cross-posted from: https://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.
-billionaires probably
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.
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.
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.
When they pass all those millions to a cousin, they can be taxed.
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.
Translation: I don’t trust governments to do anything at all, because I might not like some of the things they do.
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?
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.
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.
Then tax stocks. 1% per stock.