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Wanted: 1m signatures for EU tax on super-rich
(euobserver.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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I'll be the one to pop the bubble. All this will do: people will move their assets outside the EU, making tax havens even richer.
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/nov/20/if-you-tax-the-rich-they-wont-leave-us-data-contradicts-millionaires-threats
https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/media/_media/pdf/pathways/summer_2014/Pathways_Summer_2014_YoungVarner.pdf
No they dont. But they love it when this false Info gets continually parroted.
The EU is one of the biggest and most attractive markets worldwide. Companies will NOT leave it. Not every asset can just be up and moved. Panama Papers and countless other sources also show that anything that CAN be moved is already there.
A lot of companies avoid taxes in the EU already (including big tech giants).
This is an old argument that's long dead. The bottom line is it's a big deal to uproot your entire life / entire company just to exploit tax loopholes, and the use of tax havens is already so common place that it is unlikely to be exacerbated by additional scrutiny.
The book Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe talks a lot on this topic. The authors Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage defend progressive taxation, and state that the only historically-successful argument for raising taxes on the ultra wealthy has been "conscription of wealth" - The working class were conscripted to fight and die in war while the propertied class were not, so the property of the ultra wealthy was taxed very highly (conscripted) for war efforts.
Today, the world faces numerous crisis, and it is the lower class that will work the hardest and be forced to suffer the most while resolving them. It seems reasonable to me that the wealth of the upper class should likewise be put to use solving these crisis rather than exacerbating them. That's a conscription of wealth I can get behind.
Well then it seems like a good idea to heavily sanction tax havens as well. This argument is always one of the more defeatist takes you hear when talking about taxing the rich. Spoiler, it doesn’t happen. Most people still stay in the country and what wealth they would transfer to tax havens is already there.
This in turn will put more pressure on legislators to go after them. This game only works until it doesn't