Failure to tax world’s richest means international 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 concept 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 internet value 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 advised AFP.
Fashionable tax techniques fail to tax very rich people adequately, the report discovered, as a result of they’re taxed totally on earnings relatively than wealth.
“These people can protect just about all their earnings from the earnings tax, as a result of for them just about all earnings derives from their possession of companies,” stated Zucman within the report.
He proposes billionaires ought to pay a minimal international tax charge equal to a minimum of two % of their wealth yearly.
This is able to increase $200-$250 billion per yr in tax income from round 3,000 taxpayers globally.
Zucman’s report places the present tax charge on billionaires at simply 0.3 % 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 “combat 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 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 atypical folks”.
Alex Cobham, chief government of the UK-based NGO Tax Justice Community, stated he welcomed the G20’s assist for the precept of wealth taxation.
“Wealth taxes are important instruments to curb the damaging, excessive inequalities our societies face, and to boost income to assist wider social progress,” he stated.
bur-rox/rl
Your subscription couldn’t be saved. Please strive once more.
Your subscription has been profitable.
© Agence France-Presse
