To think the world should have a 100% tax rate

Can I suggest your Danish friend (Do you mention that because of my article) is just one person and to extrapolate from that is a bit pointless, I have Danish family but we aren't looking at their circumstances. Considering GDP per capita is higher than the UK, I'm not really sure why we would think we know more about how to create opportunities.

I'm waiting in for an engineer to investigate a dramatic shift in my house's climate right now, so I'm going down rabbit holes.

Turns out climate was a contributory factor to the fall of the Roman Empire- there was something called the Late Antiquity Little Ice Age due to a period of intense volcanic activity in the 6th century AD, leading to widespread food shortages.

Oh, and also pandemics, caused by then novel viruses. And the wealth inequality we were talking about.

Which rings an uncomfortable amount of bells, doesn't it 😬

Is there any evidence to suggest that billionaires are paying 45% tax globally?

I think it's pretty clear that form of trickle down economics is widening inequality at this point, not lessening it.

In theory, yes, it's a good idea. No one needs more than, say, 100 million, but it would need worldwide cooperation, which will never happen.

We're more likely to end up with something like this, unfortunately

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2023/12/04/from-praxis-to-prospera-silicon-valley-is-longing-to-break-free-from-countries-worldwide_6309767_13.html

@ ForWittyTealOP -
It’s hard to work out how much money billionaires have, because a lot of their wealth is derived from asset appreciation. If I bought, say, a Picasso in 2000, then by now it would have appreciated by a huge amount - but it would be very hard to tax someone on that until the asset is disposed of, at which point it would attract capital gains tax. If you stop people from making enormous amounts of money, who exactly does it benefit? Suppose the world did decide that no-one could own more than a billion pounds - how is that to be calculated? In assets, which are very subjective in terms of calculating value? In terms of sheer monetary profit? Would it actually benefit any tax jurisdiction if, say, Amazon were broken up into a number of smaller companies? Some people are purely motivated by making money, amd stopping them is putting a brake on enterprise. You’re talking a global total of less than 3,500 people, and these are the people that any country should want to hang on to, because they will necessarily be generating employment and spending money. There will always be countries that regard allowing people to accumulate enormous wealth and taxing them on it to be more advantageous than joining in with some global clamp down.

Companies that have someone taking in billions while employing thousands of people on minimum wage?
Good, we should deincentivise that crap.

Not really.

These threads always fume about the mega-rich but never consider how they got mega-rich.
They get rich because YOU buy their products. YOU give them your money! Either stop buying or stop moaning.

It's a bit disturbing the amount of people on here who are basically saying "Oh billionaires are too powerful, we can't touch them, why bother".

Are they acknowledging that we already have a class of people in our society who are above the law and able to do whatever they want, and what ramifications does this have for the rest of us?

Is there evidence to suggest that billionaires pay 45% tax, globally?

OP, you’re talking billionaires. If the world were to collude in imposing such a tax (it’ll never happen) but if it were managed, they would simply set up on a space station or some such. Most countries would prefer to keep these people on side, as 45% tax on a huge amount of profit yields quite a lot, whereas 100% of nothing is still nothing.

What on earth are you talking about? Are you posting on the right thread?

Yeah maybe you lose the argument but I've often explained why the Laffer curve isn't the killer argument many on here think it is and I'm tired of repeating myself now. As I say, a little bit of research would go a long way instead of people just repeating "...but the Laffer curve."

Although as a pp says, you can use the Romans as a good example of how civilisations collapse, you also need to bear in mind that we are in a significantly different position (there's a strong argument that we're now in the anthropocene) and face different risks. The Romans were not facing environmental collapse.

It's interesting that so many people who would fare much better in a more equal world, who are not well-served by the existence of billionaires in any way and who should be well able to assess the catastrophe of global inequality (since we see its effects with our own eyes every time we watch the news, read a paper or even look out of the window) argue so vehemently for their continued right to hoard resources and to cause damage.

