I hope this works. The only way to save the economy and the society is by taxing the rich.
Think about it for a minute. The rich people hoard all the resources, financial assets, means of production and in the competition for resources they will (and are doing so) displace everyone else in the economy (and really from society also).
This means that those who are displaced have no means to participate in the economy. And not only that but also they will be pushed to the fringes of the society and exists in slum conditions. This will stiff the economy and hollow it out.
Let's say for arguments sake that the government taxes X hundred of millions of $ from the bezos/musks/gates/etc. and put that into the economy by
- indirectly or directly hiring people
- building infrastructure
- providing services for the citizens (education, health care etc)
- providing benefits to those who need.
All that money will immediately go back into the economy stimulating all kinds of economic activity. And essentially two weeks later that same X hundred million is back in the bank account of bezos/musk/gates and it can be taxed again!
By letting the uber rich hoard the wealth that wealth is essentially away from the economy providing very little economic activity.
In economy this is known as the "high propensity to spend". The "poor" (i.e. working/middle class people) have high propensity to spend, the rich have low propensity to spend.
Tax the wealth, not the work!
This has been done before and it can be done again!
Really rich people don't have a lot of money, they have a lot of assets that are considered to be worth a lot of money, typically companies. Companies are work. If you make the big owners ask for higher dividends, you tax the work indirectly.
You could of course tax the non-work wealth. Most of that is home ownership, few home owners consider themselves rich.
I wish these kind of comments were backed by some numbers. European welfare states are paid for by taxes on the middle class. The wealthy already pay taxes disproportionately and taxing the wealth itself has an obvious problem, it's stock not flow, so given government spending it will last you a few years at best. Then what?
The way to fix the economy is to bring one metric back to what it was when the economy supposed ly worked in the past - per capital government spending
Spending money doesn't grow the economy; the economy grows by saving and investment. Punishing people who successfully save and invest by giving money to people who prefer to spend everything they earn leads to less savings and investment, and lower economic growth, as the poor economic conditions of Brazil and Spain demonstrate.
Rich people don't "hoard" the means of production, they create it. Confiscatory policies lead to less business creation; if Gates, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Page had not had the wealth to create the businesses that made them billionaires, those businesses wouldn't exist, the jobs and products they create wouldn't exist. Europe demonstrates this empirically with its complete lack of any big tech companies, a result of its hostile policies and cultural attitudes to entrepreneurship.
Investing in passive assets such as property that already exists does not create new economy.
"Rich people don't "hoard" the means of production, they create it."
Actually they do. Look at the GDP growth rates across western countries. 1-2%.
The wealthy people (since pandemic) have grown their wealth 10-20%. Where did that come from if the GDP didn't grow.
The only way they were able to do this was by literally hoarding wealth and by buying assets that already exist and by doing so displacing other people with less assets.
I think the GP comment has some issues, but this is not the right way to address them.
If someone owns all the houses but does not rent them out at a reasonable cost, so people have to sleep on the street while the house stays empty, then I will call that hoarding. You don't really address that core problem.
> if Gates, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Page had not had the wealth to create the businesses that made them billionaires, those businesses wouldn't exist
Bullshit. They would have all created those businesses as long as their personal financial situation improved through them.
Arguing that it takes 0.1% wealth payoffs to incentivize business creation is false.
Someone would do it for anything greater than average, if there were global minimums, and a tax structure that allowed corporations to retain capital was used.
It won't. Richest people in the world are exceedingly wealth, but they're not that wealthy. I'm not suggesting that they shouldn't be taxed, they should, and much harder than is currently the case. We should move to remove the loop holes used and abused to make people like Bezos appear poor, in the eyes of the tax authorities, but it won't move much in terms of monetary value, because they're not that wealthy.
Let's tax Zuckerberg half of his wealth, that's roughly 2% of the US budget. That's a lot, but you can only do that once, maybe twice. You can certainly tax the wealthiest enough to fund quite a bit and if you pick the right things you can do a lot of good. It's just not enough to reshape society, which seems to be what most think would happen.
What I see as the biggest issue is the amount of societal damage these people are willing to do to amass their fortunes. I don't even care that Bezos is worth $250 billon, if he didn't exploit workers and deliberately destroys other business to accumulate that wealth. Same with Zuckerberg, he can be as rich as he likes, but he can't build that wealth of spying on users and generally being a dick. Musk... He can build all the cars and rockets he like, but stop undermining democracy through financial means.
Taxing billionaires hard won't stop their bad behaviour.
If the US government is 30 trillion dollars in debt someone is 30 trillion dollars in credit.
