I wish the people who keep calling for the rich to be taxed more would quit. As I have mentioned before, very wealthy people have never and will never pay tax. All that ends up happening is that regular working people pay more.

I was recently talking to someone who works at a tax consultancy. She said the government has no problem ramping up the tax on people who are "stuck" in the UK but they are very reluctant to touch the very wealth, the feeling is, they will simply leave / move their money offshore.

So next time you hear some labour politician spouting about taxing the rich, bear in mind he may actually be talking about YOU. He definitely does not mean the guy with millions.

The best thing would be for everyone to pay less tax and maybe if tax was low enough then the very wealthy would pay up too. I don't know if it's still the case but in Hong Kong there was a single band of tax at 16% - hardly worth avoiding really is it.

The following BBC article is of interest - it spells out that the rich don't pay and why they never will.

Anyway there is a great deal of emotion around the place about how private equity billionaires pay less tax than cleaners, so it’s worth taking a deep breath and looking at the hard reality.

There are about 180 of these partners in total. But of these, probably two-thirds are not British: they are super-bright foreigners who work in private equity in London, because it’s the European centre of private equity action.

Or to put it another way, 120 of the 180 private-equity partners are non-doms for tax purposes – so they pay ZERO tax in the UK.

The point is that in a globalised world, there are growing numbers of firms and individuals who can base themselves more or less anywhere for tax purposes – and therefore there is not a great deal that a country like the UK can do to extract much additional tax from them. It’s not fair, but it’s a fact.

Full article;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2007/06/tax_and_private_equity.html