Who and how much:
Consider an annual tax on the net wealth of families with rates of one per cent above $10 million, two per cent above $50 million and three per cent above $100 million.
This means the first $10 million of any family’s wealth is entirely unaffected by the wealth tax. Based on modelling of the first year of this wealth tax, the bottom 99.4 per cent of Canadians would pay nothing, while only the richest 0.6 per cent would pay any amount. This means that only about 100,000 families across the country would pay any amount under the wealth tax, with 10,000 wealthy enough to fall into the second-highest bracket and 3,700 in the highest bracket.
This narrow tax on the wealthiest few would raise an estimated $39 billion in its first year, $62 billion by its 10th year and $495 billion cumulatively over a 10-year window.
How:
an effective wealth tax must make use of extensive third-party reporting of assets, particularly from financial institutions, rather than relying too heavily on self-reporting as in the case of some older wealth taxes.
If someone has hoarded that much money, taxation at that rate will have absolutely zero impact on their lifestyle.
They have no valid complaints about a system like the one being proposed.
Even if they complain, they’d get laughed out of the room. That’s why the actual go-to tactic is threats.
Wealth isn’t often in cash. It could be a founder of a company, and their stocks make their networth over 10 million.
In order to pay 1% they’d have to come up with another 100k, but the only way to do that is sell the stock. Selling the stock erodes the founders say in the company (shares = voting power) and will further incur taxes so it’s more than 100k.
So if by nothing you mean slowly erode a person’s ownership in their business over many years, then sure, nothing.
We agree that taking money from them would in fact take money from them. Want a cookie?