To ensure this framework works in practice, where past wealth taxes failed, we must design the law around two non-negotiable pillars. First, there must be no exemptions. Previous wealth taxes often failed because lawmakers carved out broad exclusions, especially for business assets. Since billionaire fortunes consist largely of corporate shares, these loopholes rendered many wealth taxes ineffective. A modern minimum tax must apply to all forms of wealth above the threshold.<\/p>\n
Second, the legislation should include an ironclad tax exile shield. Critics argue that billionaires would relocate to low-tax jurisdictions. But tax competition is a political choice, not a law of nature. Any country can unilaterally dictate that if an individual spends their life and becomes ultra-rich within its borders, the state will continue to collect the minimum wealth tax for 5, 10, or 15 years after their departure. International information-sharing agreements already allow tax authorities to monitor overseas assets and enforce compliance through domestic property or corporate holdings.<\/p>\n
The fiscal benefits would also be substantial. In the UK alone, applying a 2% minimum tax to fortunes above \u00a3100 million would raise around \u00a315 billion annually \u2013 roughly 10 times the savings expected from Keir Starmer\u2019s catastrophic 2024 decision to scrap the winter fuel allowance for retirees.<\/p>\n
The Labour government faces a clear and urgent choice. If it continues to ask ordinary citizens to bear the brunt of public finance adjustments while allowing extreme wealth to go untaxed, it will deepen public disillusionment and fuel the rise of the extreme right. When families are forced to make impossible choices while the ultra-wealthy thrive, turning to radical political alternatives is a symptom of a deeper pain. This political drift thrives when the social contract is broken, and nothing breaks it faster than a tax system that is more lenient on billionaires than on ordinary people.<\/p>\n
The next prime minister has no choice: to protect British democracy and address the deep sense of betrayal fuelling this extremist wave, the new administration must act. Britain has often been ahead of the curve, from pioneering progressive income taxation in the early 20th century to helping build the modern welfare state after 1945. By confronting the concentration of wealth and power with a 2% minimum tax, Britain can once again lead the world. The age of trillionaires is not inevitable: it is a political choice, and the time to choose a different path is now.<\/p>\n
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Gabriel Zucman is professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics, Summer Research Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding director of the International Tax Observatory. He\u00a0is\u00a0the\u00a0author\u00a0of\u00a0We Need to Tax Billionaires<\/a>, out now (Basic Books, \u00a39.99). You can buy it from the\u00a0Big Issue shop<\/a>\u00a0on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.<\/p>\n Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this?\u00a0Get in touch and tell us more<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Change a vendor\u2019s life.<\/p>\n Buy from your local Big Issue vendor every week \u2013 and always take the magazine. It\u2019s how vendors earn with dignity and move forward.<\/p>\n You can also support online: Thank you for standing with Big Issue vendors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Read more: Whether exercised by Musk or anyone else is ultimately beside the point. Democracy should never depend…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,1361,366,3686,253,613,14,1073,11927],"class_list":["post-79594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-britain","tag-elon-musk","tag-from-the-magazine","tag-inequality","tag-money","tag-opinion","tag-politics","tag-poverty","tag-wealth-tax"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116888552285102870","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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