Taxing wealth. OK, well, but. The aim here, hopefully at least, would be to tax those who just happen to be wealthy. But not to tax those entrepreneurs who are making the rest of us better off as they build their fortunes.
To tax, ahaha, good fortune but not to tax wealth creation.
Much inherited wealth – the big chunks of it, the great fat gobs, is in trust funds. It’s this generation’s newly created and still growing wealth that is in the easily taxable stuff like equities directly held.
A wealth tax won’t apply to trust funds. But it will to those directly held equities.
So, an actual and real wealth tax will end up taxing those we don’t want to and not those we might want to.
We’ll not tax the Duke of Westminster and we will tax Mike Lynch. Just not the right way around, is it?
“Much inherited wealth – the big chunks of it, the great fat gobs, is in trust funds.” Which are of course taxed on their wealth every ten years. And much Inheritance Tax may have been paid on that wealth before it reached the fund anyway. And, unless recent, the Trust funds in England and Wales have a life of only 80 years max, so then there will be another chance for the government gougers to get their hands on the money.
For inherited wealth the answer is to cap Business Relief and particularly Agricultural Property Tax Relief. Cutting the IHT rate from 40% would be a good idea too.
Ah, but inhibiting entrepreneurship, or at least limiting it to single restaurants, coffees shops, or boutique stores and stopping the Zuckerberg, Musks and Gates of the world is the whole point.
I’d be all for a wealth tax, provided it is a wealthy cvnt wealth tax. So wealthy people who are not cvnts are not caught
It’s just not right to base taxes on moral judgments of legal activities. Envy disguised as morality. It’s bollocks.
If we tax good luck we’ll have less of it.
Eeejits all around
Not sure Mike Lynch would be my poster child for the entrepreneurial ideal! His idea of spreading the wealth is spending a lot on lawyers…