Latest news with #ultrarich
The Guardian
15-07-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
What is a wealth tax and would it work in the UK?
A wealth tax is an annual levy on an individual's total net assets – property, investments, cash, even antiques or art – above a given threshold. The idea is to directly target accumulated wealth, not just income. In the UK there are already some taxes on wealth – inheritance tax, capital gains tax, and council tax – that could be tightened up before a new tax is introduced. A modest wealth tax aimed at the ultra-rich, for example those with assets over £10m, could generate significant funds. One study suggests a global levy on the top 0.5% could raise about $2.1tn – roughly 7% of national budgets – with the UK alone bringing in around $31bn a year. That revenue could be transformative if used to fund the NHS, education, affordable housing, climate resilience, and long-term care. There is also a political benefit: by launching something new with a specific name, it would appeal to the majority of voters who back higher taxes on the very rich. In Britain, like much of the developed world, the wealth of the ultra-rich has ballooned dramatically in recent decades, while ordinary workers have faced stagnant wages and prolonged austerity and there are record numbers of children growing up in poverty. In 1990 the Sunday Times rich list recorded 15 UK billionaires. By 2023, that number had risen to 171, holding an average of £4bn each. Today the richest 1% in the UK own more wealth than the bottom 70% and, according to Oxfam, UK billionaires pay 'effective tax rates close to 0.3% of their wealth'. Advocates say a wealth tax is a fair way of redistributing a small proportion of that money to help those most in need. Campaigners also say the money could be used to fund climate transition efforts. Taxing assets tied to high-carbon lifestyles – yachts, private jets, fossil fuel holdings – could shift both wealth and incentives while raising revenue for green infrastructure projects. Surveys consistently find strong backing among the public for a wealth tax. Three-quarters of Britons were found to back a 2% tax on wealth above £10m. Many wealthy individuals, including those in Patriotic Millionaires UK, also publicly endorse such measures as patriotic and socially responsible. Because wealth comes in diverse forms – business equity, art, land, intellectual property – it is hard to measure, especially if there is an army of lawyers trying to hide it. This complicates enforcement and drives up administrative costs. There is also the spectre of 'wealth flight', fears that wealthy people will pack up their riches and leave if the government tries to tax them further. An analysis by the Tax Justice Network found that there were an average of 30 news pieces a day last year raising the prospect of a wealth exodus. But the evidence is inconclusive at best and the analysis found that the 9,500 millionaires it has been claimed left the UK in 2024 represented 0.3% of the UK's 3.06 million people with assets of more than £1m. It also highlighted other places where the introduction of a wealth tax led to little or no 'wealth exodus'. For instance in Scandinavia, after wealth tax reforms, only 0.01% of the top 0.5% relocated and in the UK changes to non-dom rules in 2017 showed just a 0.02% move. The report found tax concerns were low on the list of concerns of the ultra-wealthy when deciding where to live: 'Tax is an inconsequential factor in the decision-making of the vanishingly small percentage of millionaires that do decide to move.' However, the fear that some ultra-wealthy individuals will leave the country entirely is not unfounded. Global capitalism has become highly mobile in recent decades through globalisation, government deregulation and improved connectivity. The Wealth Tax Commission in 2020 said it was likely that some of the ultra-wealthy were likely to leave or move their assets to low-tax regimes or tax havens. There are real challenges in designing a wealth tax and administrative complexity would be a continuing issue. A wealth tax on the ultra-rich might also lead some to move assets out of the UK, but scare stories of mass millionaire departures do not hold up to scrutiny. Advocates say that given widespread public support, the UK's administrative capacity, and pressing fiscal demands, a progressive tax on the ultra-wealthy is feasible and necessary. The challenge lies in careful design, robust implementation and, most of all, political will.
Washington Post
26-06-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
World's richest 1% increased wealth by $33.9 trillion since 2015, Oxfam says
Over the past decade, the world's richest 1 percent have increased their wealth by at least $33.9 trillion, according to a new analysis from the global anti-poverty group Oxfam International. That amount is 'more than enough to eliminate annual poverty 22 times over' when calculating at the World Bank's highest poverty line of $8.30 per day, the group said in a news release which also called for governments to invest in state-led development and to tax the ultrarich, among other requests.
