Tax me now!

January 9, 2024 9:51 AM

Marlene Engelhorn is an Austrian heiress who gained media attention after saying in an interview that she is willing to donate 90 percent of her wealth and is in favour of a wealth tax. Marlene is a highly vocal advocate for a global wealth tax regularly appearing in newspapers and the media, she is also a founding member of the German speaking initiative Tax me now , asking for higher taxes on the wealthy.

Yesterday she launched the advisory group which will determine how 25 Million Euro of her inheritance will be used.

Here an Interview in English.

posted by 15L06 (31 comments total)

Elog checks in on his SpaceX team for the fourth time today.
posted by torokunai at 9:59 AM on January 9 [1 favorite]

Marlene needs to be placed on a defenestration watch.
posted by CynicalKnight at 10:10 AM on January 9 [3 favorites]

I am supportive of these sorts of initiatives but also suspicious of them.

There are lots and lots of steps that wealthy people could take to increase their tax burden, and never really any sign that the wealthy people who support higher taxes on the wealthy are taking those steps.

At least in Canada, you can literally write a cheque to the government to reduce the National Debt -- and some people do -- but not many and not generally in huge, wealth-reducing amounts. I imagine other countries would also find a way to accept money if wealthy residents wanted to pony it up.

I'd like to be proven wrong by counter-example -- wealthy wealth tax advocates who are actually giving their money to government, not charity, but I haven't run across any in my (admittedly limited) reading.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:12 AM on January 9 [5 favorites]

Ooo tax me baby…that’s it you know how I like it…
posted by chronkite at 10:20 AM on January 9

There's nothing inconsistent with advocating for higher taxes for people with your income and wealth but simultaneously donating to your preferred charity. The first is because you believe it would be better for society if all people in people in your financial situation paid more taxes; the second is your directing funds to a source that you think would do the most good. After all, the government's spending priorities are determined by the same combination of forces that are also determining its tax laws, neither of which are likely to match your personal preferences.

Now, you can simultaneously push for higher taxes and for the government to support the causes you personally prioritize, but the chances of that occurring are even smaller than just tax increases.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:24 AM on January 9 [5 favorites]

In the unlikely event that I won the lottery, I wouldn't turn around and donate the money to the government - I would definitely spend it on lobbying for higher taxes, voting rights and labor protections. Forcing everyone to pay their fair share will have a much bigger impact than just one individual making voluntary donations to reduce the national debt. So, I guess I'm on team heiress here...
posted by catcafe at 10:46 AM on January 9 [9 favorites]

Is anyone publicizing how much of their wealth they are dedicating to lobbying and advocacy then?
posted by jacquilynne at 10:56 AM on January 9

Yes, the problem with just giving money to the government is that, although you could, even the very wealthiest people in the world don't really have that much money compared to a country's total tax income. A single individual giving 90% of their wealth to the government would probably still only amount to fractions of one percent of the total. That's why higher taxes are much better than individual effort, you need all the ultra-ultra wealthy to pay, and also all the merely ultra-wealthy and very wealthy to pay their part, to make an impact.

Using the money to lobby for higher taxes for everyone is almost certainly more productive, and while wealthy people giving to charity is something I'm also very skeptical of in general, it does allow them to give money to a single cause they're interested in, and, crucially, actually make a big impact on that one thing.

(In my particular case, if it were me, I would probably also want to give directly to charities, just to avoid 12% of it (in the US) going to the defense budget).
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 10:56 AM on January 9 [9 favorites]

Taaax ooon meee
Taaax meee nooow
I've gooot looots
O-of mon-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyy
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:58 AM on January 9 [4 favorites]

The "could write a check to buy down the national debt right now" argument doesn't really work for the same reason that a whole lot of the discussion around individual climate change actions is bogus: If I change my energy use patterns, that's great, but it generally has the impact of lowering the costs to other people who use the energy sources that I've eschewed, and as we see in electricity generation, and natural gas, there are a ton of other people willing to step in and take advantage of that gap (hellooooo Texas crypto miners).

