Perhaps unsurprisingly both Green Parries (Scotland and England & Wales) have highlighted the lack of a major increase on taxation of the wealthy in their repossess to the Autumn Budget.
It seems pretty clear that while the Labour Party has taken the position (widespread in the media) that a wealth tax is ill-advised, the Green Parties are responding to a wide belief in the electorate that higher taxes on the very wealthy are both needed fiscally & fair politically.
Have arrived home to find that Rachel Reeves Autumn Budget was so comprehensively trailed in the last few days that for the most part there's not much to say, that's not already been said.... other than rather than revealing a strategic vision it looks a but more like the fiscal equivalent of scrambling around for small change (or in some cases perhaps notes) in jars & drawers around the house.....
But as the dust settles I'll posy on anything that pops up that was not expected
I would have loved progress on the "big idea" of a #WealthTax
All this focus on Income and other transactions is such 19th century thinking. It continues to give a free pass to those who are hoarding massive unrealised gains.
Nb. The "mansion tax" being an obvious exception that dances along the Wealth Tax margins.
Aditya Chakrabortty on why a wealth tax is not the silver bullet many hope for - what is needed is much more fundamental:
'The electoral future of a low-growth country like Britain doesn’t lie in promising voters that with some magic trick you can drive up GDP, but in accepting that the arguments that lie ahead are about the distribution of resources. That’s something the centrists on both the Tory & Labour benches have yet to grasp'.
France wants to make its one-off wealth tax permanent.
France's economy minister said Sunday that he wants to make a temporary tax on the wealthy into a permanent levy to make government financing "more equitable."
Eric Lombard said the measure would be part of efforts to find 40 billion euros next year, mainly from savings, to bring the public deficit to 4.6% of GDP in 2026.
FEC report showing a $2 million contribution by Marc Andreessen to the Right For America PAC. Aggregate year-to-date contributions to this PAC are $4.5 million.
Although this story has received a lot less coverage than Harris's proposal to ban corporate price gouging, it has a very real chance of being more impactful. Although she hasn't exactly been crowing about it, Harris recently announced that her campaign supports all of of the tax increases on high earners and corporations that Biden proposed before he dropped out of the race to become President in 2024; including both the 25% minimum tax on billionaire wealth and increasing the corporate tax Trump lowered to 21% by seven points, to 28%. I imagine that you'll be unsurprised to learn that I support taxing the shit out of rich people, but as it turns out so does at least one influential economics professor Common Dreams describes as "a leading authority on tax evasion by the rich."
'Let's Go!' Top Economist Applauds as Harris Signals Support for Billionaires Tax
"Surging billionaire wealth at a time when roughly two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck has amplified calls for a minimum tax on the richest Americans. Zucman noted in a May New York Times piece that in 2018, U.S. billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than working-class Americans for the first time in the nation's history.
"The idea that billionaires should pay a minimum amount of income tax is not a radical idea," Zucman wrote in May. "What is radical is continuing to allow the wealthiest people in the world to pay a smaller percentage in income tax than nearly everybody else."
Polling has shown that a 25% tax on billionaire wealth is extremely popular with U.S. voters across the political spectrum. A survey in March of last year by Data for Progress found that 87% of Democrats, 68% of Independents and third-party voters, and 51% of Republicans back the idea.
A spokesperson for the Harris campaign confirmed to NBC News on Monday that in addition to backing the push for a minimum tax on billionaires, the vice president supports raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% as a way to help finance parts of her broader economic agenda, which includes an expanded child tax credit and substantial assistance for first-time homebuyers."
Now look, I want to be clear that I don't think billionaires should even exist, and ultimately I support appropriating the wealth of (at least) the mega rich by any means necessary. A billionaire tax, and raising the corporate tax rate to a level that's still lower than it was before Trump engineered the biggest cash giveaway to rich people in modern American history, doesn't go nearly far enough in my opinion. By that same measure however, inequality and hoarded wealth very much move on a sliding scale, and forcing rich people and corporations to pay more of their share than they are currently doing, helps reduce the wealth gap driving so much awful shit in our society, while also helping the government fund vital programs without increasing taxes on labor class Americans who are already bearing too much of that burden. What Biden proposed, and Harris is now promising to adopt isn't a whole ass solution, but it's a start and if taxing the rich is on the table now, it's less of a push to get taxing them more on the table in the very near future.
