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A Global Tax on Billionaires? Janet Yellen Says ‘No’
(www.wsj.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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it is very commonly quantified in net worth.
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 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.
And people lie about income for income taxes. And then they get audited. A wealth tax doesnt have to be accurate to the dollar, its about dissuading gross wealth hoarding. A billion and 40 thousand can still round to a billion and be a very effective tax estimate.
I dont think people in small low income countries like bhutan are going to affect this tax much. I would also assume this international tax would come with some form of international auditing.
Thats the one thing working in our favor dealing with the people that have concentrated the worlds wealth into a few hands: its in a few hands. Its easy to keep track of.
The difference here is that we definitively know how much income people make by collecting that number at several steps in the process - since wealth isn't transferred we only have the reporting party and estimations.
If we're okay being approximately correct that's much more reasonable though.
Bhutan was meant to be a non-controversial example let's instead consider Russia, do you think Russia will aide or hamper the ability for the international community to tax their oligarchs... please keep in mind that their government is entirely composed of oligarchs that are currently sanctioned by most western countries. What about Brazil, do you think some millionaire with close ties to the government is going to be accurately reported? Or do you think Brazil has a motivation to keep that money underreported in favor of bribes - bear in mind Brazil's long history of corruption.