RNZ News
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Feature Interview – The Have and the Have Yachts
There are more billionaires now than ever before. We know their names, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Theil, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. But we don't really know their lives. We share the same planet, but they occupy a different world. The New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos began writing about the uber rich when Americans who professed disdain for billionaires then elected one as President. His essays come together in a book that offers a rare view from the penthouse that reveals the habits, fixations and obsessions of the very rich and how they see the rest of us. The book is called "The Haves and the Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich." Tags: To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Corny, clichéd, lazy — James Frey's eat-the-rich novel is cynical tosh
James Frey boasts that it took him a mere 57 days to write Next to Heaven, a trashy murder-mystery set among the bored ultra-rich in Connecticut. This I can believe. There are books that gain a kinetic force from being composed in a feverish sprint and then there are books where you wonder if some hapless editor has sent the wrong draft to the printer. Next to Heaven feels less like a novel than notes for a novel, prompts even, almost as if Frey tossed together a few reference points — Bret Easton Ellis, Jackie Collins,Couples by John Updike — and asked a a certain large-language model to come up with the goods, although he swears blind he didn't use AI to write it. OK, he conceded to Vanity Fair magazine that he used ChatGPT to help with brand names; and it's impossible to avoid Google's AI these days. But on the creativity point he defended his integrity emphatically: 'I don't use generative AI to write ever, just so we're clear,' he said. I suppose we'll just have to take the author of A Million Little Pieces (2003) at his word. It's just that it reads almost uncannily like a cynical remix of any number of super-rich satires or thrillers we've been treated to in recent years. Like Liane Moriarty's novel Big Little Lies, the story is set in a 'picture perfect' small town. It features a gossipy Greek chorus narration and a heavily foreshadowed murder. There are frustrated cops, themes of domestic abuse and rape and an unlikely sisterhood, which given the tone of Frey's previous book, Katerina ('Cum inside me. Cum inside me. Cum inside me'), seems unlikely to have been born from any native feminist instinct. Then, like the recent TV drama Your Friends and Neighbors starring Jon Hamm, it features a Connecticut fund manager who gets fired, can't bring himself to tell his family and maintains his lavish lifestyle by pinching Patek Philippe watches from his neighbours. But, whatever. Aren't all these eat-the-rich stories about sex, divorce and murder merging into one anyway? And isn't shamelessness the quality Frey, 55, is best known for? He claims he dreamt of becoming 'the most controversial writer on the planet' — not the best, the most controversial. He shot to fame after his drugs memoir A Million Little Pieces was championed by Oprah Winfrey. It then emerged that he had invented large chunks of it. It brought controversy, a South Park parody, millions of sales and precisely zero contrition (as one of the characters in Next to Heaven thinks after she has duped everyone: 'Hahaha. It worked. Hahaha. Hahaha.') 'I grew up with a f*** you attitude,' this maverick has said in interviews, a phrase he puts in the mouth of many of his risk-taking, self-destructive characters. Katerina (2018) won a bad sex award and was described by one critic as 'an impressive attempt at career suicide'. And yet Frey seems to have failed even in this attempt because here he still is. Next to Heaven centres on a drug-fuelled sex party dreamt up by Devon and Belle, the richest two wives in chichi New Bethlehem (a name taken from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood). Devon, an art dealer who comes from old money, is looking to escape her marriage of convenience to Billy, a sadistic bitcoin billionaire with a portrait of Eric Trump on the wall. Belle, who hails from a family of rich criminals in Texas, lives in a property that's 'staffed the f*** up' with nannies, housekeepers and stable hands. Her gentle husband, Teddy, is impotent — unable to achieve 'a coconut-cream explosion'. • What we're reading this week — by the Times books team Devon craves sex with Alex, a former NFL quarterback who has lost his banking job but hasn't told his wholesome wife, Grace. Meanwhile, Belle wants to bed Charlie, a hockey coach, who is dating Katy, a maths teacher with a tragic backstory. All the women are beautiful with olive skin. Devon's beloved