Friday, October 01, 2010

Tax on "super rich"

There is a report that Taiwan is considering to introduce a tax on the "super rich". This tax is imposed on purchase of luxury home, cars and other items.

I prefer to have a high rate of tax based on extremely high income. There is no need to have bankers, lawyers, doctors and corporate executives earning several million dollars a year. Their earnings are the fees that are paid by their customers, who are not rich people, and may not be aware about the high fees that are being charged or are being sold bad investments at inflated prices.  The high rate of tax will discourage them from earning too much, and will be good for the people in general. A high rate of tax will encourage ethical behavior.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Yes, very easy to make money. I recd a letter from one of the 3 local banks that with effect next year, the ATM card they issued me would need to be replaced. To replaced with same features that is ATM and NETS, there will now be a $10 yearly fee. To replace with ATM only, it is still free at the moment. So stroke of a pen, the bank with at least 1 million account will make 10 million doing exactly he same thing. So what to do as I need ATM and NETS.

ron said...

Sometimes it is not that they charge high fees. It is the customer who is willing to pay more ( foolishly or otherwise)!

We live in a world where we do not wish to do things for ourselves but are willing to pay others to do it for us.

Pay advisers to manage our money.
( and scream when they do it poorly)

Pay people to wash our clothes
(and curse how incompetent they are)

Pay educators to teach our children
(and blame them for our children's behaviours)

Pay politicians to steer our economy
( and protest that they are overpaid)

If only each of us take charge of our own destinies and learn how to manage it, there will be no market for all these people and the fees will come down.

We are not stupid and are very well informed from our endless surfing.. unless it is idle gossip

AB said...

Taxing the super rich is one way to re-distribute wealth. However it is after the effect and may or may not benefit the lower levels of workers.

My view is that it is necessary to tackle the problem at its root which is the high income gap. That is, have measures that directly control and limit the income differential of job levels, in addition to a heavy tax on other high incomes.

yx said...

There is another line of thought. Professionals such as doctors and lawyers deserve to earn considerably higher income because of the value they are able to provide and the level of difficulty in their profession. Scarcity creates value.

What they do with their income is another matter. I may not have the numbers but there are definitely people who earn high income contribute through philantrophic acts.

There may be concerns over how the extra tax imposed on the rich may be used for country development. Good governance then has to be ensured.

AB said...

"Professionals such as doctors and lawyers deserve to earn considerably higher income because of the value they are able to provide...".

My view is that such school of thought, essentially meritocracy, is designed to abuse and exploit the majority who is disadvantaged or powerless in some way.

One will say I deserve to be paid twice more, another say ten times, hundred times, thousand times, million times....

Can greed ever be satisfied?

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