Immune To The Financial Crisis

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 | politics

As the financial crisis grows ever worse, Fintan O’ Toole, writing in The Irish Times, uncovers some discrepancies between the reported wealth of the ultra-rich and the tax returns of same. He asks why the Government is introducing a 1% levy on everyone’s earnings and removing health benefits, when it seems that the majority of the Celtic Tiger wealth seems to have accrued to a tiny percentage of the population…

Excluding the value of housing, 1 per cent of the population holds a third of the wealth and had assets of €100 billion in 2006;

Including household property, the top 1 per cent holds 20 per cent of the wealth, the top 2 per cent holds 30 per cent and the top 5 per cent holds 40 per cent; 

In effect we have, on the one hand, about 40,000 people sharing personal assets of €100 billion and on the other we have fewer than 8,000 households with a declared taxable income of more than €275,000.

I’m posting this here because it’s the same all across the world. The rich manage to squirrel away their wealth in tax-exempt funds, because they are the ones that can afford to hire the cleverest financial advisors.

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