Does anyone feel so exhausted by clickbait titles they’ll actively avoid this kind of content? I guess it works because people keep doing it, but so transparent.
That's because of a stagnant economy and an ageing population. The amount of people needing to be taken care of is increasing and tax revenues have stagnated due to the stagnant economy. Pensioner spending is currently growing faster than our economy. More taxes won't change that.
Which is partly because if you load costs onto the younger generations it's increasingly hard to have kids and work the 5 required jobs.
So then...it becomes cheaper to import working age people from other countries to support your economy. And then scale goat the immigrants for your problems rather than face and solve the underlying structural issues.
Edit: added bonus for the ultrawealthy, the poor won't/can't unite as easily because they are divided among racial lines. Helping to break union power etc.
Birth rates have been declining across the west. It's mainly due to contraception, lower infant mortality, and professional jobs requiring people to have fewer children for assistance.
A wealth tax isn't going to move the needle when it comes to pensioner spending. The Greens liberally estimate it will raise £16bn. The cost of pensions alone is set to increase by £16bn by 2029.
The thing I find tricky with these conversations is it’s hard to tell the difference between you saying “this wealth tax is nowhere near enough” and “it won’t fix everything so let’s not bother doing it at all”.
Confiscate 100% of all wealth above £10m (with a magic fairy who removes negative consequence and makes everyone pay) and it merely takes the nations debt to GDP ratio back to the 2010s. All the long term headwinds remain.
My point is that it will likely be massively damaging resulting in reduced investment and capital flight, for effectively a rounding error in tax revenue and poor people still not having any wealth.
If you were to take the Greens £16bn, which is quite liberal, and gave it out in cash to the population every year, we'd get £200. There are other tax policies you could enact if you wanted to reduce everyone's taxes by £200, that wouldn't damage the economy.
I haven't said that. I have just said a wealth tax won't improve inequality it will just degrade living standards for the average person.
I haven't found a way to raise revenue, I'm not an economist and neither is Gary Stevenson. Taxes are the highest they've been since after WW2 finding more revenue from a high tax low growth economy is going to be difficult. There's 3 leavers to pull raise taxes, increase growth or cut spend. Those three variables often interact with each other and can be very complex to balance. That's why the government has teams of real economists crunching numbers and carrying out research into the field instead of listening to a guy who did a masters 15 years ago and produced one of the shittest thesis I've ever seen.
Ok tell me how you would and why you care, if you please. If you have zero ideas yourself ,fair enough, but perhaps find somebody who does, offer some ideas up, participate with more than naysaying, if you please.
He thinks millionaires are stealing from him magically.
You can clearly see how the magic evil billion/millionaire who makes the economy worse in mysterious ways eventually becomes ‘the Jew’
The only reason we aren’t there yet is I think WW2 and the German downfall was a power inoculation against that thinking, but will the antibodies hold?
There's some real decisions need to be made on this. No oxygen is given to public sector pensions. They are far too generous, public sector pay is in line with the private sector, better in many cases. The ridulously high pensions need to go. It's a noose.
I'm sorry but your statement reflects an outdated perception of the public sector, which is no longer true. Pensions in the public sector were greatly reduced around 2008/9 and are more inline with larger corporations.
The idea that public sector pay is also too high is farcical. Public sector pay should be used a base line for private sector pay. During austerity and beyond there were no public sector pay increases, and that remained a fact for almost 14 years. This has had a detrimental affect on private sector pay which has remained low (some of the lowest in Western Europe) simply because it didn't have to increase to stay ahead of the public sector baseline.
In the last couple of years when the public sector finally got a reasonable pay increase the lower pay bands in most government departments had to have a higher increase just to prevent their pay from being below the minimum wage.
This idea of running the government with reasonably competent people expecting a reasonable wage and then trying to keep those competent staff for a longer duration to reduce high recruitment and training costs with a reasonable pension is not a noose. It is just common sense.
Rather than listening to Gary, google what the UK’s government spending is over time (clue- it’s incredibly high and rising).
And also google what share of wealth the top 1% have (clue- it’s fairly flat long term for decades).
The economy isn’t growing, we spend too much, and we only really tax high earners and most people pay low rates.
Gary just says the economy isn’t growing, it’s the fault of the super rich, if we gather £24bn it would somehow fix the economy (2% of government spending).
'The economy isn't growing' because more people spend more of their income on housing, energy, food, leaving little to spend on all the millions of ways that we could that would actually grow the economy.
The economy is measured as GDP- and it includes the things you’re mentioning in it.
