Mr. Simon Murtagh:

As to the Deputy's question about why there is no conversation on this subject, we have to be clear that wealth taxes have suffered from a bad reputation in recent decades and even as far back as the war we had. The reason was, in brief, that they were badly designed and that allowed them to be politically attacked. One of the main principles, going back to Piketty on this, is that when trying to design a wealth tax, it must have no exceptions insofar as possible in order that it is not subject to political attacks or attacks by certain interests that allow it to unravel very quickly. The context has changed a great deal, not just because of the galloping inequality that has been documented, as described by Mr. Clarken, which goes back to the work of the major economists; it has also changed because of the technical means of taxing and tracking wealth across bank accounts using electronic data. It is much more feasible now to tax wealth, both for political reasons and needs and for those technical reasons. It is happening already. America has the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, a financial transaction tax which is able to stop expatriation of wealth and charge American people taxes when they are abroad. All that computerisation is a major part of the change, along with the OECD's standard, which is another major change and innovation. We are talking about a completely different context for taxing wealth and we are seeing across a number of European countries new and improved wealth taxes. There was a big wealth tax commission in the UK that recommended an ambitious wealth tax.

The other context is Latin America, where there is a wave of reform. The best example so far was in Argentina, where a one-off wealth tax accrued $2.6 million in a much smaller economy than ours. It shows that high yield can be achieved-----