Deficits, anyone? Time for a Hong Kong capital-gains tax
- Why should Hong Kong’s wage slaves pay up to two months of their earnings in taxes while profitable stock punters and property speculators – and our tycoons – get to keep all their gains?
When it comes to a capital-gains tax, rich people will go to extraordinary lengths to prove the impossible and deny the undeniable.
You know, the usual specious arguments about killing entrepreneurship and undermining those great creators of jobs, the captains of industry. Biden’s tax plan, some claim, would end up decreasing tax revenue.
These are the same people who claim a tax cut will pay for itself, and then some. No, it doesn’t.
But at least most developed economies have a capital-gains tax. Hong Kong doesn’t even have that.
Besides the land and property monopoly by the axis of the government and big developers, that’s one reason why our rich just keep getting richer. And you think their philanthropy that gets their names all over university and hospital buildings is so heart-warmingly generous?
Given our record deficit of HK$257.6 billion, isn’t it time for Beijing to say to the rich guys and their families: enough is enough, time to pay up? Remember, it’s against the Basic Law, that is, it’s unconstitutional, for the Hong Kong government to have deficits, according to a strict reading of it.
The central government has cracked down on the democrats and other anti-government activists, many of them from the middle and professional classes. It was carried out in the name of social stability and governability.
Actually, those same reasons would be equally, or even more justified, in carrying out a taxation crackdown.
I have never understood why people who earn by the sweat of their brow have to pay a salary tax equivalent to a month and a half, or even two months, of their wages in Hong Kong while a stock punter could make a killing with a few keystrokes on his computer – and/or speculating on real estate – and gets to keep all his profits.
That just seems insane.
Apparently, even the original Marxist, Friedrich Engels himself, thought that was perfectly OK. In a letter he wrote to Marx, he argued that profiting from stock trading “simply adjusts the distribution of the surplus value”, and doesn’t expropriate it from workers.
Marx seemed to agree with him, as he was himself a stock speculator on the London Stock Exchange – the citadel of 19th century capitalism – whenever he had spare cash. According to some biographers, Engels lived off his sizeable stock portfolio and frequently subsidised Marx from it.
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You have to say, wow, how does that compute, Friedrich? Aren’t the shareholders the company owners who extract profits from the workers? After all, what are dividends but earnings based on extracted surplus value?
But as I said, when it comes to paying up their fair share, such as through taxes, people make up all sorts of excuses not to do so.
When it comes to literally the bottom line, perhaps Marx and Engels weren’t so different from today’s Wall Street titans – or Hong Kong’s super-rich – who think tax is the dirtiest of words in any language.
