Spain put up wealth taxes
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> The rate starts at 1.7% for those with net wealth of €3m, rising to 3.5% for fortunes over €10m. It is payable on worldwide assets.
An almost 2% rate on wealth of less than 10M feels wrong to me. These are mostly people who have worked hard to become rich and it is taking away what they deserve IMO, after they already worked for it under one set of rules. I feel like the thresholds should be more like 100M and above. Also it doesn’t seem appropriate to tax worldwide assets. Why should Spain have any claim to someone’s assets in some other location entirely, especially for this type of retroactive wealth tax?
It's the only (easy) way to make a wealth tax like this work. If you don't target total assets regardless of where they're held, dodging the tax is as "simple" as moving your assets out of Spain. You could implement complex "exit" taxes for foreign asset transfers and purchases, but a flat "we will tax everything you own, everywhere" is simpler.
Seems the effective wealth tax rate for single-digit millionaires is closer to 0.34% than 1.7% in practice.
ref: https://www.skyboundwealth.com/news-and-insights/spanish-wea...
(Also worth mentioning since some commenters seem to have missed it: Spain has two wealth taxes, the older "wealth tax" and the recent "solidarity tax". The older wealth tax had been functionally abolished in several regions, and the new solidarity tax effectively replaced it, with higher asset thresholds.)
"What is clear is that, two years on, a predicted exodus of the rich, trumpeted in endless alarmist headlines, has not materialised. Forbes counted 26 Spanish billionaires in 2021. This year, it lists 34, with a combined net worth comfortably over $200bn."
"So far, there is no sign that it has affected growth. Spain was the world’s fastest-expanding major advanced economy last year, outpacing even the US, with GDP up 3.2%. By contrast, growth in the UK and France last year barely scraped above 1%."