So, yeah, I'm willing to give her a pass on how she's directing her individual action if she's fighting for structural change.
posted by straw at 11:07 AM on January 9 [4 favorites]

Just a reminder for all of us to get our brains around what it means for a billionaire (the Engelhorn family's net worth being estimated at more than $4 billion) to give up 90% of their wealth. If you have $1 billion and you give up 90% of your wealth, you have a measly $100 million left over. You can easily imagine the suffering involved! If you invested that at a 0.1% interest rate, you're barely earning $100,000 interest income each year (without touching the principle), where median household income in the U.S. is around $75,000. So, like, barely scraping by, is what I'm saying. We should all feel warmth and affection for people willing to make such heroic sacrifices.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 11:09 AM on January 9 [7 favorites]

> At least in Canada, you can literally write a cheque to the government to reduce the National Debt

here's links for the US: pay.gov

you CAN just donate to reduce the public debt, but you can also direct it specifically in many ways if you're not comfortable with that.
posted by Clowder of bats at 11:11 AM on January 9 [2 favorites]

One way to fuck the ultra wealthy: Tax loans on unrealized capital gains as income or make them realize the value of the capital gain and pay taxes on it the moment they use it as collateral against a loan.

Because that's how the fuckers treat them.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 11:14 AM on January 9 [11 favorites]

Require someone to estimate their net current wealth. Tax people on their increase in net current wealth.

Tax loans are available on this, with an interest rate based on fed prime rate, that only have to be repaid based on cash flow: but loans are included in cash flow. (Any wealth transfer counts as cash flow) These tax loans can be bought off with losses (so if you have an asset that you buy for 10,000$, goes to 1 million dollars, then collapses back to 100,000$, you owe taxes on the 990,000$ gain, and interest on those taxes, but when it drops to 100,000$ you can write off some of your tax-debt using the income loss).

Require all assets have their owners and controllers be described publicly. (Controllers refers to people who have significant control over the asset due to contracts or other similar reasons; the reason why someone is considered a controller must be described). This includes corporations, foundations, etc.
posted by NotAYakk at 11:31 AM on January 9

she is willing to donate 90 percent of her wealth

We're waiting.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 11:38 AM on January 9

There are lots and lots of steps that wealthy people could take to increase their tax burden, and never really any sign that the wealthy people who support higher taxes on the wealthy are taking those steps.

Adam Cadre, back in 2011: So when multibillionaire Warren Buffett calls for a rule that CEOs be required to pay taxes at a rate at least as high as that of their secretaries, or a group of millionaires goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for millionaires' tax breaks to be reversed, detractors such as Grover Norquist and Gregg Easterbook are being willfully obtuse when they reply that nothing is stopping anyone from paying more than they owe. Again: "we think we should pay higher taxes" does not mean that I think I should pay higher taxes, and he thinks he should pay higher taxes, and she thinks she should pay higher taxes. It means that she thinks we should pay higher taxes, and he thinks we should pay higher taxes, and I think we should pay higher taxes. It's that whole collective action thing again. And as numbers are the key advantage the 99% hold over the 1%, naturally the defenders of the status quo are going to use rhetorical tricks to pretend collective action doesn't exist.
posted by jackbishop at 11:43 AM on January 9 [5 favorites]

I am willing to accept 15% of her wealth as an one time donation. I've heard that dealing with me is quite taxing if that helps.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 12:42 PM on January 9 [1 favorite]

Is anyone publicizing how much of their wealth they are dedicating to lobbying and advocacy then?

Well, there was this one guy.... OK, bad example. Really, really, really bad.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:48 PM on January 9 [1 favorite]

It still blows my mind that just 8 men own the same wealth as half of the rest of the world.

Even if you took the wealth of all the multi-billionaires down to 'just one billion', that'd be a huge amount of capital to share amongst the people with negative equity. Huge.

Or just affect the lives of those 8 richest people (in far less impactful ways than they've destroy the lives of millions), and reduce just those 8 people's wealth to a measly 100million, so they can live off the interest alone pretty damm comfortably.

Total wealth could be capped at $100million worldwide however people try to respin in. And anything above that goes to the worldwide UBI fund.

Redistribute the top hoarders wealth to all the people around then world they'd essentially stolen it from, in the form of a Universal Basic Income.

Then watch the trickle up effect of people escaping abusive working practices, property wouldn't be owned on mass by a few rich landlords but could even make property more affordable as less is hoarded by the few, income security would reduce so much stress and thus improve health, etc.

Oh yeah, and whilst we're at it, give everyone around the world a 3 month holiday, planned in advance, with eveyone around the world involved all at once, on a global collaborative process. Everyone gets a guaranteed livavable basic income for those three months from that UBI fund, heavy industry and most of the oil extraction pauses for a bit, maybe climate change is slowed briefly at least too, and we can eradicate Covid on a worldwide level too, just as they did in Aotearoa NZ during those first waves.

