From London to Paris and New York City to Sacramento, debt-hit governments are scrambling to bolster their fragile balance sheets. Increasingly, they’re training their sights on the rich to help bail them out.
Across swathes of the western world, political parties of varied stripes are homing in on wealth taxes as a neat fix to rising fiscal problems. They’re jacking up existing levies, planning new ones and contemplating exit taxes to halt the rising flow of departures to more fiscally attractive countries and states, hitting those on the way out with a big bill if they leave.
Tax-the-rich politics are playing out in fraught budget ...