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.
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.
Translation: I don’t trust governments to do anything at all, because I might not like some of the things they do.
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.
Then tax stocks. 1% per stock.