Schwarz/Koza: Need millionaire tax for millionaire heirs

2024-01-09 13:32:05

Greens: Great respect for the redistribution campaign by heiress Marlene Engelhorn

Vienna (OTS) – “Marlene Engelhorn deserves the greatest respect for her initiative to have her million-dollar inheritance distributed democratically through a citizens’ council. It individually implements what it has been demanding from politicians for a long time: the fair taxation of inheritances worth millions,” say Jakob Schwarz, budget spokesman, and Markus Koza, labor spokesman for the Greens, and state: “We Greens support this concern. Austria is one of the industrialized countries with the highest wealth concentration and the lowest wealth taxes. One causes the other, making Austria a country in which wealth is particularly unevenly distributed.”

“According to current figures from the European Central Bank, the richest five percent in Austria own more than half of the assets. This is the second highest concentration of wealth in the entire Eurozone. “That has to be corrected,” said the two MPs, confirming the Greens’ demand for taxation of inheritances worth millions.

In the past, Austria has taken a particularly “inglorious path” in terms of wealth taxation under the SPÖ-ÖVP coalitions, Koza reminds us of the abolition of wealth tax and the introduction of private foundations as particularly tax-efficient institutions for millions in assets under the SPÖ Chancellor Vranitzky as well as the non- Repair and de facto abolition of inheritance tax as a result of a VfGH ruling in 2008.

From the perspective of the Greens, this path of the last decades should finally be corrected by taxing inheritances worth millions. With an estimated inheritance volume of around 14 billion euros in 2021 alone, enormous tax revenue would be possible. The trend in the next few years is to rise sharply. “This makes it possible to generate socially accurate tax revenues in order to generate more distributive justice and to be able to finance necessary measures in the areas of care, the fight against child poverty or climate protection,” emphasize Schwarz and Koza.

Engelhorn’s initiative to have a citizens’ council decide on the distribution of the million-dollar inheritance is particularly innovative: “This is citizen participation in the best sense and an exciting democratic experiment. We need constructive social discussions to improve distribution in Austria. Politicians are urgently called upon to closely follow the decision-making processes and results of this citizens’ council and to draw appropriate conclusions for political practice.”

“Private initiatives like the current one by Marlene Engelhorn can of course not be a substitute for a tax on inheritances worth millions. However, initiatives like the Engelhorns show once again how unequally wealth is currently distributed in Austria and how important taxation would be in order to achieve a fairer distribution of the social wealth we have achieved together,” say Koza and Schwarz.