As I've told you all on numerous occasions, I don't believe capitalism itself can co-exist with a habitable planet that supports over 8 billion people. In that light then, it's hard for me to get too excited about tinkering with the U.S. tax code in a way that is ultimately designed to take the edge of some small degree of capitalist exploitation. But I do have to admit that acknowledging wealth inequality, taking some steps to address it, and reclaiming $5 trillion dollars I believe rich people owe society over 10 years is far better than the alternative; which in this case is Donald Trump giving rich people even more wealth and tax breaks, while the proposals in Project 2025 increase taxes on an American labor class already being squeezed dry in a hyper-capitalist dystopia. Harris's proposal is not a solution, but it's a start and if liberal politicians aren't prepared to go far enough, perhaps one day soon the people will rise up and reclaim the rest of that stolen wealth themselves.
I think if you put a gun to my head and asked me to name my favorite Guardian columnist, which in itself is a lot like asking me to name my favorite contagious disease, I'd probably have to go with George Monbiot in the end. Despite this however, I always find reading his work to be somewhat maddening because while he is clearly a writer who sees virtually all of the same problems I see with an ultra-wealthy ruling class, and maintaining a capitalist society on a planet being boiled to death by capitalism itself, our proposed solutions for actually solving these existentially important problems couldn't be further apart. Where I believe that the malevolent greed and intractable nature of capitalist security states clearly points to the necessity of uprising and revolutionary action to overthrow capitalism and replace it with something more egalitarian and sustainable, George typically settles for milquetoast tax reforms targeting the wealthy and convincing billionaires that burning the planet to a crisp will cost them more in the long run. This probably explains why he's a Guardian columnist and I'm an angry internet anarchist, but I would also argue that only one of us is being honest about what it's actually going to take to accomplish the staggering degree of change our society requires to save our habitable biosphere before billions of people die in an ongoing climate catastrophe.
I bring this up not to mock Monbiot, but rather to point out that his most recent article is once again an excellent argument for a revolution against capitalism, that somehow still finds a proposed "solution" that is not a revolution against capitalism - in this case, Brazil's extremely modest proposal of a global 2% tax on the wealth of billionaires.
Who is brave enough to back Brazil’s global tax on billionaires? The answer will define our future
"I think we are all either vaguely or painfully aware that, regardless of changes of government, our needs will be met only if they coincide with the demands of capital. If they run directly counter to those demands, however great and consistent our wishes might be, they scarcely stand a chance.
The response to the pandemic was one test of that proposition. Now the world’s governments face another. Last week, Brazilian climate minister Ana Toni explained a proposal put forward by her government (and now supported by South Africa, Germany and Spain), for a 2% global tax on the wealth of the world’s billionaires. Though it would affect just 3,000 of the super-rich, it would raise around $250bn (£195bn): a significant contribution either to global climate funds or to poverty alleviation.
Radical? Not at all. According to calculations by Oxfam, the wealth of billionaires has been growing so fast in recent years that maintaining it at a constant level would have required an annual tax of 12.8%. Trillions, in other words: enough to address global problems long written off as intractable."
Look, there's nothing at all wrong with Monbiot's argument that billionaire oligarchs should bear a greater taxation burden than they do now because it's going to cost a lot of money for the human species to solve the problems primarily created by the capitalist activities of, you guessed it, billionaire oligarchs. It's just that when George's article goes on to explain that those very same oligarchs operate with impunity on a global scale, have enough money to literally buy the governments of our nation states, and clearly have no intention of ceasing to push our species right off the ecological cliff for profit, it becomes incredibly obvious that not only will they never agree to pay such a tax, but even if they did it wouldn't do enough to address the fatal power imbalances he's talking about here; facts that Monbiot himself more or less concedes in this very article.
All of which is to say that while I of course support the idea of clawing back as much wealth as possible from the ultra-rich in our predatory, seemingly-genocidal ruling classes, it's going to take a lot more than that to get us out of the mindbogglingly awful crisis capitalists and capitalism have created for our species here. I'm glad George is still working hard in the mainstream media to describe the outlines of the problem, but he's absolutely fucking delusional if he thinks tax reform under the very same capitalist order that's killing us represents an actual solution. What it's going to take is ending capitalism (and the extraction that fuels it) while pooling our collective resources together to save a biosphere habitable by 8B+ humans; and given that the cult of capitalism and the ultra-wealthy ruling class that run our society are highly unlikely to do that willingly, no matter how many people it kills to keep going on like we are now, that strongly points to revolution as the only viable alternative to extinction.
Petition Signers Want Elon Musk to Be ‘The Richest Man in Town’ This Christmas ( www.commondreams.org )
https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/a-graphic-shows-billionaire-elon-musk-superimposed-into-an-image-from-the-film-it-s-a-wonderful-life.png?id=62495926&width=1200&height=400&coordinates=0%2C79%2C0%2C295 ...