Wealth tax us - demand millionaires.

 More  than 250 billionaires and millionaires are demanding that the political elite meeting for the World Economic Forum in Davos introduce wealth taxes to help pay for better public services around the world.

"Our request is simple: we ask you to tax us, the very richest in society... This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm our nation's economic growth. But it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future."

Duty Paid
Ralph Hedley (1848-1913)
Photo Credit: Sunderland Museum &Winter Gardens [CC BY-NC] 

Among those to have signed the open letter, and who hail from 17 countries, include Abigail Disney, the Disney heir; Brian Cox, who played the fictional billionaire Logan Roy in Succession; Simon Pegg, the actor and screenwriter and Valerie Rockefeller, an heir to the US dynasty.

"We are also the people who benefit most from the status quo," they said in a letter called Proud to Pay, which they will attempt to deliver to world leaders in Davos in Switzerland today. "But inequality has reached a tipping point, and its cost to our economic, societal and ecological stability risk is severe."

A new poll of the super-rich shows that 74% support higher taxes on wealth to help address the cost of living crisis and improve public services...

Guy Singh-Watson, the British farmer-turned entrepreneur who founded the vegetable box delivery company Riverford, said, "This poll seems to show that the whole world, including the richest people, wants to tax the super-rich. So where on earth is the leadership from our elected representatives who have the power to actually do it?"...

The richest 250 families in the UK are sitting on combined wealth of £748bn, according to last year's Sunday Times rich list. Those on the list included the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and his wife, Akshata Murty, with £529m between them, and the Duke of Westminster, with £9.9bn...

(Rupert Neate, The Guardian, 2024)

Brilliant idea that has been repeatedly identified by some of the super-rich for a good few years but it won't be taken up anytime soon in the UK. The Conservative party would definitely not implement it and a very timid Labour party would shy away from what they would see as too much of a radical policy.

*The revelation last week that the 25 richest US billionaires have paid very little tax even as their fortunes have soared has reignited demands for wealth taxes on both sides of the Atlantic...

Jeff Bezos - founder of Amazon and world's richest person, with a $193bn (£136bn) fortune - paid no federal taxes in 2011 and even claimed $4,000 in tax credit for his children.

The second wealthiest person - the head of Tesla, Elon Musk - paid no tax in 2018 because he took out vast loans against his shareholdings and deducted the interest costs he paid on the loans from his taxes.

Warren Buffet, the famed investor who has pointed out that he pays less tax than his secretary and called for reform of the system, paid an effective tax rate of just 0.1% between 2014 and 2018.

"It may sound shocking," says Arun Avani - assistant professor at the University of Warwick's economics department... "but all of this is perfectly legal, and not surprising to anyone who has spent any time thinking about the wealthy and tax"...

"The scandal here isn't that they broke the rules - they didn't. It's that the rules are so bad." ...

Robert Palmer, executive director of the campaign group Tax Justice UK, says: "The richest British people will be using exactly the techniques exposed in the ProPublica leaks. If you're an ordinary person you can't do that, as tax comes out of your monthly pay cheque. This is deeply unfair."...

Morris Pearl, chair of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of very rich people campaigning for higher taxes to be applied to them and other members of the elite, says the report shows that the rich can "basically choose whether to pay taxes or not."

"As a millionaire, I know personally that our economy enshrines wealth for the few - to the detriment of ordinary people in our country"...

(Rupert Neate, The Observer, 2021)

A scandal that never goes away because of the inaction of those in power.