Alternative proposal. Billionaires should pay an annual 75% tax on any income and any wealth in excess of 1 billion.

If taxation were done properly there would be no billionaires. They are a symptom of a broken tax system.

Can we be specific and say "2% of their purported assets valuation must be paid in liquid cash annually" so they can stop loopholing taxes to oblivion?

Oh look, all of the sudden corporate entities are paying taxes instead of saying "oops yeah we broke even before bonuses."

2% what the…. My income above 50k is taxed 48% i think. Wtf 2%

Edit: yes i know the difference, but still…

It’s weird to think I can be given stocks and have to pay real taxes for the value of those taxes. But somebody who starts a business and owns a large number of shares never has to pay taxes on those shares even though they got them when they were worth $0 and now are worth possibly billions.

Often times those shares can be used as leverage for a loan providing the shareholder with the quality of life of a billionaire without ever paying the taxes on earning the billions.

This feature of taxes ONLY benefits the super wealthy and everybody else just has to pay taxes for every dollar of wealth earned.

Try 90%, and they'd still have obscene wealth afterwards.

2% make it 80%. Eat the rich.

2?? Dont stroke em too hard you might get a rash

Two percent? Yeah fuck that, how about they pay their fair share instead?

Why not 20%? It's not like they need all that money.

Absolutely 100% this. We need a global effort so they can't just move to some tax shelter.
2% is also cheap IMO, nobody needs to have that much money.

say G20 ministers

Kind of a misleading headline. That's not the G20. That's three countries that are in the G20.

So I understand the ultra-rich's way of doing business now is to never realize gains but rather take loans against a percentage of their unrealized gains (backed of course, by the unrealized gains themselves) and spend that money rather than ever make any income. Does anybody know of any good ideas to handle that type of scenario?

What about billionaires paying a 50% tax until there are no more billionaires?? I like that a lot more!!

I would add that if you are securing loans above a certain total amount or used for certain purchase types to make a purchase, that purchase is subject to a sales tax that must come out of the purchaser’s pocket. The trouble with wealth taxes is that most of the “wealth” isn’t liquid, but it is often used, for example, as collateral to purchase Twitter. In this instance, the wealth used should be treated as liquid taxable assets. I think those taxes should come either from the purchaser divesting from some amount of assets or a straight cash, not from another loan, payment.

Meanwhile every Party of the current German government, as well as the opposition former conservatives now far-right populists and the fascist party are furiously rejecting wealth taxation.

I don't buy it for Germany, because the government leading social democratic party has been focusing exclusively on income taxation and blocked any advances towards reimplementing wealth taxation over the past 26 years of which they only were 4 years not in the government.

When you see a bunch of comments suggesting ideas that make it obvious the commenters don't hold any grasp on economics or finance whatsoever.

Billionaires should pay 100% tax over $999,999.99 of personal wealth.

Some people still get to be wealthy. Problem solved.

On top of a wealth tax, there should be a fraction of a percent financial transaction tax. It would have no effect on the average consumer, but a lot of effect on the investor class.

Or solve it the Vietnamese way