The money doesn't disappear. Now the problem is (in the context of United States) that the number #1 and #2 creditors are People's Republic of China and Japan. So the US cannot tax those entities.
But they can tax domestic creditors and wealthy individuals.
"Let's tax Zuckerberg half of his wealth, that's roughly 2% of the US budget. That's a lot, but you can only do that once, maybe twice. You can certainly tax the wealthiest enough to fund quite a bit and if you pick the right things you can do a lot of good. It's just not enough to reshape society, which seems to be what most think would happen."
No, the point is that you can do it over and over again.
Once you put that money into the economy it will flow all around it and most of the money will end up in the same place again. I.e in the bank account of Zuckerberg and it can be taxed again.
In modern societies:
top 1% of earners pay roughly 30% of taxes
top 5% pay 65% of taxes
top 10% pay 80% of taxes
while bottom 50% usually barely make 2% of taxes.
Heavy redistribution of wealth is already in place and it's not making things better.
"Heavy redistribution of wealth is already in place and it's not making things better."
You're right, because the distribution is removing large groups of people from the economy.
Just for reference, this has been done before and it produced possibly one of the best economies (at the time) and it was very social democrat. This was the United States after the so called "New Deal".
And just to make it crystal clear, we're not talking about taxing working people. We're talking about taxing the obscenely wealthy people who just sit on massive amounts of wealth, whether it's stocks or property or yachts or mansions or gold and jewelry. You know the > 10-1000x millionairs
Sure, but how "heavy" is that redistribution though?
Top 1% paying 30% of taxes sounds like a really rough deal for them at first, but if those 1%ers already own over 30% of your country in the first place (which is the case in the US), then thats barely their "fair share", and you are not really achieveing any redistribution at all.
How can you be certain that the problem is "progressive taxation is not working" instead of "taxation does not help against wealth inequality because it is actually barely progressive"?
But the top 1% still pays proportionally less of their wealth in taxes than the bottom 50%. Yes, they may pay a large fraction of the total taxes, but with what they own they should pay even more.
I think another big problem is that this extremely uneven distribution of wealth is a basic democratic problem. The reason we have states is, among other things, to put the allocation of our finite resources under democratic control. If the majority of those resources are on private hands, then states get less control and our votes have less power.
A lot of people survive and tolerate a lifestyle that comes from these redistributions of things to people who no longer have direct access to means of survival like water and land. You really have to qualify what you mean in better.
Many rich people with heads should consider that the current situation is making things better than the next version of the French Revolution.
I think increased automation and now AI are making wealth inequality problems inherently worse.
The existence (and prevalence) of food delivery work alone is a depressing portent in my view: If delivering food for objectively shitty pay is still a viable option for a lot of people, that signals to me that human labor has become borderline worthless (even in a wealthy/developed environment).
That makes the "american dream" (=> start from nothing, do a good job, become wealthy) increasingly less realistic.
I'm also afraid that this (preventing wealth inequality from getting out-of-control) might be a "practically unsolvable" problem for democracies in general (just like managing housing and public pensions): It is too easy to "sabotage" democratic progress for the negatively affected minority (and that minority is exceedingly powerful/well-positioned, too).
Automation is great and has made things undeniably better. In the 1800s, 30% of the US GDP was tree cutting. https://x.com/AlecStapp/status/1939912893102760063 Before automation, nearly everyone was involved with agriculture. Today is much better.
I'm not saying that things are necessarily gonna get worse-- just that human work decreasing in relative value creates huge (new!) problems for our current wealth distribution mechanisms.
Maybe there is an easy way to have our cake and eat it, too (like consistent wealth taxation like the article suggests), but I'm doubtful.
In the past, basically every form of investment used to involve human labor to some degree-- meaning that every rich industrial magnate also automatically created opportunities for zero-net-worth workers/builders/employees.
But when your big investments just become server racks and industrial robots, then you no longer have this balancing mechanism, and you probably need to do something to prevent wealth concentration without bounds (and to guarantee opportunities for "worthless" individuals).
Anything that increases productivity per person creates a potential for increasing wealth inequality, because the more each person can create, the more can be taken away from them by someone else. Pre-agricultural societies generally tend to be very egalitarian with no clear economic elites, but you start to see the wealthy elite class manifest in those of them where even without agriculture per-person yield is so high (e.g. PNW Salish) that it's possible for a few people to live off the surplus generated by the rest. Agriculture gives a massive boost to yields, and all societies that went down that route quickly lost their original egalitarianism. AI is just another step down the same road.
