I appreciated Hilary Joffe’s report on the wealth tax seminar at the Wits School of Governance. (Wealth tax a silver bullet or lead balloon? August 23). There are clearly many reservations about the value of such a tax and whether it would bring returns to the fiscus. Joffe asks two questions: would it plug the revenue gap, and would it reduce inequality? Her answer is that we don’t know "because the research hasn’t been done". She is right on that, as I have found in discussions with personalities who attended the seminar. But it’s not only on the scale of the tax take that work has not been done, the very scale of wealth in SA is not known. Nor do we know who owns the wealth (apart from disclosures to the JSE), in what form it is held, and whether there is any transparency. We have been digging into these issues since they are coming up at a conference on inequality we are convening in September. The main point is that the lack of information is attributable to the fact that resea...
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