The Tax Justice Network said trillions could be raised with a ‘featherlight’ tax on the 0.5% of richest households, copying a current Spanish tax
The Tax Justice Network said trillions could be raised with a ‘featherlight’ tax on the 0.5% of richest households, copying a current Spanish tax
Governments around the world copying Spain’s wealth tax on the super-rich could raise more than $2tn (£1.5tn), according to campaigners calling for the money to help finance the climate transition.
As a growing numbers of countries consider raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy, the Tax Justice Network campaign group said in a report that evidence from a “featherlight” tax on the 0.5% richest households in Spain could help raise trillions of dollars globally each year.
The Spanish government, under the socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, introduced a temporary “solidarity” wealth tax in late 2022, which is collected in 2023 and 2024, on the net wealth of individuals exceeding €3m (£2.6m). It is estimated to apply to the richest 0.5% of households.
Because this is a tax on assets and not income it seems to me that there could be some unfair situations, for example you inherit a property that is not so easy to sell and are now taxed on it, or you have shares/stocks in your startup company and are now taxed on it even though you haven’t sold them (and quite possibly can’t sell them).
I believe it would be better to tax income while closing some of the loopholes like allowing borrowing money against stocks and properties.
the rich are ruining every country, every economy except for their own, and the environment. let's make the rich extinct before they make all of us extinct.
It would be a good start but then new rich would emerge to take their place. Maybe we should just put "re-enact French revolution" on a 100 year calendar reminder.
I also read they started doing this in some American state and it raised 1.8 billion dollars.
If this idea appeals to you, try to find out if there are any petitions in your country that suggest something like this.
If you're from the Netherlands, the SP has a petition like this.
The rich are going to get to the "find out" stage one way or the other. Do I generally like a wealth tax? No. Do I think it's needed now because Republicans fucked up our country with repeated tax cuts for the rich over 60 years that we would never otherwise recover from? Yes.
Why, just tax based on value at a given date. In the Netherlands they tax bank value based on december 31st amounts over a specific value. And your house. They can also do that with portfolios of shares, bonds and other things people can use as collateral.
If you can borrow against a portfolio of shares, we can tax it too.
Here is an idea, how about the US uses its military to enforce a minimum wealth tax worldwide to end tax competition, instead of to enable its proxies to commit war crimes.
I’m not in favor of gunboat diplomacy, but if the US is doing it anyway (to enable genocide) I would rather have them do something useful with it.
And using a military to enforce policy does not equal conquering the world, it’s at the end of the escalation ladder, diplomatic pressure then sanctions, embargoes, support regime change, militarily blockades, limiting military operations, and finally full on invasion. These are all things the US is already doing but then for nefarious reasons.
Of the counter-productive effects? I have a bunch of shares in a private company that I was given for good performance and retention. At the latest share price from the latest funding round they’re worth more than enough to put me in the 0.5%. However, they’re not liquid - I can’t sell them unless the company floats or is bought. Under a simple wealth tax I’d have to pay many thousands of pounds of tax on them every year despite them having no realisable value. Just because something is an asset with a nominal value doesn’t mean it’s liquid or generating income. Obviously when (if) I sell the shares I’ll pay capital gains, or if they generate a dividend, income tax.
Dave Van Zandt's site, Media Bias Fact Check puts The Guardian and Breitbart in the same (Factual Reporting: MIXED) category of credibility. Apparently this is because they both have articles where the facts are contested. This ignores the difference in size of the two news sources' publication rate, the number of articles contested, and the seriousness and type of errors. Van Zandt is not a social scientist, and should not be running a credibility gatekeeper when he doesn't understand statistics, science, or bias.
MBFC uses a fundamentally flawed methodology for categorizing bias. Lemmy.World loses credibility every day this bot continues to operate.
Thank you for this public service. This bot is a fucking joke. We use The Guardian all the time as a reliable source on Wikipedia, and rightfully so. Breitbart, on the other hand, is so comically unreliable that it was deprecated (the same exact measure as the Daily Mail), and then on top of that it was added to the spam blacklist due to "persistent abuse".
It's also worth pointing out that from memory more than half the Guardian articles cited by MBFC as having failed fact checks were corrected or removed.
Also there is currently a pinned feedback thread on the news community asking for feedback on the bot so please post your thoughts in there if you haven't already.