But note that this is a potential, not an inevitable outcome. This outcome is more likely because there is a positive feedback loop at play here: if you can somehow force people who generate wealth with their labor to surrender part of that wealth to you, you can use those resources to improve your ability to forcibly exploit others (e.g. by hiring more armed goons in a primitive society, or by bribing politicians who pass laws that are ultimately enforced by "public servant" goons in a more advanced society like ours). Simply put, wealth can buy power, and the resulting increase in power disparity can be used to extract more wealth from the people producing it. Thus the natural trend of technological advancement is towards income inequality ... but a society can still go against the current, it just takes a lot more effort on behalf of the citizenry.
This is exactly what I mean-- I think also the whole housing affordability is just another side of this coin: Buying a home grew more expensive (in terms of median income) for decades, and that alone is a huge problem in my view, with no realistic solution that I can see (=> except demand implosion from a shrinking population, which would probably create twice the amount of problems that it solves...)
Considering how everything is rigged in favor for the rich I don't have high hopes for this. But it would be great if they really come up with a system that makes sense and offers equal tax regimes for everybody. Right now if I'm not mistaken in Spain the most taxed people (in terms of ratio) are those who earn < ~300K per year.
> Right now if I'm not mistaken in Spain the most taxed people (in terms of ratio) are those who earn < ~300K per year.
You are mistaken. Currently, the higher income you have here, the higher tax rate you have, where the highest tax rate on income sits at 47%, which you get hit by when your income is above 300K/year. People between 60K and 300K sits at 45%.
And then there are regional differences, someone in Andalucía don't pay the same amount of taxes as someone who lives in Catalunya for example, where the top tax rate is 50%.
Even taking into account other taxes we have, you still end up paying more in taxes the more you earn, unless you start engaging in schemes to lessen your tax burden, obviously. Although the social security is capped, so it does increase slower once you go beyond the cap, but it doesn't start regressing which your comment hinted at.
Edit: important to note that the tax rates are all marginal tax rates, maybe that was a bit unclear.
Germany technically has a wealth tax. However, it is supended since 1997, because the methods of how real estate wealth was calculated were outdated and thus considered unconsittutional.
Tax is not collected, but the supporting law has never been revoked.
Interestingly, the court order in question demanded that real estate should be taxed higher than the status quo - instead, the conservative government decided not to collect that tax at all any more.
Wikipedia claims that this decision was partly due to the max tax rate being at 53% at the time. Today, it has dropped to 42%, but for some strange reason, the wealth tax has never been reinstated.
I've replied to a comment with this but I'll leave it here.
Reducing inequality in Brazil (even a tiny amount) is a DEAD SIMPLE problem that is not in any way related to the government taking more money from people (rich or poor), but, rather, in taking LESS money:
> The collection of federal taxes on the reserve base, shows that of the amount collected by the IRS of Brazil, the majority of the taxes are based on consumption, with approximately 53% on average of the funds raised by Revenue Federal Brazil and continue accounting for more than half of tax (52%) charged by the agency. This tax structure is even more perverse when we add the taxes collected at the state and municipal levels, which bring in the largest source of revenue. The tax burden on consumption is regressive. In Brazil those who earn up to twice the minimum wage spend 26% of their income to pay indirect taxes, while the tax burden for families with income higher than 30 times the minimum wage amounts to only 7%. Excessive taxation on consumption depresses demand directly affecting the economy, reducing the consumption of the middle and lower income families.
We're talking about a country where minimum wage is 260ish dollars a month, and a macbook costs TWICE what it costs in the US, where people make much more. We're structured in a way where only rich people have access to anything. You can tax said rich people more, but they'll just keep being the ones that can afford anything at all.
Yeah Brazil's issue isn't that it isn't taxing its people enough. As usual these things always just go after the middle class and sort people into destitute vs rich buckets. IE they exacerbate inequality.
The super-rich don't stay rich by just sitting on their money, they invest it.
These countries should focus on encouraging investment there - by getting rid of bureaucracy and red tape, make it possible to hire across the whole EU a lot easier, without needing separate tax registration in every country, etc.
Lower the barriers to entry wherever possible - no long application processes for developments with endless consultations, no arbitrary minority language or qualification requirements, etc.
Income inequality is a good thing, but there needs to be equal access to education and opportunities and the lowest barriers to entry possible.
This is not so much about income inequality, but about making sure that the rich actually pay their taxes, or even more proportionally to their wealth when compared to lower income individuals.
Rich people will and should continue to exist. What they shouldn't be allowed to do is take advantage of loopholes and tax breaks just because they're wealthy. That alone should indirectly lead to lowering inequality, and, assuming we can trust that governments work efficiently and in equal interest of all their citizens (which is hardly a given), it should lead to a fair(er) distribution of wealth, instead of a growth of inequality.
