numbers don’t really apply

alvvayson ,

I agree, but the problem is that the rich have all the best fiscal experts, lawyers and politicians on their payroll.

And the rest of us are fighting amongst ourselves on which bathrooms transgender people should take or whatever symbolic pro or anti-immigration policy the politicians should implement.

As the majority, we have all the power, in theory. But until we have solidarity amongst the working class, we will not be able to yield that power effectively.

ubermeisters ,
@ubermeisters@lemmy.world avatar

And yo avoid that unification, they have made all popular social media platforms kill themselves recently.

I’ll wear this tin hat as long as I like; the 1% are actively waging war against out ability to coordinate, and I haven’t seen ANYONE talking about it. It’s no coincidence that reddit and Twitter both self destruction IMHO. I think it’s especially evident with Elon’s handing of Twitter.

alvvayson ,

You’re not paranoid if they really are after you.

This is why the Fediverse is so important.

If we want to be free people, we must own our own free communication technologies

ubermeisters ,
@ubermeisters@lemmy.world avatar

Let’s be real, they are already here. The first whispers on the wind of a new gather place and they can just toss some money at 100 shleps to create and mod the right communitities. They need to be more lenient at first, like they were with reddit, but you’ll see things like for example: mods of one large community, suddenly “helping out” with another spicy community, and things like the recent legalese fuckery in the change of service terms.

alvvayson ,

That was only possible in reddit because the admins have all the power.

In the Fediverse, they might take over the most popular instances, but a new instance can pop up anywhere.

Decentralization is extremely powerful. Just look at the resilience of piracy, darknets and crypto. They can’t be controlled and neither can the Fediverse.

EarthShipTechIntern ,

Preach!

Still new to the Fediverse, always held to the notion that global decentralized communication is the way forward for humankind to develop & improve.

Thanks

ubermeisters ,
@ubermeisters@lemmy.world avatar

New instance popping up doesn’t mean people will use that over the larger instance. Also it’s super obnoxious dealing woth everyone wanting to be the power mod of thier own little community. Mod abuse here is 500x worse than Reddit ever was. At least reddit mods couldn’t creep on users via instance metrics.

qaz ,

Don’t you think this is a little but unrealistic? Do you really think some corporate elite is going to risk exposing their secret agenda by bribing mods to sabotage some irrelevant niche social media platform?

ubermeisters , (edited )
@ubermeisters@lemmy.world avatar

… yes

-Winces eyes at you suspectly-

Changetheview ,

The wealthy aren’t paying their fair share and that is something that needs to be corrected. The arguments in favor of progressive tax systems are countless.

It’s important to note that taxing wealth isn’t the same as taxing income. But you can do both and the US has a very well established system for doing so: income when earned and wealth when transferred to the next generation. Unfortunately, both of these systems have been gutted.

I’d love to see these both get their teeth back. Pretty simple really: (1) make progressive income tax rates apply to all income sources and decrease income exclusions/deductions and (2) lower the wealth tax exemptions and clamp down on tactics used to skirt around the exclusion amount (primarily family partnerships). This is basically just returning to policies the US had from about 1950 to 1970, which also was a time of exceptional middle class growth. It’s really not breaking new ground and it’s a proven, sound way to generate widespread economic success while also battling greed and inequality.

We could go a step beyond and do a value-added tax system too, which effectively taxes consumption, but that’s another topic entirely.

BraveSirZaphod ,
@BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social avatar

There is a very real logistical problem with directly taxing net worth. It's extremely difficult to actually assess, especially when you're targeting people with extremely expensive lawyers. They also very directly encourage wealth flight, which has happened in other countries that have tried them. They can also be avoided by accounting trickery, shell companies, and all kinds of bullshit. It's not me that owns $1 billion in Amazon stock, it's a shell company in the Cayman Islands that happened to buy a yacht. Sure, you can unwind all that, but enforcement takes a lot of time and resources.

There are other much more efficient tax schemes out there focusing on consumption that can't be easily escaped.

lolcatnip ,

Bribes should be taxed at least 15%!

(The actual point being that billionaires don’t necessarily spend their money on things normal people would consider consumption.)

ericisshort ,

This would be bad because it would make people not want to be billionaires

-billionaires probably

EatYouWell ,

It’s bad because the only way this could work is by taxing unrealized capital gains on all investments, which will hurt non-rich people that invest.

I wouldn’t trust any government to not fuck with things retirement investment vehicles or property value increases if they started down this path, or to not put in a thousand loopholes that make it so the bottom 99% are the only ones paying it.

Remember, billionaires don’t have their money sitting in a bank. The vast majority of it is in non-liquid assets.

Vlyn ,

That’s really easy to avoid. Make the tax start at 100 million or something and you won’t hit a single middle to upper class home owner.

BraveSirZaphod ,
@BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social avatar

You'll suddenly find a lot of people with 99 million in assets and a cousin in the Cayman Islands that owns a few yachts and jets.

ericisshort ,

When they pass all those millions to a cousin, they can be taxed.

hglman ,

Yes, the system designed by billionaires makes it seem wrong to address the systemic corruption of their system.

Liberating nonliquid assets from billionaires to workers is the whole point.

lolcatnip ,

Translation: I don’t trust governments to do anything at all, because I might not like some of the things they do.

EatYouWell ,

So, you trust the governments that created the loopholes that allow the ultra wealthy to avoid taxes to not put in loopholes that allow the ultra wealthy to avoid taxes?

lolcatnip ,

So you believe any kind of positive change is possible or are you just fatalistic about everything?

Governments can do good things when they try. They don’t always succeed, but they definitely won’t accomplish anything if all they do is maintain the status quo.

EatYouWell ,

With the current state of the world, I don’t believe a change like you’re suggesting is possible without large scale violence from the people (I’m not advocating large scale violence from the people)

I think positive change is possible, just not if it impacts the ruling class’s hoarded wealth.

Illuminostro ,

Then tax stocks. 1% per stock.

autotldr Bot ,

This is the best summary I could come up with:

If levied, the sum would be equivalent to only 2% of the nearly $13 trillion in wealth owned by the 2,700 billionaires globally, the research group hosted at the Paris School of Economics said.

“In our view, this is difficult to justify because it risks to undermine the sustainability of tax systems and the social acceptability of taxation,” the observatory’s director Gabriel Zucman told journalists.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s 2024 budget included plans for a 25% minimum tax on the wealthiest 0.01%, but that proposal has since fallen by the wayside with lawmakers in Washington preoccupied with government shutdown threats and looming funding deadlines.

Though a coordinated international push to tax billionaires could take years, the Observatory pointed to the example of governments’ success in all but ending bank secrecy and reducing opportunities for multinationals to shift profits to low-tax countries.

The 2018 launch of automatic sharing of account information has reduced the amount of wealth held in offshore tax havens by a factor of three, the observatory estimated.

For example the rich increasingly park wealth in real estate instead of offshore accounts while companies can exploit loopholes in the 15% corporate tax minimum.

The original article contains 491 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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