Why must heavy taxes be imposed on celebrities?

(1) Are workers or capitalists?

Zheng Shuang was fined 300 million, and Fan Bingbing was fined 880 million. The Internet is in popular science. It is really hard to imagine what kind of "heavy money" it is. Here comes the problem. As an entertainment star, Fan Bingbing has accumulated a huge amount of wealth in a short period of time; even if the "yin and yang contract" is a clear violation of the law, her remuneration can be called a "sky price."

Based on this, as long as someone has discussed it on the Internet, it means that the star group should be the group with the highest income and irreplaceable labor. The bargaining power of the company is still able to share the income with the investor—that is, the capitalist. This conclusion is undoubtedly wrong. We cannot deny that entertainment stars such as Fan Bingbing did pay for their performances or participating in activities, but the sky-high remuneration she can get is not for her performance, perhaps more straightforward-their acting skills are not worth it. So much money.

To correctly understand the sky-high prices of stars, it is necessary to introduce the theory of French contemporary national treasure-level thinker and left-wing scholar Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu constructed his own sociological theoretical system with the three dimensions of "habitus", "capital" and "field".From the perspective of the relationship between class habits and circulating capital, he regards social practice as something realized in the special logic of a specific field. The capital of an actor itself is a product of habits, just as the characteristics of a field are an objectified history, and this history makes the habits of the actors operating in that field concretized.

Based on this, Bourdieu proposed the distinction and interaction between social capital, cultural capital and economic capital. Bourdieu expanded the definition of "capital" in traditional Marxist political economy, and called social capital and cultural capital "symbolic capital". Taking Fan Bingbing as an example, the reason why she was able to get a high salary is more because of her high degree of attention, that is, social prestige capital. Therefore, the investor’s salary is not her labor—that is, acting, but her huge social prestige capital.

Bourdieu believes that economic capital can be converted into symbolic capital more easily and effectively. For example, where Fan Bingbing’s huge social capital comes from, she has a lot of attention and discussion. All traffic is bought with money. For example, some people ridiculed her and her brother Fan Chengcheng . Drinking water can be hot search-hot search must be bought with money, and money is capital. So fundamentally speaking, Fan Bingbing's attention and her high salary are nothing more than the flow of "capital" in various "fields", and the essence has not changed. And Zhao Wei directly called the storm in the capital market, and has recovered her essence.

What we need to point out is that today’s actors and celebrities have such a high "bargaining power" and can become "capitalists" in a certain sense. This is actually a legacy of the revolution: we have passed Thirty years of earth-shaking revolutionary transformation has destroyed all the altars and pots of the old society, which is equivalent to restarting high-rise buildings.The first batch of market-oriented entertainment stars are all products of the dividends of the times. You can see how miserable Korean and Japanese artists are. Korean and Japanese society has not experienced a profound social revolution, and there are still many feudal remnants. This kind of personal control of artists is a typical feudal remnant. It is because these artists are not "capitalized", so they will always be in a state of being exploited by large companies. Korean artists are basically associated with the keyword "poor", not to mention accompany wine or sleep with dignitaries, etc. Rights and sex transactions; Japan is not much better.

But this wave of bonuses will soon pass, and the new artists who have not caught up with the wave will soon become "rich first" At that time, they can only become the object of exploitation. Any current drafts, men's and women's teams, basically have to sign a "selling contract" with a brokerage company-even if it's hot, the bulk of it will be capital earning, and the company has to be a cow and a horse. I have a friend who works as an executive economy for eighteenth line artists. I talked to her and found that those seventeen or eighteen-year-old girls, their work intensity is not worse than that of programmers who work overtime every day, and they basically don’t have their own holidays. And leisure time. They are also the proletariat in dire straits.

This "spread" is the exploitation of surplus value, something Marx talked about 150 years ago.

Capitalism is called capitalism because the rate of return on capital is above all else. Thomas Piketty 's " 21st Century Capital " throughout the book demonstrates an inequality r>g-meaning that capital gains are greater than labor gains in a capitalist society.

This means that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The wealth of the rich, even if they lie still, will become bigger and bigger and more rolling like a snowball, while the poor are hardworking and hardworking, and often cannot turn themselves over with a lifetime of "work". This time, everyone’s feelings about the Fan Bingbing incident are mostly from the perspective of the huge gap between the rich and the poor. The status quo of

requires tax regulation to make the world “fair”.

Personal income tax is an important means for countries to adjust the gap between the rich and the poor, and European and American countries have always been praised for the extremely high tax rates on the highest-ranking rich people. It can be said that taxation means maintain social justice One of the important ways. However, we are also very pessimistic to see that various taxation rules are vulnerable to the elite.

First of all, under the system established by the elite, I played a very clever concept of stealing. The high tax rate of individual taxes is aimed at wages.And capital income such as dividends, investment income, capital asset income, stock trading income, etc. are not included, and the main income of the richest class is undoubtedly the latter. This way, on the one hand, it can show the illusion of high taxes to ordinary people, and on the other hand, the elites will secretly laugh and make money behind their backs. In 2011, Buffett published an article in the "New York Times", complaining that he paid less tax than his secretary, and called for more taxes on the wealthy.

