The Financial Times interviewed me for its piece on how democracies should tax the super rich without driving them out. My contribution ran with my position unchanged from what I set out earlier this year in the Tax Journal in my article Why Private Wealth Is The Next Tax Frontier.
The choice between taxing private wealth and cutting essential services is no longer just an economic dilemma. It is a political and moral reckoning. The idea that safety nets for the disabled or elderly should be sacrificed while vast pools of untaxed wealth remain untouched is becoming harder to justify.
The numbers the FT sets out are worth pausing on. The first Forbes billionaires list in 1987 carried 140 names. The 2025 list runs past 3,000, worth $16 trillion between them. Elon Musk alone is now valued at more than the entire 1987 cohort combined.
Income tax does not reach most of that wealth. It sits in real estate, private equity, and corporate stakes. Wealth taxes have been tried and quietly abandoned across most of the OECD. Only Spain, Norway and Switzerland still tax overall net wealth in Europe, and the yields are modest.
Mobility is the constraint every finance minister now lives with. The UK is feeling it directly after the dismantling of the non dom regime. Italy and the UAE are the visible beneficiaries.
What I told the FT, and what I continue to argue, is that reform of existing levies on property, capital gains, gifts and inheritances will deliver more than any new wealth tax. Switzerland shows what works. Low rates, broad base, predictable rules. France, the UK, and to a degree Spain have shown what does not.
The full article is in the FT. Worth the read. Published by Emma Agyemang on the Financial Times.