In any case, it's easy to be cynical about this news, but it's a step in the right direction on paper. In stark contrast to what is happening in the US, for example.
>>This is not so much about income inequality, but about making sure that the rich actually pay their taxes, or even more proportionally to their wealth when compared to lower income individuals.
Sounds like you want to tax assets. Every country can start doing it right now with assets on their soil. No "global registry of wealthy people" is needed for that. Just look at the assets you control and tax them.
No complicated exemptions, or complicated progressive bands, just keep it simple and eliminate bureaucracy. Then people can manage their own pensions and insurance.
This could be accompanied by a Georgist Land Value Tax to encourage development and innovation too.
Is this not the same trickle down mantra that has been pushed across developed countries for decades and has only widened the gap between rich and poor? In the US, where this line was pursued since the 80s, real wages for most Americans have stagnated while the top 20% have seen their wealth increase astronomically. Merely improving the regulatory and investment climate for a country does not magically benefit most citizens in a society -- thoughtful taxation is one to correct that.
And that doesn’t account for demographic changes: Households are smaller on average than 40 years ago and there’s been a significant surge in the foreign-born population, mostly from much poorer origins.
Further, while the inflation calculation includes some hedonic adjustments, it’s really hard to capture the aggregate of the thousands of diffuse lifestyle benefits of living in 2025 v. 1985. Personally, I’d miss burritos.
The rich people are stiffling the economy and displacing a large swath of working people. This process will hollow out the economy and produce more poverty and more inequality.
For the wealthy people there are two ways to invest.
1. Invest in passive assets such as stock market, property, valuable items, gold etc.
2. Invest in new businesses.
What are they doing? Mostly 2. How do we know. Simple.. look at the real economies. The western economies are growing (barely) at around 1-2% per year. The wealthy (since pandemic) grow their wealth at 10-20% per year. Where is this growth coming from? Certainly not from new business development since the real economy is not growing. The only way it can come is by taking a bigger slice of the pie, i.e. displacing middle class by subsuming their wealth.
This is harmful to the economy and will lead to the collapse of the economy and the society.
You are right that the problem is a lack of economic growth - and that is what must be addressed, e.g. by removing bureaucracy and harmful regulations.
Robert Zubrin's The Case For Nukes is a great book on this.
>>The western economies are growing (barely) at around 1-2% per year. The wealthy (since pandemic) grow their wealth at 10-20% per year.
Imagine you are in Germany:
-you have a business that has modest profitability of 4% per year (profit/company value)
-your economy grows 1-2% per year
-your inflation is 2% per year
How much do you expect the company value to increase after a year? Right, it's 8 % - exactly how much DAX (German stock index) grew on average during last 10 years.
They invest and then they extract ridiculous rents from their investments - leading to widespread burnout, perfectly fine businesses being closed and employees being laid off because they don't give double-digit returns, empty shop spaces because it would diminish their value to lower the rent, excessive appartement rents, etc.
And an economy oriented only along the wishes of the super-rich.
Money is the way you "vote" into the economy, and the more money is in the hands of a few, the less the economy actually adresses the needs of the many.
The housing crisis isn't due to investment, but onerous government regulation that makes it near impossible to build - decades-long planning processes, dozens of consultations (local public, and NGOs, etc.)
That's exactly what I mean by removing bureaucratic processes to unlock investment.
But the "many" can learn useful skills and innovate to also make a lot of money. Everyone should be able to start a business easily - without excessive capital requirements or expensive notaries. STEM education should be free and widely available (or with very low interest loans if we let the loan interest be decided per subject, per student grades, etc.)
>> perfectly fine businesses being closed and employees being laid off because they don't give double-digit returns
Sounds like an opportunity to me.
>>empty shop spaces because it would diminish their value to lower the rent
Sounds like a problem land value tax solves - it should cost you to hold land ad if you can't pay you should give it up so others can make use of it.
>> excessive appartement rents
Sounds like land value tax + removing bureaucracy around building should solve that.
>>And an economy oriented only along the wishes of the super-rich.
I am not sure why you think anything in EU is along wishes of super-rich. It seems to me it's to the wishes of political cronies. I can guarantee you that "super-rich" would structure it differently.
>>Money is the way you "vote" into the economy, and the more money is in the hands of a few, the less the economy actually adresses the needs of the many.
And yet populist parties introducing anti-business policies win all the time.
It's true our parliamentary systems are terrible and undemocratic but it's not because super rich, at least not in EU.
We've seen effectively zero interest rates for longer than many can remember. If there's no investment it's not because of lack of capital but because of lack of optimism. When generationally rich do invest in something outside the safe game of landlordship (which is primarily defined by limited supply making chart lines point northeast just by merit of more capital joining the game) it's usually not because of n aeed or greed, but because they already have so much invested in the easy game that they feel a desire to risk some tiny fraction of it in something more exciting.