Of course, after all, there are few elites like Buffett, and the vast majority of the rich are wondering how to deduct every star from their bones. A position necessary for investment companies, wealth management companies, and major banks are professionals who are proficient in taxation and law. They formulate special tax avoidance plans for the rich. This is the embodiment of the "privilege" of elites, who can formulate rules and maximize The use of the rules and the resources of all parties to find the loopholes in the rules, but ordinary people can only firmly abide by this rule.

Tax havens are the first choice of the rich. Small islands such as the Cayman Islands, Panama and Bermuda, as well as small countries such as Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Iceland, Vatican and so on. The whole country has only one pillar industry- Finance, to be precise, is to help the rich avoid taxes. It is estimated that more than half of international financial transactions have to go through tax havens. These small countries can break through the financial system restrictions to facilitate money laundering and black box operations. More importantly, the judicial departments of various countries are unable to govern. According to a report by the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP) in 2000,More than half of the 4.800 billion francs stolen money generated by the world's criminal activities in 1999 were "bleached" in tax havens.

Developing countries lose up to US$5 billion each year due to tax evasion, which is equivalent to the total annual official development assistance (APD) funds of all OCDE countries. Developed countries have also suffered from this. Take France as an example. From 2002 to 2012, tax evasion losses amounted to about 2.5 billion yuan, which is equivalent to 10% of the total income of the French people. The wealthiest people and companies in France have about 220 billion assets hidden in them. In Switzerland and other tax havens, each year Swiss bank transfers an average of 85 million euros in French tax revenue to private pockets (Christian Chavagneux, Ces 600 milliards, qui manquent a la france, 2012). Because of this, governments of various countries frequently put pressure on Swiss banks, mainly because Switzerland is the main tax avoidance point for developed countries, and the various small island countries that rich people in developing countries love are still at ease.

It can be said that Fan Bingbing's tax evasion case is only the tip of the iceberg in the top class. If Cui Yongyuan 's bite is not let go, it is hard to say that this kind of thing will be pushed to the cusp of the storm like this. What she was investigated and punished was only tax evasion with obvious illegal acts, and the amount of "reasonable tax avoidance" was even more difficult to count.

Very coincidentally, the tax evasion by US President Donald Trump has also been violent on the other side of the ocean recently. According to a report in the New York Times, Trump’s father Fred created two GRAT trust funds ,This trust is too complicated, I don't really understand it myself. Anyway, everyone understands that this is tax avoidance. The elder Trump gave the land to the trust and signed a ground lease with him, that is, let his children become landlords. He passed on a steady stream of wealth to the children by paying rent until the property was sold. It is estimated that Trump's total tax avoidance amount is as high as $413 million.

According to the judicial rules of the United States, this sum of money may not be held accountable like Trump. But this can also reflect the inequality between the elite and ordinary people in the face of common tax rules. Trump's father also sent a lot of (tax-avoided) benefits to his son through the sale of art, and whether it is a trust fund or the sale of art, it is difficult for ordinary people to reach. The progressive taxation that should balance the gap between the rich and the poor has increasingly reflected class differences. This is the irony of the times.

However, Trump always pretended to be X during the election and emphasized that "I do not rely on my parents and start from nothing" image has completely collapsed. He once labeled himself "self-made billionaire", saying that he only borrowed a small start-up fund from his father. The "self-made billionaire" has achieved current achievements and indeed deceived many ignorant Americans. . However, the New York Times stated that at the age of 3, Trump received $200,000 in "profits" from his father’s real estate empire; at the age of 8, he had become a millionaire; at the age of 17, his father gave him 52 Part of the ownership of an apartment building; after graduating from college, he received $1 million from his father every year. This phenomenon has also been analyzed in my previous article: "Yang Chaoyue is Wang Sicong's deepest fear"

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In Capital of the 21st Century,The author has a very important argument that the tax system in developed countries in Europe and the United States is ineffective in adjusting the gap between rich and poor. The author pessimistically pointed out that the "progressive tax rate" in Western countries is not as good as the "regressive tax rate"-the richer people have to bear less. Since 1980, the dramatic decline in progressive taxation of income in the United States and the United Kingdom (both countries were the leaders of progressive taxation after World War II) may be able to explain the increase in super-high incomes. At the same time, in the current world where capital flows freely, tax competition among countries has begun to increase, which has allowed many countries to exempt capital income from the progressive income tax. This is particularly the case in Europe, where relatively small countries have long proven unable to reach a coordinated tax policy. The result is an endless race to the bottom, leading to lower corporate tax rates and exemption from taxation on interest, dividends and other financial income, and the consequences are borne by labor income. One consequence is that taxes have become regressive for top income earners in most countries. For example, a detailed study of French taxation in 2010 examined all forms of taxation and found that the average tax rate of the entire taxation decreases with income level: the 50% of the population at the bottom of the income distribution has a tax rate of 40% to 45%. The tax rate for the upper 40% of the population is 45%-50%; however, the tax rate for the top 5% or even 1% of the income is even lower: the tax rate for the top 0.1% of the population is only 35%.

In the face of the "regressive tax rate" bloody fact that only the external "capitalist shock" can be solved, the author said World wealth is sinking deeper and deeper in the vortex of r>g. But even so, the author does not agree with the communist revolution to overthrow all the original systems, but for the time being, it seems that only the danger of "destruction" can give capitalism external motivation and self-improvement. Let the capitalists spit out the bones in their mouths willingly.

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