Why The Economist hates wealth taxes

Why The Economist hates wealth taxes.

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“I want to speak to you now, somebody who is not incredibly rich, but has a bit of money, and is opposed to wealth taxation of the very rich. And I want to explain to you what is going to happen from here. Okay, we have increasingly, in this country, in America, in the world, an untaxed super-rich class. These people have enormous amounts of passive income. The poorest billionaire in the world with a wealth of just one billion dollars will generate more than a million dollars a week in passive income, and that is currently almost untaxed. These people have no choice but to buy up all of the assets very quickly, and that is squeezing asset ownership out of every other group in society. As that continues to happen, more and more people in our societies will own no assets and will be in debt. This will mean we will have no strong consumer, and we will have a weak economy. That will lead to an increasingly angry public that push their governments into taking action to support the growing poverty. Governments will be politically forced to step in to try to deal with the growing poverty. But because they do not have the capacity to tax the richest people in society, they are going to tax you.”

Gary Stevenson

The Piketty Panic

“But how do you make that defense if the rich derive much of their income not from the work they do but from the assets they own? And what if great wealth comes increasingly not from enterprise but from inheritance?” After reviewing Capital in the Twenty-First Century by french professor Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman reflects on why this particular book is reshaping the debate on wealth and inequality.

www.nytimes.com

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