Actually, there are plans to tax international investments at 1% [1] (i.e., making more money with money). This will basically stop bets on currency or commodities on the stock exchanges. Besides that, inheritance and wealth tax are also interesting fields for a regulation.
Investment can be rentseeking.
I can invest in buying a house to rent out raising housing prices and preventing someone else from owning it for themselves.
I don't think some heavy handed communist system should try to abolish all inequality either.
But does that mean income inequality is good?
Maybe in moderation, but I feel it's pretty obviously harmful when taken to an extreme. Policies to reverse the trend of concentrating wealth and power are worth considering.
> The super-rich don't stay rich by just sitting on their money, they invest it.
Yes, mostly in the pockets of politicians who make sure to keep them super-rich.
This is why wealth inequality is a disaster: it allows the super-rich to control entire countries and keep themselves and their families rich and powerful.
Any kind of economic measure that still permits billionaires to exist is not going to address this simple fundamental problem. It's at best lipstick on the pig, not a long term solution to anything.
Politicians are cheap. You don't have to be super-rich to buy them.
Corrupt undemocratic parliamentary systems we have in EU are a huge problem but getting rid of super rich won't solve them.
A lot of EU countries have enormous tax breaks for the rich.
There is a consensus that non-dom status (basically rich foreigners, very broadly defined, pay hardly any tax) in the UK needs to go. The main point made by people opposing this is that they can easily move to a number European (mostly EU) countries that have similar schemes and still only be a short flight away from the UK.
I don't understand why politicians call for taxing assets but fail to tax assets they control in their own country. Why are super rich non-doms a problem in UK? Oh, they own a lot of land and real estate? You can tax it right there.
Or maybe I do understand - it has nothing to do with trying to fix the problem but is just a populist agenda that sounds good and helps with winning elections.
BRICS is just an acronym, it is void of any meaningful significance other than that.
Edit: "oh but it's an actual organization" yeah with still very little significance between pretending it's anything but a convenient proxy for the bigger members
> BRICS is just an acronym, it is void of any meaningful significance other than that.
I think your understanding of BRICS might be slightly outdated, did you read about the last time in the late 90s or something? It's beyond just an acronym today, with institutions actively involved, new initiatives and more.
It's an actual organization actually, founded in 2009. They hold meetings globally, the next one set to be held here in Brazil in 4 days. Since it's an organizational to align economic goals among other topics, it's not unthinkable to have these kinds of discussions about progressive taxing. We can question the real effectiveness of BRICS for actually taxing the rich more extensively, but it is surely much more than an acronym.
I don't think, just an acronym, but my impression is that the only thing BRICS or BRICS+ agree on and are actively co-operating to achieve is collectively getting off the dollar and ending the effects of the so-called exorbitant privilege on themselves.
Forcing rich people to invest in low return area might be better strategy. If they know how to make money productive, they can make that area grow faster so that gdp can grow faster.
This will ensure rich people money grows at higher rate only if gdp grows.
Asking government to manage money is very in efficient.
Readit News
Think about it for a minute. The rich people hoard all the resources, financial assets, means of production and in the competition for resources they will (and are doing so) displace everyone else in the economy (and really from society also).
This means that those who are displaced have no means to participate in the economy. And not only that but also they will be pushed to the fringes of the society and exists in slum conditions. This will stiff the economy and hollow it out.
Let's say for arguments sake that the government taxes X hundred of millions of $ from the bezos/musks/gates/etc. and put that into the economy by
All that money will immediately go back into the economy stimulating all kinds of economic activity. And essentially two weeks later that same X hundred million is back in the bank account of bezos/musk/gates and it can be taxed again!By letting the uber rich hoard the wealth that wealth is essentially away from the economy providing very little economic activity.
In economy this is known as the "high propensity to spend". The "poor" (i.e. working/middle class people) have high propensity to spend, the rich have low propensity to spend.
Tax the wealth, not the work!
This has been done before and it can be done again!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal
You could of course tax the non-work wealth. Most of that is home ownership, few home owners consider themselves rich.
Rich people don't "hoard" the means of production, they create it. Confiscatory policies lead to less business creation; if Gates, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Page had not had the wealth to create the businesses that made them billionaires, those businesses wouldn't exist, the jobs and products they create wouldn't exist. Europe demonstrates this empirically with its complete lack of any big tech companies, a result of its hostile policies and cultural attitudes to entrepreneurship.
"Rich people don't "hoard" the means of production, they create it."
