Action in Vienna – millionaires call for global wealth tax

Investor Djaffar Shalchi does not like the word “self-made millionaire”: as a seven-year-old Iranian refugee from Denmark, he himself was only able to climb the ladder thanks to the social security system there, the founder of Millionaires for Humanity emphasized on Tuesday in Vienna, where he and BASF heiress Marlene Engelhorn and the worker-friendly Momentum Institute pushed for global taxes on the wealthy.

“Taxes Are Not Bad”
“Poverty is the worst form of violence,” Shalchi quoted Mahatma Gandhi in a speech. Just one percent tax on the world’s great fortunes would be “sufficient to solve all the world’s problems,” he is convinced. For Shalchi, taxes “are not something negative. They are almost nowhere as high as in Scandinavia. And yet, according to studies, the happiest people are at home there”.

Shalchi and Engelbrecht, for their part active with the Tax Me Now platform, advertise their business across Europe with the elephant “TJ” – for “Tax Justice”. In English, the idiom “an elephant in the room” means something you don’t want to talk about. But that is exactly what is needed, both emphasized. With just a 1% tax on big fortunes, Shalchi believes, “we can easily turn this planet into a paradise.”

Engelbrecht stressed that action was particularly needed in Austria: 80 percent of taxes came from work or consumption, and only four percent from wealth – less than almost anywhere else. Rich people would practically “put nothing into the system and profit from everything”. Momentum economist Mattias Muckenhuber helped with numbers: he calculated that the 100 richest families in Austria owned as much as the poorer 5.4 million of the population.

Real estate as a special case
Real estate can be seen as a special case of wealth distribution in Austria. One-tenth of households own 79 percent of the lettable real estate – ie outside their own home or apartment – and therefore benefit twice in the current situation. Not only is this capital passed on tax-free, private rental income has increased by 42 percent since 2014 (municipal properties and cooperatives: 28 percent).

“Eradicate Poverty”
According to Muckhuber’s estimates, a one percent tax on large assets of one million euros or more would generate five billion euros in Austria. In this way, one could “abolish poverty” in Austria. That is why, according to Engelhorn, they now want to promote wealth taxes “until people get so annoyed that they are actually introduced”. Every democracy has that in its own hands, Shalchi added. He pins his hopes on “young, democratically elected forces that shake up parliaments”.