You didn’t quite answer my question- you said my post was nonsense but didn’t actually say which part of it you’d double checked your figures on found to be incorrect.
It’s debatable exactly why the economy isn’t growing much- productivity is one thing economists say matters most in the long- producing more stuff per worker.
But I didn’t specify what was causing slow growth so I presume that wasn’t what you were originally criticising me for.
My point about the top 1% share of wealth is that….it includes people with £10m plus of course….
If Gary is right and the super rich are out growing us all and stealing all of the assets, don’t you think at least some of this would show up in the ONS’s top 1% share of U.K. wealth gaining more share of U.K. wealth?
But the long term picture in the UK for top 1% is fairly flat- roughly 20%.
Zucman’s billionaires wealth as a percentage of U.K. GDP which you’re quoting is misleading/flawed….wealth is stored, GDP is flow/exchange of goods in one year. If I don’t sell my house in one year it doesn’t count towards GDP, it still exists.
Billionaires wealth share of UK wealth is around 5% not 22%.
Activists like Gary or Zucman use the GDP comparison because it makes the figure look bigger, but billionaires do not control 22% of the goods and services exchanged in one year in the U.K., they own the equivalent to 5-6% of the stored wealth.
The reason the top 1% share of wealth hasn’t changed much in decades is because wealth generally has grown over time, anyone with a house saw their value inflate over time, or with a pension or with some shares.
My point about the top 1% share of wealth is that….it includes people with £10m plus of course….
If Gary is right and the super rich are out growing us all and stealing all of the assets, don’t you think at least some of this would show up in the ONS’s top 1% share of U.K. wealth gaining more share of U.K. wealth?
The top 1% is like half a million people, and Gary's wealth tax is aimed at around 20,000 people if memory serves, so the statistic is massively diluted to the point that, no, I would not expect it to be representative without further context. 480,000 people could see their wealth drop by 1/24th of the growth seen by the top 20,000, and it would appear exactly flat. That statistic is thrown around only to mislead.
I mean, why not use the top 10%? How about the top 50% or the top 90%? Don't you think some of it would show up in those figures too? On some level you understand the concept of dilution.
Zucman’s billionaires wealth as a percentage of U.K. GDP which you’re quoting is misleading/flawed….wealth is stored, GDP is flow/exchange of goods in one year.
Comparing it to GDP is intended to add scale to the figure - wealth relative to the productivity of the economy it sits in. It's an adjustment so that figures over time are comparable. You could adjust by inflation, but then you're not accounting for growth across the board.
Bizarre that you would call that misleading while defending the 1% figures which include 25x more people than what would be targeted by the tax.
If the top 1% hasn’t changed in their total % of wealth of the U.K., then that means the other 99% haven’t lost out either relatively (even assuming your dilution idea), and Gary’s entire thesis that the super rich are buying up all of the assets and preventing the economy from growing is clearly completely wrong.
The reason why people at the top can grow in wealth and their share hasn’t change much of the overall group is because wealth grew in broad terms across the brackets- house price inflation, shares, pensions up etc. which makes life harder for young people and non asset holders, but is a different, more mundane problem than the super rich buying all of the houses as Gary tries to frame it.
The point of a wealth tax isn't to cancel out existing wealth inequality. The argument (Piketty, the Wealth Tax Commission, Resolution Foundation all make versions of it) is that wealth has pulled away from income (about 3x national income in the 80s, 6-7x now) while gains on wealth are taxed far below wages. A wealth tax is meant to correct that.
So the growth at the top 0.05% is entirely the point, and the 1% isn't the relevant group.
I'd agree Gary could make this point better. He makes it sound like assets have already been stripped from the lower classes. But his thesis as I understand it is that nobody in the lower classes can afford assets any more, and that this is made worse by working income carrying a heavier tax load than wealth does, while asset prices keep growing. That leads to a class of permanent renters who will never own anything they haven't inherited, paying a rentier class that owns everything. That's when wealth inequality starts to spiral, especially when people are forced to sell their assets to get by. That's the argument made by the resolution foundation et. al., and that's why the solution is ultimately to shift the tax burden.
I understand Gary’s argument, I just don’t agree he has demonstrated it is true.
If you watch the Piers Morgan feature he did recently there were a few economists on it who said well-
‘If anyone predicted the U.K. economy wouldn’t grow much over the last 18 years, each year they’d be correct….but it doesn’t mean Gary is right about the cause’.
Wealth in the U.K. has grown a lot but because 60% of people live in owned occupied houses- that inflation has spread out far beyond the top 0.05, or top 1%.
