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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

Not really.

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

@ 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.

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

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

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

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 😬

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.

Yes it does! Actually it's quite uncanny, the parallels that can be drawn. Still, we never learn.

Where did I state that Billionaires have no moral compass, good hyperbolic spin there. If a Billionaire has a moral compass surely they would question whether they need all that money and even power over society. Personally, if I was a billionaire I wouldn't wantbto ensure democratic principles are maintained and you can't do that with only a few holding all the cards. Do you get it?

Yet when we in the UK taxed certain streams of income at 90% plus, we were better off in many ways.
We built council housing, had an excellent armed forces, an NHS that was world leading, a huge manufacturing base (ICI, Plessey GEC, Racal world leading comms and chemical industries, among many others) built Concorde (with the French of course) weekly bin collections, built a m/way network, roads you could drive on without smashing up your car...

Sure its very hard to make direct comparisons but it cannot be argued that huge numbers of millionaires/billionaires has benefited wider society.

& whats with the huge salaries we give CEO's of a Schools Academy, a council, an NHS trust.... Snouts in trough, springs to mind.

What has happened to all the money we have in the UK ?? all that furlough? Covid & energy support? its all gone to corporations, banks, energy suppliers.

"For those wondering, I will pay over $11bn in taxes this year," : Elon Musk.

That's an excellent point and I think it's often overlooked in the rush to portray the extremely wealthy as beneficial to society. Post war, up until the election of the Thatcherite govt, our society was perhaps the most equal it's ever been. That didn't happen by chance! The concentration of wealth is only ever going to benefit the few, and there's a ceiling to how much you can benefit from your wealth and assets. Conversely, the level of deprivation and suffering caused by inequality is limitless. So when people pluck the income tax levels of the 70s out of the air thinking it's a complete mic drop, they need to look at context. They also need to bear in mind that income tax dropped slowly during the Thatcher years, it didn't sink like a stone the moment that govt was elected. So what happened in the UK on terms of markets like public services, housing, transport, utilities and so on over that time? What happened to levels of inequality?

That was in 2021 in a specific and exceptional set of circumstances. Tell us how much he paid last year? *

• Clue: you can't, nobody can.

Was all that spending funded by the Revenue taken in high Taxation or by borrowing?

Wrong target. I don't give a toss about the CEOs earning Megabucks, they are a minority. I do care about the overinflated salaries of middle and upper management who basically contribute fuck all. They add up to far more than the person at the top.

Borrowing is not a dirty word. Government debt isn't something to be avoided at all costs. And sometimes policy is about more than what's strictly fair/effective. It's about setting up a framework for a particular type of socio-economic structure.

I would if it was a job I enjoyed. And if I was a billionaire I definitely wouldn't be wasting my time working in a job I didn't enjoy!

On the other hand, if I hated my job then very little would incentivise me to keep doing if I didn't have to.