HOW TO TAX A BILLIONAIRE An advocacy tool against tax privileges for the super-rich Less inequality is necessary for sustain­able development and stable democra­cies. States play an important role in re­ducing inequality. They do so through pro-poor spending and regulation, but also through taxes. On the other hand, some taxes and even entire tax regimes do not actually reduce inequality. Tax privileges for the super-rich make many tax regimes less progressive then they could and should be. But because they are difficult to capture in standard tax data and tax regime analysis, they are often overlooked. To adequately ad­dress taxation of the super-rich addi­tional research into these tax privileges is necessary. Following the core narra­tive of the Global Tax Evasion Report 2024 and based on experience from Germany, the author proposes an easy­to-do and easy-to-communicate advo­cacy tool to fill this gap and tests it in three countries. His suggestion is to use a typical su­per-rich individual and a real-world bil­lionaire to illustrate the gaps and loop­holes in the tax regime. Using a billion­aire owning easy-to-trace assets such as shares in a listed company that pub­lishes detailed information on its profits and taxation turned out to be the most convenient way to go about this. Con­structing a portfolio of a typical su­per-rich and describing its taxation proved more challenging but not less interesting. For Germany the analysis shows that both the billionaire and the typical super-rich only pay about half of the top income tax rate and about half of the tax and contributions of an aver­age employee and have managed to re­duce their tax rate by more than half in the last thirty years. In Argentina tax rates for the typical su­per-rich are much higher than for the average employee at least in theory, but a list of exemptions puts this in question in actual practice. In contrast, in Brazil tax-free dividends and a simplified calcu­lation of corporate profits already create a huge difference in nominal tax rates in favour of the super-rich. A comprehensive 2 per cent wealth tax would increase the tax rate of both the Brazilian and the German billionaire to approximately 50 per cent of their in­come, bringing it close to the rate of taxes and social security paid on aver­age wages in these countries. Further information on the topic can be found here: https://www.fes.de/themenportal-die-welt-gerecht-gestalten/ weltwirtschaft-und-unternehmensverantwortung/steuergerechtigkeit