📊 The Global Scorecard
In 1990, twelve OECD countries operated wealth taxes. By 2024, nine of them had thrown in the towel. Most found they raised little revenue, drove capital abroad, and cost more to administer than they collected.
Who abandoned it — and when
Sources: OECD Tax Policy Reforms reports; country-by-country repeal data. France was the most recent — the wealth tax was a factor in an estimated €60 billion of capital flight between 2000-2016.
🔍 Why They Failed
It wasn't one thing. It was the same set of problems, reported by country after country.
Valuation nightmare. What's a private company worth? A painting? A patent? Wealth taxes require annual valuations of illiquid assets. The administrative cost often rivaled the revenue.
Capital flight. Wealthy individuals move. France lost thousands of high-net-worth taxpayers. Norway's 2022 rate increase triggered a documented exodus — over 30 billionaires left in a single year.
Low revenue. Most countries collected less than 0.5% of GDP. Germany's wealth tax brought in 0.1% of total revenue. The juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
🇨🇭 Switzerland: The Exception That Proves the Rule
Gary and wealth-tax advocates often point to Europe and say "they have wealth taxes and they work fine." This only works if you don't look too closely.
Switzerland is the only European country where the wealth tax raises a meaningful share of revenue — roughly 3.5-4% of total tax take. But Switzerland's system is unlike anything being proposed for the UK:
🇨🇭 Swiss model
• Rates: 0.1% to 0.9% (varies by canton)
• Has existed since 1840
• Switzerland has no capital gains tax — the wealth tax acts as a partial substitute
• Decentralised: 26 cantons compete on rates
• Widely accepted as part of the social contract
🇬🇧 Proposed for UK
• Rates proposed: 1% to 5%+ annually
• Would be brand new — no institutional knowledge
• UK does have capital gains tax — double-hit on the same asset base
• Centralised: one rate, no competition
• Deeply contested; no consensus
Switzerland's wealth tax works because it's low-rate, long-established, and integrated into a tax system that doesn't separately tax capital gains. None of those conditions apply to Gary's proposal for Britain.
Norway: a cautionary tale from this decade
Norway still has a wealth tax — one of only three OECD countries that do. In 2022, the government increased the rate. The result?
The government that raised the rate is now publicly debating whether to reverse it. The exodus cost more in other tax revenues than the wealth tax gained.
🎯 Daniel Priestley: The Case Against
Daniel Priestley is a successful entrepreneur, author, and one of the most articulate critics of the wealth-tax-as-panacea school. His debate with Gary Stevenson is essential viewing.
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📺 The Evidence: Videos & Research
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🔄 So What Would Actually Work?
Criticising a wealth tax is easy. Offering a better alternative is harder. Here's where the evidence points.
The core insight from the OECD data, the country case studies and the economic literature is consistent: the problem isn't that we tax too little — it's that we tax the wrong things in the wrong ways. A fairer system doesn't require a new tax. It requires fixing the ones we already have.
🏠 Reform property and land taxes
Land doesn't move. Council tax bands haven't been revalued since 1991. A properly designed land value tax or reformed property tax is harder to avoid than a wealth tax and raises stable, predictable revenue.
📊 Close capital gains loopholes
The gap between income tax rates and capital gains rates creates the single biggest avoidance incentive in the UK system. Narrowing this gap would raise more from wealth without requiring annual valuations of every asset.
🏢 Simplify business taxation
The UK tax code runs to over 10 million words. Large corporations can afford armies of accountants; SMEs can't. Simplification would level the playing field more effectively than a new tax on wealth.
🚀 Encourage entrepreneurship
Better SEIS/EIS relief, simpler R&D credits, reduced regulatory burden on startups. Making it easier to build businesses grows the pie — taxing existing wealth just redistributes a shrinking one.
🏛️ Reform inheritance tax properly
The current system has so many reliefs (business property relief, agricultural relief, the seven-year rule) that it barely functions as intended. A reformed system with fewer loopholes and a reasonable threshold would be fairer and raise more than a wealth tax.
🌍 International coordination on corporate tax
The OECD's global minimum corporate tax (Pillar Two) is already happening. Strengthening international cooperation on tax avoidance is more effective than a unilateral wealth tax that encourages exit.
📚 Further Reading & Sources
- Tax Policy Associates — Why the rich paid less tax in the 1970s (Dan Neidle)
- OECD — Wealth & Property Taxes (cross-country data)
- IFS — Wealth Tax Research
- Resolution Foundation — Wealth Tax & Inequality Research
- The Guardian — Super-rich abandoning Norway at record rate as wealth tax rises slightly
- Institute of Economic Affairs — Wealth Tax Publications