This is my current plan to world peace anyway.
posted by many-things at 12:55 PM on January 9 [8 favorites]

I’m more impressed by the actions of gazillionaires who earned their money than someone who just got money from a relative who married a rich guy. Has she ever had a job?
posted by Ideefixe at 1:15 PM on January 9

If you have $1 billion and you give up 90% of your wealth, you have a measly $100 million left over.

Even more interestingly, if you achieved a 7% average return on your $100m, you could be a billionaire again in about 35 years.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:17 PM on January 9 [1 favorite]

The S&P 500 long- term inflation-adjusted return is 7.4%, so that 7% would get you back to billionaire status while letting you enjoy $400k per year (again, adjusted for inflation).

This is how the mega wealthy become ultra wealthy in a single generation without even trying. And why we need a continuous wealth tax, not just a one-time tax or one-off voluntary donations.
posted by jedicus at 2:35 PM on January 9 [2 favorites]

What we need, too, is an economic system which isn't based on constantly "growing".
posted by maxwelton at 2:59 PM on January 9 [6 favorites]

Oh yeah, and whilst we're at it, give everyone around the world a 3 month holiday, planned in advance, with eveyone around the world involved all at once, on a global collaborative process.

Nurses? Garbage collectors? People who run the sewage treatment plants? Or the electricity generation and distribution? Farmers? Food transport? Insulin production?
posted by Mitheral at 3:49 PM on January 9 [2 favorites]

I’m more impressed by the actions of gazillionaires who earned their money

No gazillionaires earned their money.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 5:20 PM on January 9 [5 favorites]

Redistribute the top hoarders wealth to all the people around then world they'd essentially stolen it from, in the form of a Universal Basic Income.

I think you're overestimating the amount of wealth owned by billionaires. There are 2640 billionaires in the world, and their fortunes total about 12.2 trillion dollars. A lot of money, to be sure, but divided by the 8 billion or so people in the world, it's only 1525 dollars per person. It'd be a nice one-time lump sum to receive, especially for the poorest half of the population, but it's not anything you can base a UBI on. For comparison, the world's average per capita yearly income is around 9700 dollars, so 1525 dollars is a little less than two months world average wages.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 5:31 PM on January 9

(For comparison, the total net worth of everyone on Earth with a net worth of a million dollars or more (including billionaires), some 56 million people, is about 158 trillion. If you took all their money and redistributed it evenly, it'd be almost 20 thousand dollars per person on Earth, which is a lot more, and would probably change a lot more lives. But still, the fact is, there are a whole lot of people on Earth, and the vast majority of them are poor.)
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 5:35 PM on January 9 [1 favorite]

make them realize the value of the capital gain and pay taxes on it the moment they use it as collateral against a loan

This strikes me as an extremely interesting idea -- particularly because "securities-backed lending" actually starts working at a much lower level than I originally thought. I had some idea that it only for gazillionaires, but the limits start much, much, much farther down the economic ladder.

...so the amount being "stolen" by people doing such lending is much larger than I thought. Even if you only said something like the first X% of assets must be revalued and gains tax paid on only that slice, it might still make an impact.
posted by aramaic at 6:17 PM on January 9

It'd be a nice one-time lump sum to receive, especially for the poorest half of the population, but it's not anything you can base a UBI on.

On the flip side, the very existence of extreme wealth is the driver for wealth-creating assets being as expensive as they are, and the rents attracted by those assets accounting for as much of ordinary people's monthly outgoings as they do. It would be a lot easier to get by on what from today's vantage point looks like an unrealistically meagre UBI if so much of that income did not immediately flow directly from tenants' pockets back into those of the world's wealthiest landlords.

Trickle-down is actually not a bad model of economics; it's just that most people's mental models have up and down reversed. Money just naturally wants to trickle out of your pocket and down the drains provided, and if it's allowed to, most of it will just accumulate in dank and stagnant pools in the sumps of society where the most self-important social parasites swim.

Arranging for any given droplet of money to need to visit more pockets as it trickled down from UBI to sump would let a lot more people get a lot more use out of it along the way.
posted by flabdablet at 12:35 AM on January 10

I can see that this is going to over well with the 1%.
posted by DJZouke at 5:49 AM on January 10

#notallbillionaires
posted by flabdablet at 6:40 AM on January 10