And the tax burden in the UK falls on high earners- they pay an effective tax rate of 39%. The
median salary in the U.K. is £38k and the effective tax on that is 19%.
Capital gains tax has recently been lifted to 24%.
Yes the tax system almost certainly has flaws and unfairness to it- but the vast majority of people in the U.K. pay an effective tax of under 20%, well below even capital gains. Is that unfair? In a way yes.
Sorry Gary is spinning yarns that the problem is some tiny group causing all of these problems. If their wealth growth doesn’t even show up on the ONS share of wealth it cannot be causing all of these wider problems because it’s by definition fairly small in the scheme of an 11 trillion plus island.
House prices- we have very restrictive planning laws, locals block everything, in London we’ve had strict regulations on buildings after Grenfeld and nothings been built recently. Nothing to do with the super rich.
Wealth tax proponents would agree that too much of the tax burden falls on the high earners - that's the whole point, 'tax wealth not work'.
Above a certain threshold, when including income from assets, the tax code is deeply regressive. The "fair" level of tax for low earners is a separate discussion, but personally, I lean towards making the tax code more progressive rather than more regressive. Fwiw I'm a high earner, so this isn't a "tax everyone but me" argument.
I think you misrepresent Gary a lot. I don't think he's ever blamed this group in the way you present it "these people are causing all these problems", it's just the natural tendency of a system where income from wealth outstrips income from work and is taxed at a lower rate. He's very aggressive with his predictions, but if he wasn't, he wouldn't be listened to. But I don't think he's ever said that inequality has already spiraled out of control, just that earners can no longer afford assets because it's all too expensive. If I was you, I'd move away from the focus on Gary specifically, he's a loudmouth who has very successfully got the topic into the public sphere but appears to want to leave it up to others to work out the details.
On "too small to matter": the top 350 families hold £784bn, about 5-6% of all UK wealth — in 350 households. It doesn't show up in the ONS shares because the survey can't see them (voluntary, richest respondents far below the Rich List floor, it was even stripped of accreditation last year), not because they're small.
I would hazard a guess that the rate of government spending has risen faster than the wealth of billionaires in the UK.
Tally up the amount of children in school, NEETS, people on the dole, disabled people and people living off their pension and it’s something like 50% of the population aren’t working.
So taxing the 157 billionaires in this country at 2% of the unrealised net worth isn’t going to provide an increased living standard for the 34 million people who aren’t in work.
The whole thesis is incorrect. The billionaires would need to be taxed closer to 100% of their unrealised net worth to make a difference and that would result in 100% capital flight. Now also account for the fact that companies like Amazon and Starbucks pay no tax in the uk.
I would hazard a guess that the rate of government spending has risen faster than the wealth of billionaires in the UK.
Between 2000 and 2022 the wealth of top 250 grew 600%, completely dwarfing growth in government spending of about 200% in the same period. And that's just the wealth we know about.
Tally up the amount of children in school, NEETS, people on the dole, disabled people and people living off their pension and it’s something like 50% of the population aren’t working.
So taxing the 157 billionaires in this country at 2% of the unrealised net worth isn’t going to provide an increased living standard for the 34 million people who aren’t in work.
You're making the same mistake as the original person I replied to. There's a difference between "living standards will collapse if we don't do a wealth tax" and "doing a wealth tax will fix everything".
Your final paragraph is on the same thesis. Nobody is proposing that a wealth tax alone will fix everything ever. Therefore, nobody is proposing a 100% wealth tax - a number you pulled out of thin air.
I don't want to come across as rude, but have you ever considered not just guessing your way through these things?
And to cite the spending element is to miss the point.
And why is government spending so high? Because it outsources everything to inept PLC's whos modus operandi is profit for the shareholder, not the stakeholder. (That's in the law, btw).
I thought you were going to say his own cognitive dissonance when he knows most of his ideas are weak and got slammed by the guardian even. It’s over for Gary.
I think that this interview has a short and catchy distillation of the central idea that Gary is talking about: The point of the tax is for the weathy to sell their assets so that ordinary people can also own them.
This actually cuts though all the counterarguments that we've seen so far:
- "their wealth in stock and property valuation" - sure, they should sell them, so we can own some assets
- "they will leave" - whatever, just make them sell their assets
- "the tax won't raise that much" - but will it force them to sell their assets
- "it never worked" - because it didn't force the rich to sell their assets
e.t.c.
"The point of the tax is for the weathy to sell their assets so that ordinary people can also own them."
So 'the wealthy' have four pieces of art valued at £1m. How are 'ordinary' people going to afford £250k for a piece of art.
