World News

Nobody who held this opinion was ever able to even give me a rough idea of an explanation how it should supposedly damage the economy.

Because if you tax the rich, they move away! And that's clearly bad because...
They take their wealth with them! Just think of all the jewellery that will hang of people's necks in other countries and all the overpriced art that was never publicly displayed, now not visible elsewhere.
And of course they'll take all the housing and factories and the land they're built on, stuff it all in their pockets and fly away with it.

Just think of all the jobs. Not the jobs, companies are already offshoring now, of course.
And ignore that companies make such decisions based on productivity, available infrastructure and supply chain networks.
No, they'll move to less profitable countries because clearly not paying taxes is more important to rich people than making more money.

And of course, we can't tax people when they move away, so we shouldn't tax them to avoid this.

Small correction: Them sitting on it and growing isn't quite it doing nothing - for it to grow, the money has to be somewhere in the economy "doing" things. Then the rich person gets money for doing nothing because the company (and by extension its workers) are partially "theirs".

The benefit of a wealth tax is less freeing up that money, and more so not enabling rich people to spend the money they get for doing nothing on excessive luxuries that only serve to pollute the planet and take up resources that could be used for useful things (and also doing something against excessive wealth accumulation in general, which is imo capitalisms greatest flaw - money leads to more money, and money = power, and we are living in the reality resulting from that)

I think it is more of a threat along the lines of "if you tax me more, I will play even dirtier to keep my wealth, lay off people in companies I am a major shareholder of etc and therefore economy will be worse". And politicians know that many people will blame the government for any damage to the economy and they therefore bend the knee not to lose their seats. Everything really would be better if people understood who their real enemy is.

Personally, I would argue that taxing them is helping the economy.

Basically, even with only a 2% wealth tax, that's money that would otherwise just sit in some account as shares or something that would only serve to make the wealthy more wealthy.

By moving the funds to the people by way of taxes, the money can be utilized for social programs, like housing and healthcare for the poor for example. Which would then give those people an easier path to sobriety (if needed), a "fixed address" so they can enroll in job training or simply get a job, since most jobs require you to have a fixed address for seemingly no good reason...

My point is, the money could be used to enhance the lives of all citizens. Rather than just people like that asshole.

In the current day an age, when Rent Seeking is a massive fraction of the Economic structure, people with tons of wealth are actually the main problem since they're using that wealth to take limited resources away from the reach of the rest (with their higher wealth they can outbid the rest on price) to then rent those resources to the rest, extracting money from them - so for example, they can buy residential and commercial real estate and then rent them to people who need a place to live or conduct business.

I mean, in a way he is right: taking money away from the rich would damage the Economy as it is now and as measured by GDP because so much of what is counted as GDP nowadays is some people extorting money from the rest because they own assets which the rest need in order to merelly survive. If the big asset owners doing most of the Rent Seeking were forced to pay taxes on assets owned, they would have to divest from at least some of those assets, thus reducing their rent seeking activities which in turn would make the GDP number go down (at least at first) simply because the money flows from asset renters to the asset owners would be less and or in other words, there would be reduced trading in the Economy (that this is unecessary trading is irrelevant for this number).

However, less rent seeking would actually be better for everybody else, so the median quality of life would go up even whilst the GDP number would be implying that the Economy was getting worse.