Failure to tax world’s richest means world tax wanted: report
tax | economic 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 charge on the world’s richest, argued a G20-commissioned report revealed 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 the USA has opposed it.
Tuesday’s report by economist Gabriel Zucman requires a coordinated minimal tax commonplace for ultra-high web price people, arguing “the very rich profit from a huge tax privilege”.
“They pay a lot much less in tax than all different social classes,” he instructed AFP.
Trendy tax techniques fail to tax very rich people adequately, the report discovered, as a result of they’re taxed totally on revenue reasonably than wealth.
“These people can defend 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 charge equal to at the very least two p.c of their wealth yearly.
This may increase $200-$250 billion per 12 months in tax income from round 3,000 taxpayers globally.
Zucman’s report places the present tax charge on billionaires at simply 0.3 p.c of their wealth.
Higher taxing of the wealthy would cut back “incentives for the wealthiest people to interact in tax avoidance” and assist the “struggle in opposition to 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 by way of 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 atypical individuals”.
Alex Cobham, chief govt of the UK-based NGO Tax Justice Community, mentioned he welcomed the G20’s assist for the precept of wealth taxation.
“Wealth taxes are very important instruments to curb the damaging, excessive inequalities our societies face, and to boost income to assist wider social progress,” he mentioned.
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