The wealth tax on the rich that even the rich want to pay

The wealth tax on the rich that even the rich want to pay

What happens when an economist proposes a 2% tax on fortunes over £10 million and the first to defend it are some of the very millionaires affected? It has peine in the UK: a group of large wealth holders signed a public letter asking to pay the surcharge in order to curb the rent-seeking that, they argue, threatens to turn the country feudal. The proposal has not gone down well in every boardroom. The media have received it with hostility and landowners, according to a documentary cited in the conversation, warn that they would fight it and win, because they always have.

The episode serves as a gateway to a broader discussion about the global shift to the right and its economic bill. The starting thesis is explicit: the corrective pendulum against globalism has turned into a programme that hits those at the bottom. And the Argentine case works as a testing ground, with figures that read in radically opposite ways depending on who is presenting them.

What a wealth tax actually taxes, and why it draws so much opposition

The technical argument against the 2% tax is that it confuses wealth with income. High wealth is often locked up in assets — shares in one's own company, property — that generate no automatic liquidity. The calculation circulating in the exchange is illustrative: a £30 million property portfolio with a net return of 5% before tax can end up at 2.5% after corporate tax and income tax. Subtracting another 2% on the asset leaves a margin that does not cover inflation.

The objection has legs. It also has an answer: if those £30 million yield returns, the extra 2% amounts to £600,000, a fraction of the income generated. The blind spot in the debate is that both calculations are correct and describe different realities: the pure rentier and the entrepreneur with capital concentrated in their own company.

The Argentine case: the same figures, two opposite stories

The conversation heats up when it crosses the Atlantic. Against the reading of social deterioration, a battery of figures is deployed: new rents in Buenos Aires are falling 32.9% in real terms, the supply of rental flats is growing 326%, annual inflation has dropped from 211.4% to 33%, and the trade surplus has jumped from −6,925 to +18,899 million dollars. GDP is growing 4.4% after the previous −1.6%.

Those who defend the austerity programme sum it up like this: the country had been trapped for decades in the Peronist cycle and there is no option but to tighten one's belt for a while. Those who criticise it do not dispute the inflation figures, but the social cost of the therapy and the drift of the man himself. Poverty, on the list of indicators, is left without a figure. That gap speaks too.

The gap that won't close: from complaint to action

The final stretch of the exchange leaves macroeconomics behind and enters the terrain of political strategy. Some argue that voting works, if only to punish those who managed the crisis. Others respond that the real goal of any government is to reduce the purchasing power of the common people, regardless of party colour. And one lone voice proposes moving from complaint to action, with the ambiguity of never clarifying what exactly breaking things means.

The underlying question hangs over the whole exchange: whether the pendulum swing to the right is carried out within the rules of the democratic game or against them. The landowners in the documentary already warned that they always win. With these materials, the basket will be paid for by those with no estates to defend.