Actually they do. Look at the GDP growth rates across western countries. 1-2%.
The wealthy people (since pandemic) have grown their wealth 10-20%. Where did that come from if the GDP didn't grow.
The only way they were able to do this was by literally hoarding wealth and by buying assets that already exist and by doing so displacing other people with less assets.
If someone owns all the houses but does not rent them out at a reasonable cost, so people have to sleep on the street while the house stays empty, then I will call that hoarding. You don't really address that core problem.
Bullshit. They would have all created those businesses as long as their personal financial situation improved through them.
Arguing that it takes 0.1% wealth payoffs to incentivize business creation is false.
Someone would do it for anything greater than average, if there were global minimums, and a tax structure that allowed corporations to retain capital was used.
It won't. Richest people in the world are exceedingly wealth, but they're not that wealthy. I'm not suggesting that they shouldn't be taxed, they should, and much harder than is currently the case. We should move to remove the loop holes used and abused to make people like Bezos appear poor, in the eyes of the tax authorities, but it won't move much in terms of monetary value, because they're not that wealthy.
Let's tax Zuckerberg half of his wealth, that's roughly 2% of the US budget. That's a lot, but you can only do that once, maybe twice. You can certainly tax the wealthiest enough to fund quite a bit and if you pick the right things you can do a lot of good. It's just not enough to reshape society, which seems to be what most think would happen.
What I see as the biggest issue is the amount of societal damage these people are willing to do to amass their fortunes. I don't even care that Bezos is worth $250 billon, if he didn't exploit workers and deliberately destroys other business to accumulate that wealth. Same with Zuckerberg, he can be as rich as he likes, but he can't build that wealth of spying on users and generally being a dick. Musk... He can build all the cars and rockets he like, but stop undermining democracy through financial means.
Taxing billionaires hard won't stop their bad behaviour.
The money doesn't disappear. Now the problem is (in the context of United States) that the number #1 and #2 creditors are People's Republic of China and Japan. So the US cannot tax those entities.
But they can tax domestic creditors and wealthy individuals.
"Let's tax Zuckerberg half of his wealth, that's roughly 2% of the US budget. That's a lot, but you can only do that once, maybe twice. You can certainly tax the wealthiest enough to fund quite a bit and if you pick the right things you can do a lot of good. It's just not enough to reshape society, which seems to be what most think would happen."
No, the point is that you can do it over and over again.
Once you put that money into the economy it will flow all around it and most of the money will end up in the same place again. I.e in the bank account of Zuckerberg and it can be taxed again.
Heavy redistribution of wealth is already in place and it's not making things better.
You're right, because the distribution is removing large groups of people from the economy.
Just for reference, this has been done before and it produced possibly one of the best economies (at the time) and it was very social democrat. This was the United States after the so called "New Deal".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal
And just to make it crystal clear, we're not talking about taxing working people. We're talking about taxing the obscenely wealthy people who just sit on massive amounts of wealth, whether it's stocks or property or yachts or mansions or gold and jewelry. You know the > 10-1000x millionairs
Top 1% paying 30% of taxes sounds like a really rough deal for them at first, but if those 1%ers already own over 30% of your country in the first place (which is the case in the US), then thats barely their "fair share", and you are not really achieveing any redistribution at all.
How can you be certain that the problem is "progressive taxation is not working" instead of "taxation does not help against wealth inequality because it is actually barely progressive"?
I think another big problem is that this extremely uneven distribution of wealth is a basic democratic problem. The reason we have states is, among other things, to put the allocation of our finite resources under democratic control. If the majority of those resources are on private hands, then states get less control and our votes have less power.
Many rich people with heads should consider that the current situation is making things better than the next version of the French Revolution.
Really? Universal education and healthcare don't make things better?
The existence (and prevalence) of food delivery work alone is a depressing portent in my view: If delivering food for objectively shitty pay is still a viable option for a lot of people, that signals to me that human labor has become borderline worthless (even in a wealthy/developed environment).
That makes the "american dream" (=> start from nothing, do a good job, become wealthy) increasingly less realistic.
I'm also afraid that this (preventing wealth inequality from getting out-of-control) might be a "practically unsolvable" problem for democracies in general (just like managing housing and public pensions): It is too easy to "sabotage" democratic progress for the negatively affected minority (and that minority is exceedingly powerful/well-positioned, too).
Automation is great and has made things undeniably better. In the 1800s, 30% of the US GDP was tree cutting. https://x.com/AlecStapp/status/1939912893102760063 Before automation, nearly everyone was involved with agriculture. Today is much better.
Maybe there is an easy way to have our cake and eat it, too (like consistent wealth taxation like the article suggests), but I'm doubtful.
