Felix Salmon, Reuters finance blogger, and Ben White, “Morning Money” and economy reporter at Politico, analyze a study published by the Tax Justice Network that finds that offshore accounts — not including those held by Americans — contain somewhere between $21 and $32 trillion.
Salmon says there’s nothing necessarily wrong with storing your wealth elsewhere, but argues that a wealth tax — as opposed to an income tax — might be needed in the U.S. “There is no real country in the world which can effectively tax wealth. What this report complains about is, ‘Look at all this wealth, we could make a lot of money if we just taxed a little bit of it.’ But countries don’t have wealth taxes. I think, personally, that maybe the United States should have a wealth tax,” he says.
