How much money does a person need?
When you have a billion you can live extremely comfortably for the rest of your life?
How about we tax the super rich 100% on all assets (including hidden) over a billion. I believe these super rich are mentally ill, just look at a few of them. To prevent them ruining others lives at a whim and share things out more fairly once they have a billion including loan back schemes designed to avoid tax. Tax the extra at 100%.
A great idea in theory, which I heartily applaud.
But doomed to failure in practice I fear.
Such people have the means to pay for advisers who will find them ways to hide their money from the taxman - in shell companies, offshore trusts, land investments, assignment of assets to family members, to name but a few.
Exactly why that needs investigating, they are doing it already yet Gov’s look to control the little people’s money transactions
Any political party trying to tax the billionaires is going to find themselves running out of money and friends real fast.
Yep, but come the revolution. If all the countries of say the EU acted together it would be and interesting horizon. No one party could do it alone.
A billion is a mind bendingly large amount of money to get your head around.
If you had a billion £ you could spend £30k a day for 90 years and stll not burn all the way through £1 billion.
There is a practical difficulty here - which is that many of these assets are shares which a bit of a Heisenberg asset, until you sell them you don’t know what they are truly worth. and it probably would not work for the government to take them as shares - spending on the scale needed to turn them into £$€ would depress the market.
Suggestions which might work include taxing loans secured on assets at a rate similar to income tax, and also taxing dividends and capital gains at a higher rate.
Plus a small amount on the assets themselves of 1-2% per annum.
Mine was (as usual) the simplistic solution and obviously difficult but yes, they cannot really spend all of the money but yet still so bloody greedy for it.
Consider the number of people on our planet and then consider Musks vast fortune divide that up and we’d all be millionaires.
No, we’d each have about $100
Sod it let’s do it anyway 
If you need people for the firing squad, I’m a decent shot with a rifle.
What utter nonsense.
Billionaires spend money like no other people on the planet and pay taxes through other things,
What is this obsession with penalising/punishing what people describe as having the broadest shoulders. Read this UK’s biggest celebrity taxpayers as JK Rowling pays £47.5m bill | Celebrity News | Showbiz & TV | Express.co.uk to maybe self educate that people with money pay or contribute through their businesses enormous amounts of tax revenues every year.
Too many people take more out of the system than pay into it.
Maybe we should tax people with children as they cost society loads
So long as it’s swiftly followed by pensioners who also cost loads.
Absolutely, healthcare for pensioners is astronomical!
More examples of business people paying huge amounts of tax
Betfred brothers top list of UK’s biggest taxpayers with £400m bill | The super-rich | The Guardian
I rather think you are missing the point.
Thanks for saving me the explanation.
As someone who spends their career sorting the legal affairs of UHNW people (and HNW celebrities) I’m all for taxing the rich into oblivion. I won’t say I know more about this subject than anyone else here, as we have a wide variety of smart and accomplished people from all kinds of backgrounds and careers, but I do know an awful lot, and tbh I find the arguments for not taxing than to be “utter nonsense” much of the time. Suggesting that because an individual pays a commensurate tax bill means they should hoard billion is a nonsense because it works on the assumption that the public purse wouldn’t have got that tax, or more, any other way when thats clearly not the case. The amount UHNW people waste on very expensive lawyers (I’d say ‘like me’, but I’m very cheap!) sending frivolous threats to people, and launching frivolous actions against people to bully them into silence is, in itself, a reason they’re not using that wealth for the good of humanity (which is of course what they all claim ‘i pay so much tax!’, ‘I give so much to charity!’). I’d happily be out of a job forever if it was a side effect of these, almost universally, evil fookers, having their wealth removed. Of course, it won’t happen, but a decent tax level would be a good start, and if they go, then they go. Presumably they’ll take their assets with them too, the ‘Betfred brothers’ can gouge gambling addicts in other countries if they don’t want to pay tax here as their UK operations can be closed / blocked. Ditto any of the others. There’s a lot that can be done, we just need a political system that isn’t already bought and paid for by those people.
So, half of that £400m is gambling duty, so not paid my them at all.
That leaves £200m and, in the words of Tim Hartford, is that a big number in the context of the earnings that is paid on?
No they don’t - they salt it away, in the lowest taxed location they can find. A small fraction of what they acquire is sufficient to pay for all the “stuff” they need.
And as has been mentioned, they use every possible stratagem and loophole to avoid paying tax, in ways that are simply not available to average people.
And the system is stacked in their favour in many jurisdictions. In the UK the basic rate of tax on dividends is just 8.75%, rising to 10.75% in 2026-27.
Meanwhile tax on income starts at 20%.
Capital gains tax is a max of 24%. And so on.
HNWIs pay a much smaller percentage of their income on indirect taxes such as VAT because they are so wealthy. Poorer people end up paying a lot of VAT and excise duty in relation to their income.
Also what @kirsteastevenson said
Well said Kirsteastevenson, no one needs billons.
You an me both, me from the fiscal not legal side though….we also differ in our opinions although maybe your experience being legal is different to mine when dealing with them.
Different opinions is all good, as long as they are based on fact instead of opinion, jealousy, bias etc etc. I agree as a % of wealth billionaires most likely pay less than a good earning individual however in absolute terms enormous amounts.
I will leave now before it turns into more ranting against very fortunate wealthy individuals amassing wealth but from what I can tell only to a certain level that society determines is fair. Cheerio.
p.s. very cheap lawyer, presumably you mean just triple figures an hour rather than four figures 