Why not tax the rich?

By Herman M. Lagon

There is something almost insulting about watching a fuel price hike explained on television by men in coats while a public school teacher in Iloilo is already doing arithmetic in her head that has nothing to do with her lesson plan. A full tank for the motorcycle means less money for classroom snacks, printing, or a child’s project. A jeepney driver feels it by lunch. A market vendor feels it by dawn. A principal feels it when fewer parents can send children to school with enough baon. That is why the fresh talk of suspending fuel excise taxes, and even the VAT on petroleum and others, sounds attractive. It promises quick relief, and when oil turns cruel, quick relief matters. But once government says it may lose tens of billions, the old question returns: if the state must give up revenue to let ordinary people breathe, why does the sacrifice almost always start with the tax base that touches everyone, while the deepest pockets remain a sensitive topic? The latest debate is not really about oil alone. It is about who gets asked to absorb pain in a country where pain is already unevenly distributed.

That is why the idea of a wealth tax refuses to die, and frankly, it should not be dismissed with a bored shrug. Economist and former NEDA chief Winnie Monsod has argued for taxing extreme wealth, not ordinary savings, with proposals generally aimed at net assets above very high thresholds, such as ₱1 billion, and at rates low enough to bite without pretending to be a firing squad. Some estimates tied to versions of the proposal have placed possible collections from a billionaire tax in the hundreds of billions of pesos, while even the narrower thought experiment of taxing only a small circle of the richest families produces sizable sums. Those numbers attract attention because the country is not exactly short on concentrated wealth. Forbes reported that the combined wealth of the country’s 50 richest reached $86 billion (₱4.9 trillion) in 2025. In plainer language, there is enough money at the top to make the phrase “there is no money” sound selective, not absolute. The appeal of the idea is moral, yes, but it is also practical: if prices are rising because fuel and transport costs crawl into everything from fish to notebooks, then shifting more of the tax burden upward is at least worth serious study, not instant ridicule.

The fairness argument is not difficult to understand, even without a degree in economics. Consumption taxes are paid in fragments, but they accumulate like a headache. A teacher commuting from a town to campus does not receive a letter saying, “Dear Ma’am, today you have been regressed upon.” She just pays more for fare, then more for food, then more for printing, then quietly postpones buying a new pair of shoes. Meanwhile, wealth often sits in land, stocks, corporate structures, and appreciated assets that grow while their owners sleep. OECD analysis notes that capital income and assets are highly concentrated at the top, and that many tax systems still treat capital more favorably than labor. At home, that imbalance is not hard to feel. Salaried employees are taxed before the money even warms their hands, while the very wealthy can legally arrange holdings, timing, transfers, and exemptions with the help of people whose business card probably costs more than a week of jeepney rides. That is why a wealth tax resonates with many of us. It sounds less like punishment and more like a simple correction to a tax culture that is often strict with payroll and timid with accumulated power.

Still, honesty requires saying what advocates sometimes say too softly: wealth taxes are not magic, and critics are not inventing their concerns out of thin air. OECD work has been clear that many countries abandoned recurrent net wealth taxes because they were hard to administer, raised relatively little in some cases, and sometimes created distortions, especially when layered on top of weak capital income taxation or poorly designed exemptions. The Department of Finance has also warned that such a tax could encourage avoidance, create valuation disputes, and even push capital outward if designed badly. Executive Secretary and former Finance chief Ralph Recto has more recently signaled little appetite for new taxes in general. These objections deserve more than eye-rolling. It is genuinely difficult to value private companies, hidden offshore assets, art, land portfolios, and interlocking corporate claims every year. A rich person’s wealth is not always a vault of cash. Sometimes it is paper, leverage, control, and timing. That matters. A clumsy law can end up dramatic in speeches and disappointing in collections. A serious wealth tax, if ever adopted, would have to be built for the Philippine reality, not copied from slogans and not stitched together in committee during a moral panic.

But that is also exactly why the conversation should mature instead of collapse. “Hard to do” is not the same as “do not do.” Bank secrecy rules have weakened globally, information exchange standards have improved, and tax administrations now have more tools than they did when old wealth-tax stories are casually invoked as universal cautionary tales. Even the OECD, while cautious about recurrent net wealth taxes, acknowledges that governments have reason to address wealth inequality through the tax system and that country context matters. In places where capital is undertaxed, inheritance is weakly taxed, or wealth concentration is severe, the case for stronger taxation of wealth grows. That does not have to mean a reckless annual tax on everything that glitters. It could mean a narrow tax on ultra-high net worth, stronger estate and gift taxes, better real property valuation, tighter treatment of trusts and shell holdings, and a cleaner registry of beneficial ownership. In short, the argument is not only “tax the rich more.” It is “stop building a tax culture that is brave only with consumption and wages.” That is a different sentence, and a better one.

For many of us, especially teachers, the point becomes sharper when one asks where relief should come from when oil prices misbehave. Suspending fuel excise taxes can indeed bring down pump prices, with recent estimates in the current debate placing the possible reduction at around ₱6 to ₱10 per liter. That is not trivial. It matters to jeepney drivers, delivery riders, farmers, fisherfolk, and school employees who travel far. Yet a broad fuel tax suspension also benefits those who own SUVs, fleets, generators, vacation vans, and lifestyles that can absorb price shocks better than most. By contrast, a carefully designed wealth measure targets those with far greater capacity to contribute. Imagine the politics of saying this plainly: instead of asking every mother buying sardines, every tricycle driver buying diesel, and every teacher spending for the next week’s visual aids to carry the burden first, why not ask more from people whose daily market swings can erase or add more money than a public servant earns in years? The question is not radical. It is almost embarrassingly ordinary.

Of course, another point raised by ordinary citizens is also correct: no tax reform will earn trust if public money keeps leaking through corruption, waste, ghost projects, sweetheart contracts, and the ancient local miracle by which a road is forever being repaired yet never quite repaired enough. That criticism should not be treated as a distraction. It is part of the same argument. Better taxation and better spending must travel together. Asking the wealthy to pay more while ignoring procurement abuse is like replacing a water tank while the pipes are still laughing. But that reality is not an excuse to avoid progressive reform. It is a reason to pair it with tougher transparency, simpler procurement monitoring, open project data, and real punishment for theft. The country does not have to choose between plugging leaks and improving the fairness of taxes. It can do both, and it probably has to. Even defenders of wealth taxation admit that design and governance matter; otherwise, the proposal becomes a banner, not a solution. That is fair. But it is equally fair to say that hiding behind implementation difficulty has long been the preferred sport of systems that work quite efficiently when collecting from those least able to argue back.

So, why not consider a wealth tax for the rich, especially when fuel taxes on everyone are suddenly negotiable? That is the heart of it. Not a tantrum against success. Not a cheap class war slogan. Just a sober question about burden-sharing in a country that loves to praise resilience because it has asked too much of it. If government is willing to forego revenue so the public can survive another season of pump-board cruelty, then it should also be willing to study revenue sources that are more progressive, more humane, more sustainable, and more consistent with the old civic idea that those who have benefited most from the economy can help steady it when ordinary people are gasping. A good society does not only ask who can pay. It asks who will feel the payment least, and who has been feeling too much for too long. On that test, the teacher, the driver, the fisher, and the clerk have already paid enough. The billionaires can enter the conversation now.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.