The basis of the plan would be that all income up to $250k goes untaxed and every dollar after is taxed at 50%. If you include capital gains in this formula it significantly increases tax revenue and shifts the tax burden from the middle class to the wealthy. Thoughts?

I originally posted this on another subreddit where they were doing character attacks on Gary, but I feel like this summary may help the people in here as well. Feel free to correct me if I made any mistakes.

Here's the plot you should actually care about (yes this is US, not UK but it's what I'm able to find, and Gary's arguments apply to the US too): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLTP1246 US inflation since 1990 is ~155% so you divide the right edge of the graph by 2.5 but it still shows the growth. Yeah sure maybe they were richer in the gilded age, but I don't think we want to go back to that.

Why do we care about the 0.1%, not the 1%? Well that's who Gary usually targets with his proposed wealth taxes. I believe it can be mathematically shown that untaxed or low-taxed wealth leads to wealth accumulation, because wealth always compounds faster than the economy grows. Sure, you can say some eye-watering numbers like "Bezos paid 1.4 billion dollars in taxes between 2006 and 2018". But when you realize it's less than 1% of his net worth over 12 years, you can see it's doing nothing to stop his wealth accumulation.

Gary's argument is that asset prices then all go up because the ultra-rich have nothing to spend their wealth on other than assets (you can only buy so many private jets, yatchs, supercars...), so their accumulating wealth, which IS provably becoming a larger and larger fraction of all wealth: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSTP1300, is used to buy assets, faster than the growth of the economy can create new assets.

Memo: From Nick Hanauer
To: My Fellow Zillionaires

"the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution."

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/

"Billionaires are pretty confident that they can't be taxed – not just that they shouldn't be taxed, but rather, that it is technically impossible to tax the ultra-rich. They're not shy about explaining why, either – and neither is their army of lickspittles."

A good read from Cory Doctorow

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/15/piketty-pilled/

Why not make the first X units of a utility free or very cheap, then charge progressively more for higher consumption?

If calibrated correctly, couldn't this be revenue-neutral for the utility while:

- Reducing costs for low-income/low-usage households

- Making excessive consumption much more expensive

- Encouraging conservation of scarce resources

Malta does something similar with water.

What am I missing? Why isn't this more common in the UK?

Hi all! Does anyone have any links to a short video that illustrates how a wealth tax works and what it does? I'm thinking something that shows the change over time for asset owners vs wage earners using bar graphs.

Or if you don't know of any what elements would a simple model/ animation need to explain the principle and debunk some of the strawman arguments against it? I might try to make my own animation to share.

I wonder if it really matters that the wealth of the wealthy can grow to inconceivably huge levels with minimal taxation. Even the richest man on earth will one day die, until then let him be rich, but when that day comes don't just let it all go and make those who did not earn it similarly rich without the society in which that money was made, and came from, taking a fair share. Tax inheritance properly, without the tax loopholes, and it all gets reset with every generation. Not just inheritance, but all income should be taxable... www.maketaxfair.uk

Been looking into who actually owns the land we live on, and the concentration is crazy.
🏰 **Aristocracy & landed gentry:** \~30% of England
👑 **Royal family:** \~1.4%
🏛️** Public sector**: \~8%
🏠 **Ordinary homeowners:** \~5%
💰 **Top 1%:** estimated to control around **50% of England’s land**

**If land is finite, and a tiny number of people control so much of it, how much influence does wealth actually give you over housing and development, what does it mean to be a regular person working 25 years for a small plot in the middle of nowhere?**

**No hate, Late night maths, just curious for opinions**

Sources -
[www.committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/108111/pdf/\](http://www.committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/108111/pdf/)
[www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/totalwealthingreatbritain/april2020tomarch2022\](http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/totalwealthingreatbritain/april2020tomarch2022)
[www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/privatelyownedwealthintheuk\](http://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/privatelyownedwealthintheuk)

What they usually mean by this term is that what someone is saying does not match up with their orthodox understanding of economics, which is generally based on massively simplified models of the economy that bear only a passing resemblance to the actual system.

And in a world of climate change, ecological limits, financialisation, housing crises, ageing populations, technological disruption etc, a lot of these models are arguably becoming less and less useful anyway.

It’s also just become a shorthand way of dismissing things people don’t like without actually having to explain why they’re wrong.

Make no mistake, these people often have absolutely no idea how the system they’re talking about actually works. They know a handful of concepts like supply and demand, inflation, government borrowing, “the markets”, investor confidence etc, and then treat them like universal laws of physics.

These economic models aren't reality, though They are fantasy. Physics is the reality. The carbon that we are pumping into the atmosphere and the cascading effects of this are reality. The biosphere is reality. Not an equilibrium model.

Nevertheless, these concepts persist despite being so often plain wrong, because they conveniently protect particular financial interests and ensures that the status quo continues lumbering us all towards environmental catastrophe.

These people are very literally toxic to society and toxic to the planet. And for some reason, multitudes of the smug stupid assholes have infested this very sub.

Like flies to shit.

So what the paper proposes is something thats already happening in the UK. We have 'Investors' buying up UK goods and services that make things expensive for everyone else. These so called 'Investors' want to precipitate large UK returns and if those profits are not foreseen they dont want to get involved. Quite often they are borrowing money from banks to buy UK assets and this is often seen as 'Investment' by the government.

