MSE News: Super-rich must give more, says Nick Clegg

Randvegeta

Okay. Let me pose you a different question.

Let us say a billionaire from China decides to move to, and live in the UK. He bring's along with him his vast wealth and is far wealthier than 99.9% of the population, making the inequality in the UK, technically greater than what it would otherwise be.

Is his wealth damaging to society?

jamesd

cepheus wrote: »

Some of you guys are living on a different planet:

Some of us just place information within contexts that explain it.

cepheus wrote: »

The new findings show that the household wealth of the top 10% of the population stands at £853,000 and more – over 100 times higher than the wealth of the poorest 10%, which is £8,800 or below (a sum including cars and other possessions).

OK, so an unemployed teenager has less money than the pension pot and home of a person who is about to retire. Is that supposed to be bad given that the money of the person about to retire has to last for 25+ years? It's say a house in the SE with half of the value and enough extra to buy a pension income of £17,000 a year.

Knowing why the assets are there is a hugely important factor.

temporary1

Randvegeta wrote: »

Okay. Let me pose you a different question.

Let us say a billionaire from China decides to move to, and live in the UK. He bring's along with him his vast wealth and is far wealthier than 99.9% of the population, making the inequality in the UK, technically greater than what it would otherwise be.

Is his wealth damaging to society?

Every billionaire/millionaire who is not creating billions of jobs and/or sharing their good fortune and wealth amongst the billions of their fellow men, to reduce overall levels of inequality, hardship and poverty, is ultimately damaging to the whole of the human race, and therefore society.
Riches, by definition, simply amounts to a level of selfishness; the richer one becomes, the more selfish one has become.
It is therefore obvious that the richest people in society do not respect the principles of society, do not deserve any respect from society, and should be excluded from the benefits of that society, until their consciences, and bank balances, are suitably cleansed, and they've learnt to play and share nicely with the rest of society again.
To encourage, grow and create a fairer society, we need a wealth/assets tax, not an income tax.

Pincher

Idi Amin tried it with the Indians.
Emperor Nero confiscated from rich Romans.

The first thing is currency control, so no wiring of funds without permission.

The second thing is to tighten up border control,
because they will buy diamonds and shove it up their bottom to get money out of the country.

At a wild guess, you need 100,000 new civil servants to enforce it. They will hire G4S to recruit them, then discover the recruits don't even speak English, but will let anything go by for a tenner.

wantsajob

temporary1 wrote: »

Every billionaire/millionaire who is not creating billions of jobs and/or sharing their good fortune and wealth amongst the billions of their fellow men, to reduce overall levels of inequality, hardship and poverty, is ultimately damaging to the whole of the human race, and therefore society.

Indeed, those who reached the top through their business acumen, often did so by trampling on all those beneath them in their struggle for the top. Few businesses pay their employees a decent "living wage". They expect maximum effort, for minimum pay. More people at the bottom need to remember the maxim - "minimum wage, minimum effort." Only then will equality be improved. The above quality is often made abundantly clear on the TV program "undercover boss", (usually made by fledgling wannabe millionaires trying to up their profile/take a step up the career ladder).

The way things stand with wages, employees are largely Government-subsidised for businesses, through things like Working Tax Credits, Council Tax Benefits, Housing Benefits, and a tax free allowance. Where businesses make billions year on year, something is wrong when they pay minimum wage and the employee has to go cap-in-hand to the Government to make ends meet. Even then most businesses take it a step further and abuse free slave labour - see http://www.boycottworkfare.org/

Most people at the top try to use their charitable giving to heighten their profile. For example, Bill Gates's large charitable donations were suddenly pushed to the media during the Microsoft anti-trust court cases. Asil Nadir's Wife can only note one redeeming quality of her thief husband, who is many times her age. Very few donate percentages of their disposable income that would equate to more than a minimum wage worker dropping one whole British pence in a charity tin. Therefore, by definition any minimum wage worker who drops 10p in a charity box is over ten-times more charitable than his wealthiest possible counter-part. Something to think about when you walk past that charity collector.

temporary1 wrote: »

To encourage, grow and create a fairer society, we need a wealth/assets tax, not an income tax.

Wealth and assets can be hidden easier than income though. Except for, perhaps, property and pension wealth. Besides, I believe VAT was intended for the purpose you hint at, to tax consumption, rather than the mere acquisition of wealth. And of course those in more valuable properties pay higher Council tax rates.

cepheus

The poor spend a greater fraction of their money. The rich squirrel it away in tax havens.

That's why hitting poor makes no economic sense.

MercilessKiller

cepheus wrote: »

The poor spend a greater fraction of their money.

That means absolutely nothing!

A smaller fraction of a LOT more is still much higher than a greater fraction of a lot less!! If the richest 2% only spent 1% of their income, that's going to be a lot more VAT than if the poorest 98% spent 98% of their income!

Pushing the rich out of the country through a wealth tax will kill our future growth. It's a silly idea and you all know it!

antrobus

MercilessKiller wrote: »

That means absolutely nothing!
...

It means something. It means that the poster in question is likely one of those members of the British left who believes that, because the poor spend a greater proportion of their income than the rich, resdributing income from the rich to the poor will result in more spending, which will 'boost the economy', and is therefore an all round 'good thing'.

All this proves is that they were asleep during that crucial part of their economics lecture which taught them that savings equals investment, and that spending on investment is just as capable of 'boosting the economy' and is thus also an all round 'good thing'.

Sadly however, the crackpot idea that saving money is somehow 'taking money out of the economy' remains quite prevalent.

antrobus

grey_gym_sock wrote: »

...corporation tax is also the only tax the UK can expect to collect on businesses which have to operate in the UK but are foreign owned (e.g. philip green's retail business, owned by his monaco-resident wife). ......

41.2% of the UK stock market was in foreign ownership in 2010.

chrismac1

This "tax the rich until the pips squeak" has already been tried. It was called Communism and most Russians, Poles, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Latvians etc. would say it did not have a happy ending.

Britain had its own flirtation with it in the 1970s. Overall you'd think the left wingers would have learnt their lesson, all they achieved was 18 years of Tory rule and the collapse in Union membership and all the rest.

But no. The same tired old stuff is still getting trotted out. Most rich people are too busy making money to spend every waking hour on tax dodging. The problem is there is not much political will on either side to tackle the evaders and avoiders, because so many rich party doners and so forth are at it.