AIBU to think a 2% wealth tax on the rich is unfair?

[Mrspepperpotpot]

i just saw an article and petition from oxfam saying if we taxed the ‘super rich’ 2% it would solve a lot of problems. They were suggesting 2% on anyone worth 10 million. Everyone in the comments agreed

I just don’t understand this mentality. High earners are hit at every turn. They usually use private health and private schools, pay the most tax, get hit with tax on savings, IHT, land tax, pensions etc etc Why on earth should people earn money to be taxed on it, to then be taxed on it again and again.

Why do people begrudge others having money when they’ve worked extremely hard to get it? Why isn’t there uproar about benefits instead?

I know this will never actually happen but the amount of people who seem to want it to is astonishing

Who pays for the training ? Or how is it paid for ?

No of course big events have increased it, but the Labour MPs will always reach for the levers of higher tax and borrowing and after the pandemic it’s going to be problematic.

“Who pays for the training ? Or how is it paid for ?”

@RedTagAlan - you give them no choice and they pay themselves via loans, just like students! To make it fair.

Also benefits, care blah blah blah - of course there should be a safety net to support people temporarily. But once you are back on your feet or dead etc, pay it back. That would be fairest for all.

Yes he’s good on why proposals are problematic. I’m not sure there should be more tax but if it’s the one you say it’ll likely enough people to see Labour out.

And then we get threads about folk not paying back training loans. And how it's the middle class being hammered by tax to pay for the people not paying their loans. And so it will go on.

My reply is hidden which quotes a good summary by Dan Neidle from the article “has Britain run out of other people to tax”. Go read the conclusion - scathing on both the Left and Right politically speaking.

@RedTagAlan - the NEET crisis is real and urgent. It has to be addressed straight away.
Also tax evasion or underpayment is still massive in this country.

The wishful thinking of taxing the rich to keep the public happy is not going to work. Not enough of them to make a dent. It is another form of magic money tree and the feeding of the 5000.

I think you should then be asking why the Tories never got control of the fiscal situation between 2010 and 2019 and the debt spiralled. They tried to reduce spend and kept tax generous for the wealthiest but it didn’t stimulate any form of growth to improve public finances

I think you should be asking what Labour will do now they’ve run out of road with tax hikes and borrowing.

If you said his conclusion that we have run out of other people to tax to Labour MPs and that borrowing was at the limit how many would say no way let’s keep going, maybe all

People don't understand rich people can just leave. We already have a brain drain in the UK. We need to do something about the generational dependence on welfare and all the young NEETs

A) it's never going to happen
B) if you have a £10 million a year income, the interest alone would more than cover this 2 percent tax.

Of course rich people can leave. It is a benefit of being rich.

When you say brain drain, do you mean that the only smart people are also the rich people ? Because if are, this seems to be into trickle down economics ideology. And it has been shown many times that this does not work.

Society getting "better" for the masses does not depend on there being a few super rich people. We have done that for the past X thousands of years of history. Things never started getting better for the masses till the 20th century. And that coincidentally is when the masses got a voice through democracy ( in the Global West anyway). And that democracy brought in fairer taxation.

If we had kept with the "super rich is right" mentality, we would still be in Dickensian times.

Yes, how does one rich person's brain save us all!

Is it true though that very high net worth individuals pay more tax than the others? As a total perhaps, but are they paying the same percentage of tax as a typical earner in the UK? The answer is often no which is why these wealth taxes are often mooted. Different tax jurisdiction, but I think it was Warren Buffett who said he paid less tax as a proportion of his income than his cleaner. Which is unfair even if he paid vastly more tax overall because y’know billionaire.

You don't mean the wealthiest 10 percent of earners. You mean the top ten percent of earners. As in the people with the highest taxable income.

The suggested wealth tax has nothing to do with income or income tax. Very well of people don't need to be paying themselves a very high PAYE salary to benefit from their wealth. Therefore figures about who pays the most income tax is at best irrelevant and at worst an attempt to conflate two different things to mislead.

I think it was his secretary he was talking about.

But yes. What is also forgotten is that lower earners put near all their income back into the economy. Because they have to to live. The super rich squirrel it away.

That is not true. Wealthy people don’t sit on mounds of cash because the value of cash reduces over time. For many their wealth exists in the form of their own businesses that employ people, make things, grow food etc. The rest will mostly exists in the form of investments then enable other people to make things, provide services, grow food, have a mortgage to buy an house etc.

So? When you are super wealthy you can afford to take those financial risks.

Working 40 hours in a minimum wage job, living in poor housing, the stress of not having enough money, not being able to save for old age, not being able to access healthy lifestyle choice all come at HUGE risks to health.

Are they doing this for the sake of fellow humans, or are they doing it to accumulate more wealth ?

UC entitlement isn't a reliable metric for whether wages are adequate - that's a really odd assumption to make. Lots of people who are struggling aren't entitled to UC because of savings/partner's income/housing circumstances etc. Not qualifying for UC isn't equivalent to earning enough to live on, and nor is earning the so-called market rate.

And yes I'd be willing to pay more for goods and services if it meant more people could actually put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads - but your reasoning is flawed there too as higher wages don't automatically translate into equivalent price rises. Labour's only one component of the costs of running a business. I find it interesting, though, that you assume I'm calling for 'massively' increased salaries, if I didn't know better I could almost read that as an acknowledgement that many current wages fall far short of what is needed to live on... 🤔

And unless you yourself are working and still having to claim UC, yours isn't the lived experience I was suggesting you listen to.

Exactly, so many people don’t understand tax thresholds.

It's not surprising given how few people in the country pay tax.....