this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/7812592

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/7812500

PARIS, Oct 23 (Reuters) - Governments should open a new front in the international clampdown on tax evasion with a global minimum tax on billionaires, which could raise $250 billion annually, the EU Tax Observatory said on Monday.

If levied, the sum would be equivalent to only 2% of the nearly $13 trillion in wealth owned by the 2,700 billionaires globally, the research group hosted at the Paris School of Economics said.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's pretty insane, because that's barely 1/3 of what the USA spends on its military alone every year. I think we can do better than 2%, these people won't even notice.

(To be clear though, anything would be better than nothing. The chances of even a measley 2% tax getting passed is slim to none, and those chances get smaller the higher the tax is, so anything we can get is a win.)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

By the time you could get the Billionaires to "agree" to a 2% wealth tax, you would be in a position to demand basically 100% with progressive taxation of course.

[–] Zippy 1 points 1 year ago

This is also worldwide. While wealth inequality is an issue, it really would have little effect on the poor or middle class. You could tax them at 100 percent and it would only marginally increase tax buffers. There are simply too few of them compared to the middle class.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The fact that anyone can amass that amount of wealth means that far too many people were not paid enough.

How about this: Tax them as much as it would take for them to experience hardship, just like the rest of us.

A family making under $75,000 these days is barely able to make ends met, so the tax they experience causes suffering. Yet the way we tax billionaires makes no difference at all to their quality of life. Tax them more. Until they feel it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

The problem is that they'll just fuck off to a country with less taxes, so you'll lose all the taxes that they paid before as well

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

"So you're saying more tax cuts to these billionaires? Done deal" - entire world's leadership

[–] BustinJiber 6 points 1 year ago

Finally we will be able to pay for all those tax breaks for the rich.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


If levied, the sum would be equivalent to only 2% of the nearly $13 trillion in wealth owned by the 2,700 billionaires globally, the research group hosted at the Paris School of Economics said.

"In our view, this is difficult to justify because it risks to undermine the sustainability of tax systems and the social acceptability of taxation," the observatory's director Gabriel Zucman told journalists.

U.S. President Joe Biden's 2024 budget included plans for a 25% minimum tax on the wealthiest 0.01%, but that proposal has since fallen by the wayside with lawmakers in Washington preoccupied with government shutdown threats and looming funding deadlines.

Though a coordinated international push to tax billionaires could take years, the Observatory pointed to the example of governments' success in all but ending bank secrecy and reducing opportunities for multinationals to shift profits to low-tax countries.

The 2018 launch of automatic sharing of account information has reduced the amount of wealth held in offshore tax havens by a factor of three, the observatory estimated.

For example the rich increasingly park wealth in real estate instead of offshore accounts while companies can exploit loopholes in the 15% corporate tax minimum.


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