In the past, basically every form of investment used to involve human labor to some degree-- meaning that every rich industrial magnate also automatically created opportunities for zero-net-worth workers/builders/employees.
But when your big investments just become server racks and industrial robots, then you no longer have this balancing mechanism, and you probably need to do something to prevent wealth concentration without bounds (and to guarantee opportunities for "worthless" individuals).
But note that this is a potential, not an inevitable outcome. This outcome is more likely because there is a positive feedback loop at play here: if you can somehow force people who generate wealth with their labor to surrender part of that wealth to you, you can use those resources to improve your ability to forcibly exploit others (e.g. by hiring more armed goons in a primitive society, or by bribing politicians who pass laws that are ultimately enforced by "public servant" goons in a more advanced society like ours). Simply put, wealth can buy power, and the resulting increase in power disparity can be used to extract more wealth from the people producing it. Thus the natural trend of technological advancement is towards income inequality ... but a society can still go against the current, it just takes a lot more effort on behalf of the citizenry.
Work is not valued, wealth is.
You are mistaken. Currently, the higher income you have here, the higher tax rate you have, where the highest tax rate on income sits at 47%, which you get hit by when your income is above 300K/year. People between 60K and 300K sits at 45%.
And then there are regional differences, someone in Andalucía don't pay the same amount of taxes as someone who lives in Catalunya for example, where the top tax rate is 50%.
Even taking into account other taxes we have, you still end up paying more in taxes the more you earn, unless you start engaging in schemes to lessen your tax burden, obviously. Although the social security is capped, so it does increase slower once you go beyond the cap, but it doesn't start regressing which your comment hinted at.
Edit: important to note that the tax rates are all marginal tax rates, maybe that was a bit unclear.
Tax is not collected, but the supporting law has never been revoked.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verm%C3%B6gensteuer_(Deutschla... (Sorry, no translation available)
Wikipedia claims that this decision was partly due to the max tax rate being at 53% at the time. Today, it has dropped to 42%, but for some strange reason, the wealth tax has never been reinstated.
Reducing inequality in Brazil (even a tiny amount) is a DEAD SIMPLE problem that is not in any way related to the government taking more money from people (rich or poor), but, rather, in taking LESS money:
> The collection of federal taxes on the reserve base, shows that of the amount collected by the IRS of Brazil, the majority of the taxes are based on consumption, with approximately 53% on average of the funds raised by Revenue Federal Brazil and continue accounting for more than half of tax (52%) charged by the agency. This tax structure is even more perverse when we add the taxes collected at the state and municipal levels, which bring in the largest source of revenue. The tax burden on consumption is regressive. In Brazil those who earn up to twice the minimum wage spend 26% of their income to pay indirect taxes, while the tax burden for families with income higher than 30 times the minimum wage amounts to only 7%. Excessive taxation on consumption depresses demand directly affecting the economy, reducing the consumption of the middle and lower income families.
We're talking about a country where minimum wage is 260ish dollars a month, and a macbook costs TWICE what it costs in the US, where people make much more. We're structured in a way where only rich people have access to anything. You can tax said rich people more, but they'll just keep being the ones that can afford anything at all.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Brazil
The super-rich don't stay rich by just sitting on their money, they invest it.
These countries should focus on encouraging investment there - by getting rid of bureaucracy and red tape, make it possible to hire across the whole EU a lot easier, without needing separate tax registration in every country, etc.
Lower the barriers to entry wherever possible - no long application processes for developments with endless consultations, no arbitrary minority language or qualification requirements, etc.
Income inequality is a good thing, but there needs to be equal access to education and opportunities and the lowest barriers to entry possible.
Rich people will and should continue to exist. What they shouldn't be allowed to do is take advantage of loopholes and tax breaks just because they're wealthy. That alone should indirectly lead to lowering inequality, and, assuming we can trust that governments work efficiently and in equal interest of all their citizens (which is hardly a given), it should lead to a fair(er) distribution of wealth, instead of a growth of inequality.
In any case, it's easy to be cynical about this news, but it's a step in the right direction on paper. In stark contrast to what is happening in the US, for example.
Sounds like you want to tax assets. Every country can start doing it right now with assets on their soil. No "global registry of wealthy people" is needed for that. Just look at the assets you control and tax them.
The specific issue here is that revenue from capital is taxed less than revenue from labor, thus disproportionally impacting the poor & middle class.
Can you explain how taxing the rich even less will solve this issue?
Ideally there'd just be a 10% tax across the board - sales tax, income tax, etc. like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9%E2%80%939%E2%80%939_Plan
No complicated exemptions, or complicated progressive bands, just keep it simple and eliminate bureaucracy. Then people can manage their own pensions and insurance.
