freediver wrote on Jan 23
rd, 2022 at 1:26pm:
Exactly what I suggested would happen:
https://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/education/2021/02/11/lessons-from-history-france-s-wealth-tax-did-more-harm-than-good/
While most decent people would support policies to address rising inequality and support those worst hit by the pandemic, history suggests introducing a wealth tax is unlikely to be the best way to do it. As Mr Healey concluded, there is a little evidence that, all things considered, it can be sufficiently lucrative.
Back in 1990, around a dozen European countries had a wealth tax, but most have been abolished
In 1982, Francois Mitterand, the first left-wing president of France’s Fifth Republic, introduced a wealth tax that was swiftly abolished by Jacques Chirac in 1986, but reinstated two years later when Mr Mitterand was voted back in. The tax – called the ISF (impôt sur la fortune) – stayed in place until 2017 when it was abolished by current president Emmanuel Macron.
The rate was charged on individuals with a net worth over €1.3m (£1.14m), with the rate ranging from 0.5 per cent to 1.5 per cent (on assets over €10m). While it might have helped social solidarity in France, the revenue it raised was paltry. In 2015, a total of 343,000 households paid €5.22bn, an average of about €15,200 per household, according to the Financial Times. It accounted for less than 2 per cent of France’s tax receipts.
What’s more, it led to an exodus of France’s richest. More than 12,000 millionaires left France in 2016, according to research group New World Wealth. In total, they say the country experienced a net outflow of more than 60,000 millionaires between 2000 and 2016. When these people left, France lost not only the revenue generated from the wealth tax, but all the others too, including income tax and VAT.
French economist Eric Pichet estimated that the ISF ended up costing France almost twice as much revenue as it generated. In a paper published in 2008, he concluded that the ISF caused an annual fiscal shortfall of €7bn and had probably reduced gross domestic product (GDP) growth by 0.2 per cent a year. What's more ISF fraud mainly involving an underassessment of property assets was estimated at around 28 per cent of total revenues.
Most wealth taxes have failed to bring in much revenue and ultimately proved politically unsustainable. Higher taxes and the flight of a cohort of France’s richest will have helped to reduce inequality, which is lower than in the UK, according to the Gini coefficient. But it is hard to see that it left the country better off.
Yet
simple confiscation of 99% of only the 10 wealthiest billionaires' pandemic-related gains would yield $5 trillion....and they would still be $8 billion better off than before the pandemic.
Global mobility of capital - and tax havens - are a problem.
Meanwhile, you claim Gittins doesn't know what he is talking about, and that governments must tax or borrow from greedy financiers, as if this is written down on a tablet from God.....all the time telling us why taxation (on the rich) is a bad thing.
You still haven't explained how everyone can participate in the economy at above-poverty level, given the massive mis-allocation of resources enabling the world's wealthiest 10 men to double their claims on the world's resources, even while asleep, at the same time as poverty is killing people at the rate of 1 every 4 seconds.
The guillotine is waiting.....
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