The latest Oxfam report should make cheerful reading for some. The Irish billionaire club rose from nine to 11 last year and their combined wealth increased by more than a third to just over €50 billion. Ireland’s richest two Irish billionaires have more wealth than the bottom half of the population. The richest 1 per cent hold an astonishing 35.4 per cent of Irish financial wealth.
Oxfam didn’t name the 11, but Forbes’s rankings suggest that you probably won’t find any living down the road – or ones that you might recognise at any rate. Of the 11, six are foreign born (India, the US, the UK) and became Irish citizens. Only a few are domiciled here.
The richest Irishman is Indian-born Shapoor Mistry, a Mumbai-based engineering tycoon whose Irish citizenship derives from his reclusive father Pallonji’s marriage to Pat “Patsy” Perin Dubash, reportedly born in Hatch Street nursing home in 1939. Shapoor’s two nephews also make the list thanks to inherited shareholdings in Mumbai-based Tata Motors. Generations of Mistry real estate wealth accretion date back to the 1860s.
[ Who are Ireland’s 11 billionaires?Opens in new window ]
The billionaire 11 also include John Grayken, the US-born founder of Dallas-based private equity business Lone Star Funds (aka a vulture fund) and long-time UK resident who reportedly renounced his US citizenship for tax purposes in the 1990s and took up Irish citizenship. John Dorrance, the quiet-living US born grandson of the Campbell soup inventor, sold up and moved to Ireland, where he got citizenship in 1995 apparently for planting $1.5 million worth of trees. John Armitage, British-born co-founder of the Egerton Capital hedge fund, became an Irish citizen in 2018. There is also Denis O’Brien, personally tax resident in Malta. Others include the Collison brothers in San Francisco via Dromineer and Eugene Murtagh, founder of the Kingspan Group in Cavan.
Oxfam calculates that 36 per cent of global billionaire wealth is now inherited and that many of the so-called “self-made” simply inherited vast fortunes (think the Mistry family and Donald Trump). It’s time for states to reassert themselves, to properly tax wealth, they say, estimating that a progressive tax on Irish billionaire wealth could yield up to €9 billion a year.
Some people argue that billionaires are bad people by definition, because accumulating obscene amounts of money must surely entail some serious moral dilemmas. Others put it all down to vision and genius. But whether we like their ethics, tax efficiency or self-aggrandising philanthropy is not the point. The point is whether taxing enormous wealth would be good for the world. The point is inarguable. The current effective tax rate of billionaires is equivalent to 0.3 per cent, according to French economist Gabriel Zucman. Billionaires pay lower effective income-tax rates than American wage-earners.
Back in 2020, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E Stiglitz and French economist Thomas Piketty were among many calling for a wealth tax (a tax on net worth as opposed to income), with Piketty arguing for rates of 90 per cent on wealth above €2 billion.
“Entrepreneurs will have millions or tens of millions, but beyond that, those who have hundreds of millions or billions will have to share with shareholders, who could be employees. So no, there won’t be billionaires any more”, said Piketty. “How can we justify that their existence is necessary for the common good? Contrary to what is often said, their enrichment was obtained thanks to these collective goods, which are the public knowledge, the infrastructures, the laboratories of research.” He could have been talking about Silicon Valley, which would never have boomed but for the state funding that enabled the development of the world wide web.
The calls for a tax were gaining momentum. Piketty’s proposal of a co-ordinated global wealth tax of the wealthiest at 2 per cent was echoed in a blueprint in a 2024 report commissioned by the G20′s Brazilian presidency, authored by Zucman and published by the EU Tax Observatory. The tax could raise up to $250 billion annually if levied on billionaires, or up to $380 billion annually if levied on centimillionaires. “Internationally co-ordinated” are the key words there.
But what are the chances of a wealth tax now?
Have a look at the raw, brazen concentration of wealth central to Trump’s inauguration images; the whole event could as easily have been rendered in the form of a gigantic crypto coin. Spineless tech magnates seated on the stage and the cabinet relegated to a row behind will be the defining symbol of Trump’s America.
Joe Biden named it: “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead”.
When an outgoing president and an 80-year-old global charity both use the word “oligarchy”, the world should sit up.
The quid pro quo is already there. The tech bros have scooped tens of billions in US public contracts for rockets, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Musk is purging the civil service of lawyers and experts and replacing them with regime loyalists. The US supreme court has gone rogue. The butchering of regulation, the communications and media grab, the means by which money itself morphs into near untraceable cryptocurrency are already in evidence. Trump and Melania’s separate meme coins launched last weekend, not to mention another by the pastor who preached on Monday.
[ The Irish Times view on the Oxfam wealth report: the rich get richerOpens in new window ]
Which leaves us with all the Trump-whisperers urging world leaders to go sit on his lap or learn golf. There will be a backlash. People will rebel against the toxic world being created for their children by the titans and their uncontrolled wealth. To paraphrase Liz Cheney, there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone but his enablers’ dishonour will remain.