To think the world should have a 100% tax rate

[notanothernamechange24]

On anyone with assets or income over 1 billion pounds. Nobody needs to hoard money / wealth to that degree. There is no justification for it.
The world would be a far better place without billionaires let alone trillionaires.

I know it will never happen. But it should. AIBU?

How could it be morally right to take all of the money which someone has earnt?

Start your own successful company maybe and then you can donate the profits to who you like.

And before you say "not everyone has the same opportunities". My husband grew up in an abusive household in a tiny council flat in an ex-mining village and is now one of the 1% top earners in the country. My upbringing was less abusive, but not much richer.

The problem is billionaires structure their income as wealth, not salary, so it is taxed less than someone earning way less. Our tax system is criminally inadequate and assets should be taxed too. The problem is the UK allows vast amounts of potentially taxable wealth to be hidden offshore or to be avoided. We need global tax reform.

I mean, is it about motivation to earn money at "billions' level?

The OP is discussing Billionaires though, to be in the top 1% of earners in the UK that's £201,000 before tax as much as this is beyond the dreams of many it is not billionaire status.

We should separate the two issues being debated here:

1. is it morally right that an individual can own wealth that is significantly beyond what a normal person can own, and;
2. as this situation exists today, what changes to the tax code / environment can we collectively (internationally) make such that this situation goes away.

To me, 2) has been answered. We can’t really do much about this situation by forcing people to pay more tax etc etc, as for lots of reasons (see above) it would just not work / have some big side effects. They could willingly donate their wealth to charity (or pay off some of the national debt, etc), but we would need common agreement on 1) to make that happen.

so let’s move to 1)?

On this - it’s clearly a complex issue. To me, I go back to my previous point. I would argue that it is morally ok for this, with the assumption that those people have built that wealth by building businesses (ie employing others) and thus generated wealth beyond just themselves, and paying lots of tax. If it’s inherited, then that assumption is not valid.

So my conclusion on 1) is, if it is earned, fine. If it is unearned, not fine.

Money gets spent as well as made so the incentive would be to maintain the billionaire status.

How old are you OP? Are you still at school or something. You seem to be incredibly naive.

By the way communism or whatever version of communism this is has never worked. Ever. Like Ever.

You seem like you haven’t really lived or built anything yourself.

OP can stop worrying about billionaires in this country. They are leaving anyway.

In other news government borrowing was 25% up year on year in April. The government borrowed £25b to pay for welfare and freebies for people with same mindset as OP who want free stuff at other people’s dime.

The billionaires must be laughing at this stupid country. And rightly so. You can hate them all you want. Until you want their businesses and jobs they create and the tax they pay. And yes 1% of a billion is still better than 0% of nothing. Not to mention the fact conic activity a billionnaire would create.

Well, how’s that working out?

We don’t have a World Government though. So people would just shift over to a different regime.
Bit like all the climate change stuff. No point in a few countries having policies when the greatest polluters don’t. Manufacturers just shift to the easier regime.

And money doesn’t work as simply as that. It’s not a pile of gold or bread that can just be shared and suddenly poor people can have the houses and food and infrastructure they want. Resources are finite even if money is just a concept allowing exchange. Changing economies doesn’t mean resources expand to suit.

Wes Streeting has suggested equalisation of CGT with IT and HMRC has an interesting chart which shows that if this happened, the Treasury would lose money. You have to account for human behaviour. Would OP be happy if her 100% tax rate reduced overall tax revenues?

It is highly unfortunate that media and successive governments have perpetuated this myth. There is no such thing as "non-dom" in UK tax, since April 2025.

I pull this one out quite a lot when people say ill-thought out things like the above quote (and the OP too!). It's from the West Wing, so v old now, but still relevant:

"Henry, last fall, every time your boss got on the stump and said, “It’s time for the rich to pay their fair share,” I hid under a couch and changed my name. I left Gage Whitney making $400,000 a year, which means I paid 27 times the national average in income tax. I paid my fair share, and the fair share of 26 other people. And I’m happy to, ’cause that’s the only way it’s gonna work. And it’s in my best interest that everybody be able to go to schools and drive on roads. But I don’t get 27 votes on Election Day. The fire department doesn’t come to my house 27 times faster and the water doesn’t come out of my faucet 27 times hotter. The top one percent of wage earners in this country pay for 22 percent of this country. Let’s not call them names while they’re doing it, is all I’m saying"

In the UK the top 1% of earners account for roughly 13% to 15% of all total taxable income in the UK, but they pay 28-30% of all tax, so pay twice their relative share - not just twice as much (they pay many, many more times) than the rest of the UK, but twice as much relative to their income.

