This spring has been an exceedingly good one for Flightline Aviation Limited, a London-based enterprise that specializes in helping the world’s deepest pockets find the private jet of their dreams.
“We have closed six sales in the past five weeks,” Flightline’s Anna Campbell gushed at London’s most celebrated luxury trade fair earlier this month. “Everyone seems to want to get a plane for summer.”
Polly Toynbee, a veteran British political columnist, happened to be at that same trade fair. She watched one gentleman talking with a salesman about a showcased private plane and then approached that potential buyer with a question. With so many families struggling to put food on the table, Toynbee asked, shouldn’t the U.K.’s richest be paying “a bit more” in taxes?
“Why would I?” the private-jet aficionado replied.
“Look,” he added, waving at the aircraft on sale all around him, “take any more in tax and the wealthy would be off—away out of here in one of these!”
Before the Fair Share Amendment’s passage, wealthy Massachusetts taxpayers averaging $2.4 million in annual income were only paying 6.8% of that income in state and local taxes.
Off to a place, that gentleman of means was implying, smart enough not to inconvenience its richest residents with any sort of robust tax on income or wealth.
The rich who call the U.K. home have, at the moment, little reason to start looking for one of those tax-getaway locales. Britain’s Labour Party, the likely winner in the nation’s next parliamentary elections, is showing no interest whatsoever in subjecting the U.K.’s richest to any significant tax hike.
“We have no plans for a wealth tax,” Rachel Reeves, the Labour Party’s likely choice for finance minister, announced last summer—and no plans either to put in place a mansion tax or a higher levy on either capital gains or top tax-bracket income.
“I don’t see the way to prosperity as being through taxation,” Reeves went on. “I want to grow the economy.”
The British economy is already growing quite nicely—for the U.K.’s wealthiest. Since 1989, the University of Greenwich economist Ben Tipper points out, the nation’s 200 richest residents have seen their wealth—after taking inflation into account—grow on average by 15% per year.
Throughout human history, adds the U.K. High Pay Center’s Luke Hildyard, living standards for average households have only improved when societies have in place mechanisms “to ensure that wealth doesn’t overwhelmingly flow to the people with all the economic and political power.”
Given that reality, Hildyard posits in his just-published Enough: Why it’s Time to Abolish the Super Rich, modern societies need to both tax the top 1% “more effectively” and get those wealthy to pay more “to the workers at the companies they run and invest in.”
How best to accomplish all that? Progressives in the United States—the only U.K. peer nation with less of a tax burden on its richest—have plenty of ideas on that........