7 August, 2014

Dear Sir,

I have trouble understanding the reasoning behind the manifesto point of the People’s Campaign to increase taxation on the rich.

In other countries, the aim of high tax bills for the wealthy is to minimise the tax burden on the average working person.

Yet in Bermuda the tax burden, as a share of income, on citizens up and down the economic scale is already rather small, so this point appears as essentially a punitive measure.

Increased tax income could naturally be put to use, but this assumes that the wealthy would actually be willing to pay. Similar measures elsewhere have above all demonstrated that rich people can afford to up sticks and go wherever the local authority demands less from them. Since we have made an industry out of being one of the very places to which wealthy people and their businesses flee, it would surely be an unhelpful step backward to change this situation.

If I may also be allowed to pre-empt an expected counter to the above: some may feel uncomfortable with this if they interpret the courting of IB as pandering to the rich (or worse, the white foreign rich), but the fact that it is good business is undeniable. By way of analogy, selling alcohol may be seen as pandering to antisocial drunks, but it makes money for everyone directly or indirectly involved, and money is at the root of so many issues these days.

HEADS BEFORE HEARTS