Bashing the wealthy might be fun, and you may feel schadenfreude when they get taxed more, but if they leave in vast numbers, the UK is screwed. We are unable to fill the gap they would make without leaving many, many people seriously uncomfortable or worse. The Adam Smith Institute estimated that with a "medium number" of non-doms leaving the impact could be a cumulative loss of up to £32.4bn in lost growth by 2035 and the loss of 28,322 jobs by 2030. You can read the whole report here:
https://www.adamsmith.org/press-releases/abolition-of-non-dom-status-could-cost-up-to-111-billion-by-2035

It isn't communism though and to argue that it is, is quite simplistic. Even the millionaires are arguing the balance is wrong- Polling by Survation, commissioned by Patriotic Millionaires, has found that 77 per cent of millionaires from G20 countries think extremely wealthy people buy political influence, and nearly three quarters recognise that extreme wealth threatens our democracies.

Many have tried to discuss this on here OP and have similarly failed.

MN posters in general love billionaires and love the super wealthy and will never entertain the idea that they should have less or pay more.

Yeah millionaires in Iran and Indonesia maybe.

Isn't the OP discussing this at a global level. It's far from a joke.

EU and the UK could coordinate their fiscal policies to reduce competitive disparities. Obviously, you could move your family to a country that has hallowed out all societal infrastructure and allows you to keep 99.9% of your wealth but I suppose then you have to live in an environment that leaves most destitute.

https://www.businessinsider.com/danish-millionaire-why-wealth-taxes-good-for-everyone-2021-6

No, I don't think so...

I don't think anybody is arguing for Communism more a slight adjustment that was akin to the past when more balance existed. Perhaps Billionairea can have a little bit less so hardworking people can have a fair standard of living.

Most wealth at this level is in shares / options not cash. How would you manage this? Take shares away once the shareholding value goes above £1bn and give it back if the shareholding value drops?

Yep this. I do all I can to get my effective tax rate below the 40% threshold, to the point where when my salary reaches to the appropriate level, I'd rather work 4 days a week. Therefore, the more you tax higher earners, the more they will seek ways to avoid that tax, and the government ultimately ends up with less money overall.

Once someone mentions the Laffer curve on here they've lost the argument. They've obviously just done a quick Google of "why paying tax is bad" or similar; they haven't even bothered to ask AI to explain it to them very simply.

The point here is that billionaires should not and in fact cannot continue to exist if there's to be a viable future for our planet. Personally I don't believe there's much of a future for the human species anyway. Non human animals will be ok when we've gone, after a while. Billionaires are just a symptom of the demise of the human era and the effect of the anthropocene. But if we want to try and carry on for a bit, we have to tax billionaires out of existence. Not for the money but to end their harmful reign.

Op I agree with you.

How can it be that people are making arguments saying ‘oh, but this happens already for people earning 100,000’

you’re right - 100,000 is loads! But a billion a year is 10,000 times more! It’s an impossibly vast amount of money. Having that amount of wealth is astonishing. Having that income????

How would you physically do it though? Billionaires earn income from several countries (usually). How would you keep track of how much is earned or owned across all the countries? Which country would collect the tax?

Billionaires are mobile. If one country chooses to do this, they’ll move. I think Jersey have a thing where you can move there if you can show that you will have a noticeable impact on the island’s coffers.

I can’t work out why you think it’s morally right to take all the money off of someone over a certain level, money they created, giving jobs to many people, it’s grabby and spiteful, jealous sounding, but morally right to say you can’t have it share it out, no, not seeing it.

You could align your tax principles, harmonise fiscal policies to close loop holes as I stated in my previous post. Admittedly this is not going to be globally feasible but I wouldn't see how it isn't from Jersey ans Europe.

Trickledown economics just doesn’t do this though. I suggest you put this argument to the Amazon workers having to use food banks, and see if they feel grateful to have a billionaire boss