more to understand about wealth/income inequity...
neoliberal oecd position 2021:
"...Policy makers have a range of instruments and tools at hand to increase the financial resilience of
vulnerable households, and to limit the increasing wealth concentration at the top end of the distribution.
A number of those are discussed in (OECD, 2021[4]; 2018[5]) and (Balestra et al., 2021[6]) and include
measures along the following principles:
Support vulnerable lower-income and lower-wealth households’ capacity to save and
accumulate wealth:
Develop attractive savings schemes for small savers. Where tax-preferred accounts are
available to encourage household savings, ensure that these are targeted at lower-income
lower-wealth households through deposit limits and/or capped (e.g. annual) contributions;
Enhance the neutrality and progressivity of taxes on household savings by reducing the
differences in tax treatment applying to different types of capital assets, e.g. by limiting tax
exemptions on capital gains;
....Limit or cap mortgage interest deductibility, as such deductibility tends to provide greater
benefits to wealthier households in absolute terms;
....Consider schemes of minimum capital endowments (“minimum inheritance”) for young
adults, as a starting capital for funding education or starting a business.
OECD WISE Centre Policy Insights
Strengthen financial literacy by helping individuals and households navigate the challenges
and opportunities of financial markets and promoting good budgeting, planning and saving
practices;
Review the design of asset tests in social insurance programmes, to avoid discouraging
low-income households from accumulating wealth and thereby creating poverty traps;
Design equitable homeownership support programmes for younger and lower-income
households.
Strengthen the progressivity of tax and spending and ensure that all wealthy households
contribute to the financing of public services:
Adequately tax personal capital income (dividends, interest, capital gains), which tends to
be concentrated at the top of the income and wealth distribution and often benefits from
preferential tax treatment;
Consider making recurrent taxes on immovable property progressive, and ensure that they
are levied on regularly updated property values;
Consider making better use of well-designed inheritance and gift taxation, by scaling back
regressive tax exemptions and reliefs, limiting opportunities for tax planning and avoidance,
and taxing wealth transfers at progressive rates. This may require addressing political
obstacles often associated with inheritance tax reforms by providing information on
inherited wealth and inequality, the way inheritance taxes work and who they apply to;
Possibly consider ways to tax beneficiaries on wealth transfers they receive over their life
through a tax on lifetime wealth transfers;
Where annual wealth taxes are levied, ensure that they are well-designed and effectively
levied on the wealthiest households by having relatively high tax exemption thresholds,
scaling back tax exemptions and reliefs that tend to be regressive, and addressing tax
avoidance;
Ensure the integrity of tax systems by limiting opportunities for aggressive tax planning and
avoidance, and strengthen efforts to combat tax evasion. In particular, continue to make
progress on international tax transparency through the exchange of information between
tax administrations to combat offshore tax evasion..."
oecd.org
the genius victorian, charles dickens, wrote a bit about it back in the day...
gutenberg.org
and the victorian mary shelley warned prior to that:
gutenberg.org
lots to learn, always. |