In practice this is not possible.

in the past when it has been tried in individual countries (eg in the 1970s there was a U.K. top tax rate of 98) people leave the country.

lots of people leave the country.

you could consider that communist countries had nearly 100% take take in the sense that no matter what work you did you still got basic food and shelter provided.

most communist countries have had to build walls either literally (Berlin wall) or in terms of barbed wire and sentries with machine guns to stop people leaving, it was hated so much.

so if only one country does it, loads and loads of people will leave.

you’d have to have it the same across the world so that there was nowhere to go to.

then, if that happened, you would face a different problem.

I have a danish friend, the taxes are high in Denmark. He says that everyone pretty much chooses a job they like doing because it’s not worth doing a job you don’t - you’ll never get enough money to compensate for it.

communist countries have similar vibes - if you get basic food and accommodation no matter what you do why bother working hard? Why bother inventing new things?

sure, there will always be some people who are driven enough and interested enough to invent things and work hard despite being paid peanuts (born academics basically) but most people won’t.

that’s a big reason why communist countries fall so far behind capitalist countries. There’s no incentive to invent, no incentive to improve things, very few people working on the frontiers of knowledge.

it’s not a coincidence that most inventions in technological progress in the last 100 years or so have come from capitalist economies.

Hate posts like this. It’s obvious out of envy. I bet you say ‘eat the rich’ as well OP. Very childish

I agree that the whole concept of billionaires is obscene - the concentration of wealth and the inequity is mind-blowing. It is not millionaires and they are not on the laffer curve.

They are almost impossible to tax - Elon musk famously pays himself no income but instead gets banks to lend him billions against his company stocks to finance his lifestyle. So he and presumably most other billionaires would rather pay interest to financial institutions and opt out of society with the rest of us than contribute to the world their employees live in.

That's no reason it shouldn't be discussed.

I think the argument that we couldn't possibly even consider taxing the global super rich a bit of a cop out tbh. Once upon a time nobody could have imagined the existence of the UN, NATO or the EU. If an international defence organisation can exist, I see no reason why an international wealth taxation one couldn't.

One thing Britain as a country could do with doing though is looking at all our offshore tax havens, of which we have a disproportionate amount.

Can you articulate your argument? It doesn't make sense as it stands.

But there isn't a Worldwide tax nor is it remotely likely to ever exist so her whole argument is fatuous.

I agree that the principles that apply to people earning £100k don’t necessarily apply to billionaires.

Though regardless of the relevance of the Laffer curve I think it’s common sense that billionaires are going to give away assets rather than pay them to the state in tax. So this isn’t a tax raising policy but one that limits the wealth any one person can accumulate and effectively requires more diverse ownership of assets.

But a billionaire like J.K Rowling will hold the majority of her wealth in IP. She did earn that from writing novels. Are we saying it’s immoral for her to retain the IP in an asset she created and that she should be required to sell part of it to pay tax such that a pension fund or similar owns part of her work?

I would say most billionaires have created their wealth through selling a product which is in very high demand. This requires hard work but that isn’t sufficient. If you cap them at making a billion, they may stop developing their product at that point. And that could have meant we don’t have Microsoft, apple, Amazon, Tesla etc in their current state but a far less developed one (though some people may think that’s a good thing).

Well, the OP was musing on the concept of a worldwide tax, so unless Elon Musk does in fact move to Mars...

So you think billionaires have no moral compasses and as such, we should behave the same and take all their money. Right o.

How would it be "moral" to take 100% tax to give it to some people who can work but don't want to?

I don't believe that every benefit claimant is genuine - far from it. What about tackling that lack of morals?

As for your arrogance in dismissing the Laffer Curve I KNOW it's true from my personal experience in 33 years working in HMRC.
There is a "Goldilocks" zone where the level of tax brings in the most Revenue. Go above it and the wealthy leave the country, and your Revenue plummets.

Google taxation under Labour in the early '70's when the highest tax rate was 98%.

And this supposed to be evidence people are falling over themselves to pay tax rather than leave high tax countries? Ok then.