The richest of America’s rich—the top 0.1 percent with at least $20 million in net wealth—held 23.5 percent of all U.S. wealth in 2012 after adding in estimates of how much was hidden in offshore tax havens, said London School of Economics economist Gabriel Zucman, a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. That compares with his previous estimate of 21.5 percent. Zucman’s paper found that financial wealth held offshore costs the U.S. $36 billion in annual uncollected tax revenue. Smialek writes, “That’s enough to buy lunch for every student in New York City public schools for more than a century. Europe is losing about $75 billion.” About 10 percent of European wealth is in offshore accounts compared with 4 percent in the U.S. For example, Austria’s top 1 percent held as much as 36 percent of that country’s wealth in 2013, if adjusted with Forbes’ data. That’s 13 percentage points more than one survey estimate suggests, which would make Austria almost as unequal as the U.S.
Jeffrey Hollender, co-founder of cleaning and personal-care products company Seventh Generation Inc. and among “the wealthiest 1 percent in the U.S.,” as saying, “The more money that you have, the easier it becomes to hide that and avoid taxes.” He adds that the very rich have wealth in foundations and companies that compound the difficulty of measuring their fortunes.
European Central Bank economist Philip Vermeulen found the 1 percent held 35 percent to 37 percent of wealth in 2010, exceeding the 34 percent indicated in the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
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