Alex Lo

My Take | Deficits, anyone? Time for a Hong Kong capital-gains tax

Why should Hong Kong’s wage slaves pay up to two months of their earnings in taxes while profitable stock punters and property speculators – and our tycoons – get to keep all their gains?

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Unlike most developed economies, Hong Kong does not have a capital-gains tax. Photo: Edmond So

Alex Lo

Published: 1:14am, 28 Apr 2021Updated: 1:14am, 28 Apr 2021

When it comes to a capital-gains tax, rich people will go to extraordinary lengths to prove the impossible and deny the undeniable.

I was just reading how the great and the wealthy in America have been lining up to round on President Joe Biden’s proposal to increase that tax’s rates on the richest to fund his trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.

You know, the usual specious arguments about killing entrepreneurship and undermining those great creators of jobs, the captains of industry. Biden’s tax plan, some claim, would end up decreasing tax revenue.

These are the same people who claim a tax cut will pay for itself, and then some. No, it doesn’t.

Why do people who earn by the sweat of their brow have to pay a salary tax equivalent to a big chunk of their wages in Hong Kong while a stock punter could make a killing with a few keystrokes on his computer – and get to keep all the profits? Photo: Bloomberg

But at least most developed economies have a capital-gains tax. Hong Kong doesn’t even have that.

Besides the land and property monopoly by the axis of the government and big developers, that’s one reason why our rich just keep getting richer. And you think their philanthropy that gets their names all over university and hospital buildings is so heart-warmingly generous?