Failure to tax world’s richest means world tax wanted: report
tax | financial system | wealth
Paris, France | AFP | Tuesday 6/25/2024 – 22:26 UTC+7 | 339 phrases
The failure of wealthy international locations to tax the world’s billionaires has made it essential to introduce a world minimal tax price on the world’s richest, argued a G20-commissioned report printed on Tuesday.
The thought of a world tax on the richest is already supported on the G20 by Brazil, France, Spain and South Africa — though america has opposed it.
Tuesday’s report by economist Gabriel Zucman requires a coordinated minimal tax normal for ultra-high web price people, arguing “the very rich profit from a big tax privilege”.
“They pay a lot much less in tax than all different social classes,” he informed AFP.
Fashionable tax methods fail to tax very rich people adequately, the report discovered, as a result of they’re taxed totally on revenue slightly than wealth.
“These people can protect just about all their revenue from the revenue tax, as a result of for them just about all revenue derives from their possession of companies,” mentioned Zucman within the report.
He proposes billionaires ought to pay a minimal world tax price equal to at the very least two p.c of their wealth yearly.
This may elevate $200-$250 billion per 12 months in tax income from round 3,000 taxpayers globally.
Zucman’s report places the present tax price on billionaires at simply 0.3 p.c of their wealth.
Higher taxing of the wealthy would scale back “incentives for the wealthiest people to have interaction in tax avoidance” and assist the “struggle towards inequality”, the report argues.
Investigative media ProPublica reported in 2021 that a number of billionaires, together with the previous boss of Amazon Jeff Bezos and Tesla chief Elon Musk, paid little or nothing when it comes to taxes on their whole wealth.
ProPublica says the billionaires in its report did nothing unlawful of their tax declarations, however employed tax-avoidance methods “past the attain of bizarre individuals”.
Alex Cobham, chief govt of the UK-based NGO Tax Justice Community, mentioned he welcomed the G20’s help for the precept of wealth taxation.
“Wealth taxes are very important instruments to curb the damaging, excessive inequalities our societies face, and to lift income to help wider social progress,” he mentioned.
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