housekeeper, Ana, has particularly beautiful olive skin and must sleep with her boss to send money back to her husband and child in Costa Rica. So all the ingredients are here for another titillating tale of rape and retribution among the 1-per-centers complete with Chanel dresses, Boca do Lobo sofas, limited-edition Yeezys, Ode à la Rose orchids, Roche Bobois chairs etc. Next to Heaven confirms that Frey is a very, very lazy writer. His sentences read like schoolboy attempts at hardboiled style — 'He had it all. And he had always had it all' — and contain some of the corniest lines I've read in fiction ('promises are like glass and they break just as easily'). Then there are the parts where he takes flight: 'Oh the night! Oh the dark! Where promises are made and kisses exchanged, where secrets are born and shared, where hearts entwine and passions ignite.' Frey doesn't let editors touch a word of his — this I can also believe. What's particularly strange, given that he's such a 'bad boy', is that he completely fluffs the wife-swapping soirée. After one paragraph in which the men all size each other up, the characters slope off to have very tame (or depressing) heterosexual intercourse. James, goddammit, it's an orgy! He takes more care describing the party invitations. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List For a book about bad behaviour, the characters behave in remarkably boring and predictable ways. They have no foibles or contradictions. No one in the novel feels remotely real. The characters are dead, the language is dead and it says terrible things about publishing that this ever saw the light of day. It's also coming to a TV near you because Frey sold the screen rights before the manuscript — 'Hahaha. It worked. Hahaha. Hahaha.'Next to Heaven by James Frey (Swift £18.99 pp336). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
New York Times
06-06-2025
- General
- New York Times
A Chronicle of the Rich Getting Richer, Crasser and More Obscene
THE HAVES AND HAVE-YACHTS: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, by Evan Osnos I kept thinking about the Weegee photograph 'The Critic' while reading 'The Haves and Have-Yachts,' Evan Osnos's collection of his 'revised and expanded' New Yorker articles about the 'ultrarich.' In the 1943 picture, two socialites, clad in furs, jewels and tight, dignified smiles, walk into the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera while, off to their left, a tipsy, bedraggled woman in a cloth coat gives them a withering stare. Osnos, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is urbanely critical of the rich who have gotten too rich, but is not Weegee's Critic. There are constant reminders that the various yacht owners, tech disrupters and hedge funders profiled lead a more lavish lifestyle than does the author — but it's clear to the reader that he can pass. Osnos is not a hater of success or even privilege; he's more an anthropologist of unseemly excess. In the acknowledgments, he thanks one of his sources and inspirations: 'a stranger, sitting next to me on a flight nearly a decade ago,' who happened to work in Silicon Valley. This person urged him to examine the 'changing conceptions of wealth, government and the future' then metastasizing among the elites of the ascendant tech sector. Presumably Osnos and this deep-pocketed Deep Throat were not flying coach. Osnos himself grew up in Greenwich, Conn., the son of a publishing executive. After Harvard, he made his way to China first as a student in the wake of the Tiananmen clampdown. By 2008, he was corresponding from Beijing for The New Yorker, at a time when many of America's business elites were making vast sums of money there. His excellent 2014 book 'Age of Ambition' won the National Book Award for its low-high depiction of a country coming of age — which, he writes, most reminded him of the Gilded Age United States. Back in America, Osnos was put on the plutocrat beat, just in time for a scheme-y new Gilded Age. There's plenty of excess to gawk at with him here, but the message is always that great wealth is in some way its own trap. Osnos gives us Anthony Scaramucci's few possible avenues for the rich: 'the art world, or private aircraft and yachting, charity-naming buildings and hospitals after themselves — or they can go into experiential.' Rod Stewart, Usher and Mariah Carey are hired to play at private parties. There's the guy selling 'experiential yachting' programs, which recreate the Battle of Midway to entertain 'bored billionaires,' complete with haptic guns. We meet estate planners who keep the rich from paying their fair share of taxes — if any. A good-looking, if mediocre, actor with an impressive social media presence runs a Ponzi scheme pretending to be a successful movie producer. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