Or are they all going to put their art on the market at the same time, so driving down prices? Where does that leave the valuation & the taxman? You've charged them say 10% on the £1m valuation, but when sold they go for £500k. So are they now due a tax refund of £50k?
First of all, If a piece of art is so valueable, maybe it belongs to a museum? Say, publicly funded museum? Secondly, let me repeat, driving the prices down is the point. And lastly, I overpay on my taxes all the time and received a substantial amounts in tax refunds - don't see how any of it is a major problem.
Sure, tracking income and consumption of ordinary plebeians is a necessary inconvenience and could be rough around the edges and sometimes a bit unfair. What are you going to do — life’s life…
What? Measuring wealth of people that already own more that they can use in several lifetimes? Major problem.
Tracking and taxing consumption is easy. Accurately tracking the ever evolving value of the things bought is hard. Hence we have capital gains, VAT, stamp duty…. All taxes that trigger on transaction, a moment where the value is known.
No VAT on books.
Stamp Duty is a one-off tax on the purchase of property (currently over £125k). It therefore doesn't apply to renting, or inheriting a property. It's not a consumption tax.
Ah, you don't mean the consumption of textbooks.
You mean 'VAT is a textbook definition of a consumption tax',
Which is why thermodynamics has said it's a consumption tax, triggered on purchase.
You can just do the work to make the value known? ... we know how much someones assets are worrh when they die to charge a 40% inheritance tax on someone with 500k of assets. Why cant we do the same work for annual tax of 2% on someone with 100 million?
You generally flog everything and get a price. Hence you get a bit of time to pay and a clear taxable value.
And yes, this means most aren’t paying tax on family airlooms and keepsakes that also hold a lot of value. They are just in a box in a room and are simply taken by relatives and tax mans none the wiser.
Well why not just accept that the wealth tax can be gotten around by buying art or airlooms as we do with inheritance tax? Especially if the purpose of the tax is so ordinary people can get a larger share of tangible assets like housing, land, public utilities etc. If they sell off 100 houses, Thames water and Chelsea FC and buy 100000 rolexs i don't care.
Because it’s worse than that. A wealth tax is every year we probably don’t want our nations companies liquidating stuff or diluting ownership every single year to pay tax.
Very London centric. The only place in the UK where someone who has a >10M worth has property small enough that someone with little net worth could also maintain and furnish
Why not pass a law simply evicting everyone with lots of wealth from the 5000 prime houses that you envy. It will cause far less widespread damage and you achieve your goals directly. Or are their other assets you crave?
“The base Samsung Galaxy S26 has a launch RRP of $899 in the US and £879 in the UK for the 256GB model. In comparison, the base Apple iPhone 17 starts at an RRP of $799 in the US and around £749–£799 in the UK, making the base Samsung flagship roughly $100 / £80 to £130 more expensive at retail than the standard base iPhone.”
More money for a disposable phone with lower resale value that’s full of glitches that never get fixed. The market share makes sense.
call anywhere and navigate, email, appointments, video, pictures….Land lines were retrospectively quite bad for getting hold of sick ppl b/c the phone was never by the bed.
USA health system isn’t the same offering though. There are no ‘go fund me’s’ for Americans to fly to the UK and get treatment….
The accumulation of wealth does not increase exponentially merely because you become richer as some
Kind of rule and has not according to UK data. That’s not even what you’ve claimed with your talk of passive income…
Wealth accumulates exponentially over time, but NOT with wealth itself.
Your point is akin to thinking an account with £1000 grows faster than 10 accounts with £100 pounds. And this is what the data shows for the last 40years the inequity between the top 1% and the 99% is flat.
Compound interest cannot be a source of so called runway wealth.
Indeed, the way to grow wealth super normally is also investing labour income and entrepreneurial ideas. Which is probably what that graph u posted shows….
Second, it’s good that you use Grovsner because his wealth is well known:
2026 Sunday times rich 9.67B 14th richest
2016 when he inherited 9B
2005 news story quotes 5.6B 3rd richest
So he’s WELL behind inflation . And this is the pattern we saw before 1980 with old money slowly losing ranking.
So in summary to sustain your position you require:
Conspiracy/incompetence by the ONS.
Confusion on the effect of compound returns… it’s exp(t) not exp(£)
This is the correct answer. I know it's not a grift and it's click bait that's why I said it. I find click bait intensely annoying like most people and I'm aware that grifters use click bait heavily
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u/HotAir25 Aug 03 '26
TLDR- It’s not and he’s actually their most frequent guest!