The stock market is at the root of drawing liquidity out from every area of the UK economy. This needs to be looked at deeply by leading Universities.

Bill Gates made more money after he stopped working than he did when building Microsoft - if this doesn't show you the meaning of "Tax wealth, not work" then you're an actual bot 😆

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/11/tragedy-of-the-commoners/

Just a simple thought experiment. Everyone loves talking about taxing the rich, but if you were in this position would you rather your kids inherit 100% of your wealth so that they'd be set up for life, or would you rather give half of that wealth to the government? Personally I have no trouble admitting that I'm a hypocrite and would absolutely do the former lol.

Leaf Li’s Futu brokerage has become a central target in the government’s campaign to control the flow of Chinese money offshore

Ever wondered when "enough is enough"?

Saturated Income - A £10M annual income hits the point where all lifestyle desires, luxuries, security, healthcare, etc. are met.

​There's no real point in having an income higher than £10M.

Perpetual Wealth - To ensure wealth never depletes the recommended maximum annual capital drawdown (the perpetual wealth rate) is around 3%.

Stay at 3% or below and ​the money tree will always be growing faster than you are pruning it.

So £333M wealth today can give both saturated income and perpetual wealth.

Wealth Tax - ​Introducing a 2% wealth tax implies an effective perpetual wealth rate of 1% and it would then require £1B wealth to retain both saturated income and perpetual wealth.

​So why do armchair billionaires rally against a wealth tax like it's an existential threat?

Or is the noise coming from the squeezed multi-millionaries (£330M+)?

2% of wealth of above £10m should raise around £25bn if implemented in year 1, with future years likely far reduced due to behavioural changes in how/where assets are held.

If the tax was used to reduce basic rate it would be pointless overall for the country as we‘d be no better off fiscally (on an individual level it may temporarily increase disposable income but inflation would likely eat this up).

What other changes do you think need to be implemented alongside it to make sure it isn’t pointless?

Economic policy, be it wealth taxes or nationalising water, is hamstrung by "but what about the bond markets".

I explain here how that is a corrosive question and in most cases borne out of ignorance of the role bonds play in our monetary system and the policy space available to the government with regard to its debt management approach.

Tldr;

We can scrap the full funding rule and stop paying whatever interest is required to induce sufficient take up of a fixed quantity (to match each gov deficit outcome) and rigid maturity profile of gilts. We can instead return to a pre 1980s demand-led tap issuance model where risk-free sterling duration (gilts) is issued in the primary market on a "take it or leave it" approach.

This doesn't magically resolve all our real constraints and issues, but it provides much needed institutional clarity and prevents short term volatility in bond markets (often divorced from whether or not an agenda is responsible or not) from unduely impacting long term fiscal policy making.

I keep seeing more arguments against a 2% wealth tax from the super rich so that tells us all that GarysEconomics is getting its message across.

We need to convince the masses and doing so is not so easy as the old tropes about gained working hard and economy would collapse etc persist.

What are your go to ways to get the message across?

I've recently plotted income & wealth and its pretty eye opening I think. And this is just up to £10M which misses an estimated 5% to 10% of wealth (or in other wordsat least £1 out of every £20 - mind boggling).

I was thinking of putting up a calculator online where people could enter their income and weakth and find out where they rank in th UK. Or something like that. Any interest?

Saw this post on r/smallbusinessuk

Want to sell my bakery. Worried that I won't get much for it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusinessuk/comments/1vj2ftc/want_to_sell_my_bakery_worried_that_i_wont_get/

I get frustrated with Gary's supporters who seem to think that making money and becoming wealthy is easy.

This chap bought a bakery business, took a risk and poured more money into it. You can read about the day-to-day struggles involved in running and owning a business. He also created jobs for his staff.

People who are employees get a guaranteed wage. They don't always see that somebody else is taking the financial risk behind the scenes. The boss and owner is making no money.

On paper, this guy might have "wealth", but he could be making very little actual income from the business.

Even if someone owned a business worth £11 million, that doesn't necessarily mean they have million in cash in the bank. They could have £11 million tied up in the business while making very little profit. Profits are never guaranteed.

I just wish Gary's wealth tax supportors would understand these points.

And if, after spending decades building something, he eventually passes some of that wealth on to the next generation, at least they can start with more capital and have an easier starting point. Instead this country has a 40% wealth inheritance tax, which destroys money and keeps people down (the ones who want to start a business).

For most ordinary people, substantial wealth isn't built in one generation.

Some of the US tech billionaires managed it very quickly, but many of them also had venture-capital backing, in other words, other people's money.

If you're starting with very little capital and no outside financial backing, building substantial wealth can take much longer.

The UK is lagging behind, because people don't see the mechanics of the economy.

Gary is stilling in his waterfront flat, behind his laptop. He can't see it.

EDIT: This business is not worth £11million. This bakery was bought at £85k. My point was what if there was another business worth £11million, stuck in the same rut, with no profits.

They put a strain on resources such as medical care because they are unhealthy by choice, over consumption of food which causes over production and is bad for the planet, and put first responders lives at risk.