One of Labour's rising stars has jumped to the defence of Chancellor Rachel Reeves for dismissing a wealth tax on the richest people. Torsten Bell, a former Treasury aide and chief executive of the Resolution Foundation think tank, argues that such a tax wouldn't raise significiant revenues. Despite Ms.
Reeves' highlighting a £22bn hole in public finances, she has shrugged off calls for taxing the nation's wealthiest. Supporting the Chancellor’s position, Mr Bell said it was not helpful in the wealth tax debate to compare the UK with the US, as the US has far more billionaires. "On the tax side it is very fashionable on the left to say ‘let’s just have a wealth tax’," he explained.
"For some of us who have spent 20 years working on tax policy, I think that is something that is exciting for them to write in books and not very useful in terms of helping govern the country. There are two reasons why that is." "The short reason why that doesn’t work in the UK is two words, Jeff Bezos.
He does not live in the UK. And, yes, we do have some very rich people. But our wealth is nowhere near .
.. we don’t have the globally rich people that the US, particularly, has lots of.
" Elon Musk, chief exeuctive of Tesla, is the richest person and the richest man in the world with a net worth estimated at $269bn. After Musk is Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. with a net worth in the region of $208bn.
He added: "You will have a brand new wealth tax and you are not going to bring in reall.
