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

Did you read the article I suggested earlier? The one by amnesty international about the abuse domestic workers face?

If not, I suggest you do. If you did, and still want to move there, then that speaks volumes about you

It really is all relative!
The Indian workers in Dubai are of course “exploited” by Western standards. But the reason they go there is because the pay is better than in India. They save ferociously and send money home, even if it is terrible conditions. That is the reality for much of the developing world.
Historically, we can only offer our own poor free services because we colonialised and exploited much of the rest of the world.
Anyone here sitting on their high horse - be grateful you live somewhere privileged by luck of birth. The poorest here is nothing on people in the developing world.
Now I agree we should work towards equity.
However, right now the world is not a safe place. The Left are in complete denial of what some of the dodgy world wide dictators are up to. Shafting a few generationall wealthy here and making us all poorer - it is unsafe. The effort has to be to work with other European countries who value equity and equality towards world wide taxes. Not go it on our own. We need to get back into a closer relationship with the economies that share our values. That is the most urgent and important question of our time.

It doesn’t work like that. Any government that has made land grabs has never resulted in a more prosperous life for poorer people. You incentivise people to invest. Penalise them they’ll just hold on to their money or they move. If they earn 20 mil off their assets to go that money isn’t going to be invested here but to the place they’ve moved to. There is no shortage of land in this country there shouldn’t be a housing crisis. It’s not because rich people own all available land

But people need to be able to invest in things - we need people to hold shares to fund companies. We need there to be landlords. We need people to be able to invest without fear that they need to be able to have cash available in the immediate future.

I don't see how any of that makes you any more entitled to their money than somebody on minimum wage is to yours.

I worked 13 hours today in a dangerous job operating heavy plant like 40 ton volumetric mixers where a momentary mistake could easily cost a life. I don't think I'm owed anything by people I don't know whose wealth I didn't help them accumulate.

We do. And there's such a thing as good investment. But excessive speculation in land for example isn't a good thing. It just misdirects money away from business and innovation etc. it also makes it more expensive to create new businesses or expand (because building a factory, opening a shop costs more) and makes government attempts to increase productivity (building infrastructure) more expensive.
A 2 % tax on wealth isn't taking all of someone's profits away. It does help to partially close some loopholes that otherwise allow people to avoid paying other forms of tax (income and capital gains) and discourages people from sitting on empty assets (eg building an office block but not leasing any of the spaces for seven years because you want to lease it as a whole, owning a super expensive apartment in London but letting them sit empty because you don't need the rent, you can rely on prices increasing to make loads). People can still do that, it's just it will cost them a little bit of money to do so because you are getting taxed, whether those assets are actively working or not.

It's not a land grab. It's a 2% tax in wealth not the government booting people of their land. The fact is that, as you said, divesting oneself of those assets is an option if people really don't want to pay the 2% but that if people did do that (I am not convinced) it wouldn't be a bad thing

Milton Friedman agreed with taxing land by the way. It's not a crazy hard left idea.

Why did you put exploited in quotation marks? Is this an attempt to suggest they aren't? Or that the exploitation isn't that bad?

Try reading this

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/07/global-filipino-domestic-workers-exploited-in-saudi-arabia/

Or watching this

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/MDE23/1197/2026/en/

The kafala system enables the abuse.

God I’m so fed up of this argument.
if you over tax the rich and over tax business then they leave the uk. They take their business out of the UK. And then they don’t pay for services and products within the uk and those providers suffer. And they no longer employ people within the uk and those people lose their jobs.

you lot are as short sighted as the Labour Party.

Those assets will be bought by others. At the moment the resources are being hoovered up by the most wealthy. We need redistribution.

So the tax system you support is one which places the highest burden on people who earn well but who lack the resources to escape from the UK?

For people whose wealth exceeds that point, the gover Has to offer them tax breaks to make sure they pay proportionally less than those high earners who can’t afford to escape?

So on a graph, the tax rate goes up and up until you get rich enough, and then it should rapidly drop for the people at the top because they can’t be expected to pay tax like ordinary people.

It’s a bold choice to put it so bluntly, but I guess as long as everyone understands it there can certainly be no complaints about increasing inequality, and the move towards a society made up of the mass of working poor and then a tiny elite of the super wealthy.

It’s not a bug, it’s a baked in feature.

I don’t know how you inferred that conclusion from my comment. Just because I say overtaxing the rich has consequences does not mean that the middle classes (also, the cash cow of Britain) should continue to be squeezed.

I haven't read the whole thread, but you're wrong - most super rich people are not paying the same % of tax as we are, because most of their wealth isn't taxed as income - it's taxed as eg dividends, investments or capital gains, and deliberately so, so they effectively pay much lower rates of tax - like 21% . If nothing else, they should at least be taxed on all their wealth at the same rate as higher rate tax payers.

It's not perfect but I'd still move to the region. DH has to often to go Saudi for work. If I could even visit Riyadh for holiday I would.

If investment driven income is taxed less then PAYE. Let's lower PAYE as well

It's not perfect? That's quite the understatement.

Why not just admit that you don't care about the abuse as long as you have your fun.

Every country has it's issues. It's unfortunate, it's sad and I hope the governments tackle it. And I hope things get better in the future.

But yes I'd still move to the region if I could.

Did you read any of the links? Did it not make you think hang on, I don't want to be party to this abuse? Or are you just going to ignore it and pretend it's not happening?

It's sort of irrelevant whether or not it's moral to visit/move to Dubai or the other gulf states. The point is that the Kaffala system and very low paid/low rights labour is part of how they are able to structure their economy so that tax etc is very low. Effectively no one (even the rich Westerners moving there) has rights or democracy but tax is incredibly low. (It is also pretty terrible for the "locals" who arent part of the ruling families. That works for some people so yay them, but I can't see how you could implement it in the UK or Europe. Unless we decimated the working class and middle class here and got rid of democracy, workers rights, migrants rights, created a pseudo-slave underclass etc we will never be able to compete with Dubai for tax. So the "it works for Dubai" people are either not thinking it through or they are thinking it through and not being honest about what they want for the UK. I 100% think this is the case for the Tices and Oakshots of this world who occasionally say the UK should be more like Dubai.

Business does tend to be country specific. So how does one take a business and plonk it in another country with lower tax ?

Quote : "Where has that ever worked? "

Well, there is the thing where the countries that consistently top the various "best country to live" tables are the Nordic Countries. They also happen to be high tax countries.

So it does work in other places.

A lot of businesses are international (think about all the companies that sell in multiple countries or that you recognise when you go abroad).
They open an office/factory/r&d centre in another country and employ people there and move people over.
it can also be that they don’t necessarily start from stretch in another country but increase numbers in an existing location there whilst reducing it in the uk. When hiring someone for a global position deciding to hire and base the job out of uk when previously it was in the uk.

I know how offshoring works. I was very much involved in it.

It was done for cheaper labour tho. Not because of a proposed weath tax on the super rich.

That’s clearly not the case otherwise ROI wouldn’t have attracted so many companies with lower CT.

Did the multinationals set up in Iraland because of wealth tax on the super rich ? That is the subject of the thread.