A Global Tax on Billionaires? Janet Yellen Says ‘No’
A Global Tax on Billionaires? Janet Yellen Says ‘No’
Treasury secretary came out against the proposed global levy, which proponents say would stop the rich from shifting wealth into countries where they can avoid paying the tax
Crazy how Biden's admin is full of people 70+ years old who are incredibly conservative and keep going against all of the things he keeps saying he wants to do...
Like, Imagine if you boss hired a bunch of shitty assholes, and when you complain about them he says "what am I supposed to do. They're already hired!"
Like, you can fire them Joe...
When you hire someone and they consistently do things you (supposedly) don't want them to do, you fucking fire them and hire someone who will do what you tell them.
Unless of course you don't actually want to get anything done and what you're telling them to do is what they're doing.
I can't read this article due to a paywall, but I know that Janet Yellen has been leading an effort to set a minimum corporate tax rate worldwide. I don't know what her stance is on wealth taxes in general, but I wouldn't be surprised if she's just trying to ensure that a minimum corporate tax rate work is not derailed by changing the target to something more controversial.
keep going against all of the things he keeps saying he wants to do...
When did Biden say he wants a global wealth tax?
US President Joe Biden’s 2024 budget included plans for a 25% minimum tax on the wealthiest 0.01%, but that proposal has since fallen by the wayside with lawmakers in Washington preoccupied with government shutdown threats and looming funding deadlines.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/23/business/billionaires-global-tax/index.html
In fairness, it's hard to keep track of all the times Biden says he wants to do something to appease voters and then never tries while his appointees fight the party platform.
But Biden wanted it for America, just stopped mentioning it, and now his appointees are fighting any wealth tax from anywhere.
The devil is in the details here. For the super-rich, wealth is an extremely hard thing to quantify. Once a true wealth tax is established, all it will do is increase billable hours for financial professionals who know how to hide wealth in tax sheltered vehicles. And that will get litigated every year, when the bill is due. If you want to go after the extremely wealthy, I think the right place to do it is with a strong inheritance tax. That only gets litigated once, and the bill is paid by people who did not accumulate that wealth themselves. It also dilutes generational wealth, which is a good thing.
Plus, the US is unique in that it taxes citizens on their worldwide holdings, anyway. While there are offshore tax havens, they work a lot differently than the tax havens a wealth tax would target.
It's easy to say "We should tax the wealthy", but hard to make good policy that can't be gamed, especially when attempting to do it across multiple wealthy countries.
It’s easy to say “We should tax the wealthy”, but hard to make good policy that can’t be gamed, especially when attempting to do it across multiple wealthy countries.
That's literally what Yellen is refusing to participate in...
Like, the reason we can't do it, is we're not doing it...
If that sounds confusing, it's because there isn't a logical reason not to do it, besides the wealthy may donate less money to politicians
There are very real constitutional issues with explicit wealth taxes. It took a constitutional amendment to authorize the federal government to collect an income tax, and it's quite possible that it would take another to authorize a wealth tax. Particularly with this Supreme Court, Congress probably doesn't have the legal ability to impose a wealth tax even if it wanted to, to say nothing of the general complexity and costs of collecting it. There are plenty of economists who support the general idea of taxing the wealthy more but who prefer other taxation schemes.
wealth is an extremely hard thing to quantify.
it is very commonly quantified in net worth.
There's a lot of bullshit in those numbers though including things like unrealized capital gains and real estate. Trump is in trouble for wildly misvaluing his real estate (including openly lying about factual information like square footage) but it's almost impossible to accurately value real estate outside of a sale happening - things like depreciation and local market prices fluctuations are all just guesses. Most real estate is valued as low as the owner can justify (outside dumb pride and weird tax tricks) just to dodge property taxes.
Net worth is an easy number to guess at within an order of magnitude but it's really difficult to actually calculate - even for Americans in America... guessing at the wealth of some Bhutanese millionaire who has a deep in with the local government and can bribe officials to undervalue or misassign property would be extremely difficult.
Wealth isn’t that hard to quantify. An assessor comes to my house every few years and quantifies what it’s worth for property tax reasons and most people’s wealth is basically their house and maybe a retirement account. Private companies almost all have a valuation. When a start up raises a round, they literally set a valuation for the round. When a traditional business gets a loan, the bank estimates what it’s worth.
But no one even wants to tax small business owners. Every wealth tax proposal is on the super wealthy who can sure as fuck value their net worth. Donald Trump just went on trial for lying about his. If we had a formal assessment system, he would have never even been able to do frauds.
There's an actual simple solution.
Overfund the IRS and subsidize the tax agencies of other nations the same way we subsidize their militaries.
iirc every dollar invested in the IRS brings in about $300.00. That's with them avoiding the super rich because they have super lawyers.
Also with taxes going to the government... There is a lot of corruption designed to bring those taxes back in the form subsidies, projects, funding etc. No guarantee taxes end up where they are needed.
While I agree that billionaires need to start paying their way, I cannot get on board with taxing someone for dying.
I think a better way is to remove all of the mechanisms in place that made them that wealthy in the first place.
This type of tax would just result in wealthy people moving their money into 3rd world countries. they will not pay a dime in the end and the USA would get less tax money from them.. hence why its a no for now. come up with a better strategy for taxing these assholes, not something that will result in them paying even less and hiding their money other places. FFS, it's fairly simple yet forest/trees
Except we started this years ago and it's working...
A 2021 agreement between 140 countries will limit the scope of multinationals to reduce tax by booking profits in low-tax countries by setting a global 15% floor on corporate taxation from next year.
“Something that many people thought would be impossible, now we know can actually be done,” Zucman said. “The logical next step is to apply that logic to billionaires, and not only to multinational companies.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/23/business/billionaires-global-tax/index.html
Like, what you're doing is the same as when billionaires/corporations claim if they pay more tax they'll leave for a third world country with low tax...
You know what never happens?
Billionaires/corporations moving to third world countries after we raise their taxes.