This could be accompanied by a Georgist Land Value Tax to encourage development and innovation too.
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https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Personal income is up more than 50%.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
And that doesn’t account for demographic changes: Households are smaller on average than 40 years ago and there’s been a significant surge in the foreign-born population, mostly from much poorer origins.
Further, while the inflation calculation includes some hedonic adjustments, it’s really hard to capture the aggregate of the thousands of diffuse lifestyle benefits of living in 2025 v. 1985. Personally, I’d miss burritos.
That's your opinion. I fail to see how the differences were have today make sense and could be good for the society.
Suddenly a lot of productive assets are no longer working.
Do you think capital allocation will be better when it's being done by everyone?
The rich people are stiffling the economy and displacing a large swath of working people. This process will hollow out the economy and produce more poverty and more inequality.
For the wealthy people there are two ways to invest.
1. Invest in passive assets such as stock market, property, valuable items, gold etc. 2. Invest in new businesses.
What are they doing? Mostly 2. How do we know. Simple.. look at the real economies. The western economies are growing (barely) at around 1-2% per year. The wealthy (since pandemic) grow their wealth at 10-20% per year. Where is this growth coming from? Certainly not from new business development since the real economy is not growing. The only way it can come is by taking a bigger slice of the pie, i.e. displacing middle class by subsuming their wealth.
This is harmful to the economy and will lead to the collapse of the economy and the society.
Robert Zubrin's The Case For Nukes is a great book on this.
Imagine you are in Germany:
-you have a business that has modest profitability of 4% per year (profit/company value)
-your economy grows 1-2% per year
-your inflation is 2% per year
How much do you expect the company value to increase after a year? Right, it's 8 % - exactly how much DAX (German stock index) grew on average during last 10 years.
And an economy oriented only along the wishes of the super-rich.
Money is the way you "vote" into the economy, and the more money is in the hands of a few, the less the economy actually adresses the needs of the many.
That's exactly what I mean by removing bureaucratic processes to unlock investment.
But the "many" can learn useful skills and innovate to also make a lot of money. Everyone should be able to start a business easily - without excessive capital requirements or expensive notaries. STEM education should be free and widely available (or with very low interest loans if we let the loan interest be decided per subject, per student grades, etc.)
Sounds like an opportunity to me.
>>empty shop spaces because it would diminish their value to lower the rent
Sounds like a problem land value tax solves - it should cost you to hold land ad if you can't pay you should give it up so others can make use of it.
>> excessive appartement rents
Sounds like land value tax + removing bureaucracy around building should solve that.
>>And an economy oriented only along the wishes of the super-rich.
I am not sure why you think anything in EU is along wishes of super-rich. It seems to me it's to the wishes of political cronies. I can guarantee you that "super-rich" would structure it differently.
>>Money is the way you "vote" into the economy, and the more money is in the hands of a few, the less the economy actually adresses the needs of the many.
And yet populist parties introducing anti-business policies win all the time. It's true our parliamentary systems are terrible and undemocratic but it's not because super rich, at least not in EU.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/workingpapers/econ/107_en.htm
But does that mean income inequality is good?
Maybe in moderation, but I feel it's pretty obviously harmful when taken to an extreme. Policies to reverse the trend of concentrating wealth and power are worth considering.
Yes, mostly in the pockets of politicians who make sure to keep them super-rich.
This is why wealth inequality is a disaster: it allows the super-rich to control entire countries and keep themselves and their families rich and powerful.
Any kind of economic measure that still permits billionaires to exist is not going to address this simple fundamental problem. It's at best lipstick on the pig, not a long term solution to anything.
90% of bureaucracy and red tape are Chesterton Fences that exist for a reason.
Remove those fences while being clear and transparent about who they protect and how they will be exposed.
Be aggressive about the remaining 10%.
And good luck telling which is which.
or
We are not trying it hard enough.
Best not to hold your breath though...
There is a consensus that non-dom status (basically rich foreigners, very broadly defined, pay hardly any tax) in the UK needs to go. The main point made by people opposing this is that they can easily move to a number European (mostly EU) countries that have similar schemes and still only be a short flight away from the UK.
Or maybe I do understand - it has nothing to do with trying to fix the problem but is just a populist agenda that sounds good and helps with winning elections.
Edit: "oh but it's an actual organization" yeah with still very little significance between pretending it's anything but a convenient proxy for the bigger members
I think your understanding of BRICS might be slightly outdated, did you read about the last time in the late 90s or something? It's beyond just an acronym today, with institutions actively involved, new initiatives and more.