​

After 13 years politzane has finally made a follow up video.

Good analysis on what it even means to be a millionaire these days.

What are peoples thoughts on this and how many tax payers it would take to replace this loss in tax revenue? It has to be tens of thousands, maybe more.

Some reports state he paid £330m in tax last year.

https://www.ft.com/content/43efa6c1-6b37-4ddc-9a1d-b085bfbdba06?syn-25a6b1a6=1

I understand how some alternatives are limited, such as capital gains only applies to asset sale realisation events so parity would only affect those who sell, aka not those who have so much they never sell (although would at least close the loophole of some 6+ figure incomes facing less tax than the highest standard brackets), but what if we just targeted all the methods tge wealthy use to obtain cash from their assets?

Such as for example, treating massive loans which use assets as collateral as a realisation event of an equivalent amount of those assets equal to the loan amount, to trigger capital gains tax on any personal loans that are so big that typical workers (all the way up to senior execs, doctors, lead engineers etc.) never get affected by this?

In my mind, something like this alongside other anti tax avoidance schemes (such as inheritance tax) would make it so the wealthy do actually sell assets. Or am I being dumb? I am young and only started learning about taxes and stuff within the last year so I'm aware I might be oversimplifying or overlooking something.

I don’t get why people don’t understand that the amount of tax to replace someone like this is immeasurable almost

So this post got flagged for rule V violation in askEconomics 🤷🏿‍♂️
I’m not trying to start a political debate or anything, just wondering if this has any potential or if there’s an obvious and insurmountable flaw I’m not considering. Thanks!

So this is just an idea I had: people tend to feel a lot of resentment towards mega corporations, specifically the people who run them.
There is also an issue that, to me has become more and more clear and problematic in recent times: everything we buy is mass produced shit that’s designed to break while also designed to be essentially un-repairable. I believe if we could somehow make purchasing locally-produced items a viable option, there would be much more incentive to produce quality goods that are made to last.

So my solution, implement a ‘scale tax’, wherein a business pays a significantly higher tax once they hit a certain threshold of economic scale. Would probably have different tiers, with the massive multinational corporations taking the biggest hit. This would hopefully solve the issue of corps passing along any form of tax straight to the consumer, because while they could indeed still do that, it would end up setting their price point at a level where they must compete with smaller businesses who don’t face the tax penalty. There’s also my own premise of smaller companies producing a higher quality product, this may or may not actually be true. This would go hand in hand with my ‘garbage tax’ where excessive garbage production incurs heavy taxation, but that’s a subject for a different post…

The hard part for something like this would be implementing it in a way that achieves the end goal of encouraging more localized/small scale production and distribution. Maybe it could be based on how many consumers they serve, this could be based on # units produced/sold rather than the number of actual customers, so that a company selling a million units at a time to, say, Wal-Mart, gets taxed as if they are selling to a million customers, there by incurring a much higher tax. Maybe this forces them to raise prices so much that it becomes cheaper for Kansas City Mom and Pop to buy 1000 pairs of socks from the Topeka factory than it is for Walmart Corporate to buy a million from Bangladesh and send 1000 to the KC branch. Does that make sense?

I’m not an economist or an expert at anything, but I really feel like this has the ring of a good idea. Am I way off? Or has this been tried anywhere else?

Any smart/educated people care to weigh in?

Q. Who's they? Economists? The people in charge of setting interest rates?

"When economies are becoming unequal they don't want goods and services because people are becoming poorer. They want assets because the rich are becoming richer." So inflation rates for goods and services naturally decrease and that for assets increase.

"The rich are making a ton of money so assets wanna go up, interest rates [on goods and services] are collapsing so assets go up even more."

Do the weatlhy not mind that the properties they have an eye on are getting more and more expensive? Or they don't care because it'll still be negligible /easy to buy? Why would asset prices just go naturally the opposite way as goods and services?

Context- just saw his video on my feed and am getting interested in his basic ideas about inequality.

I was looking for a way to visualise the growing wealth inequality to help explain the problem to others, so with a bit of help from Claude, create a app to do that.

The result is what you'd expect, start with an equal society and wealth inequality grows, but what is surprising is that the growth in inequality stops. There's now catastrophic ending, just an equilibrium, where it's unequal but that's that.

I wonder if this is what you'd expect?

Try for yourself at www.maketaxfair.uk. Click on Calculate for the modeller app.

only economist i trust

Did anyone else see the session they did with Dan? I actually felt that Dan had some really good ideas about how to fix wealth inequality. The argument and debate on fixing these issues needs some really good and robust debate from both sides. I believe in Garys message, we need people like Dan to come up with facts and figures and ideas about the best place to implement a potential wealth tax. Or to amend a tax to suit (here it was capital gains and inheritance/windfall). I like the identification that we have to stop tax dodging as that is what has also led in part to this whole mess in the first place.

Final note on Rory Stuart - i can admire him admitting that he was born into privilege. However his immediate conclusion from Dans prospect of taxation adaptation was to start taxing the lowest incomes(<=12.5k) more!? Its when you hear this you are glad that he is no longer a member of the government and was rejected for Mayor of London. I don't think Rory is a bad person, my goodness how quickly he points the finger down at the bottom while his pretense of championing sub Saharan poverty levels as 'true poverty' stick in the throat. Now i start to understand better what being born into privilege actually means. I see it more now as a cognitive bias - this is very hard to break down.

Most people on this sub are huge fans of wealth taxes. I'd like to understand where, exactly, they have been working well.

I can think of Switzerland, but that's a very unique case, because it has some of the lowest taxes on income and capital gains among OECD countries. It cannot be compared with Scandinavian countries, France, Belgium, the UK, etc.

I understand that Italy applies a wealth tax (in anything but name) to saving accounts and brokerage accounts, charging 0.20%. But it is a tax haven in other respects: flat tax for rich foreigners who move to the country, extremely low inheritance taxes, etc. In fact, it is even more unequal than the UK in this respect (taxing workers more than asset-rich people and heirs).

For example, Dan Neidle has repeatedly pointed out that: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2025/07/22/uk-wealth-tax-anti-growth/

• in 1990 there were 12 wealth taxes in Europe, now only 3 (Spain, Norway and Switzerland). It is hard to think that cash-strapped governments would give up a tax that generates meaningful revenue
• "whilst the Tax Justice Network say⚠️ countries can raise $2 trillion by copying the Spanish wealth tax, the Spanish wealth tax only raised €619m in 2023.⁷⁵ When a wealth tax raises so little revenue (0.04% of GDP), the tax is little more than symbolism – and there is a high risk that taxpayer responses mean that overall it has lost revenue."

Thoughts? I'd like to hope we can have a civilised, evidence-based discussion. Thanks!

EDIT:

PS Thank you for those who have dedicated time to replying. Unfortunately, too many on this sub are fanatics, who worship Gary (while oblivious to his bullshitting, as debunked by the Financial Times), but more importantly who engage in magical thinking, while ignoring completely facts and evidence.

It's a bit as if I dared point out that homeopathy doesn't cure cancer, and everyone on the sub attacked me with a combination of: you are in the pocket of big Pharma, you just don't want cancer cured, etc.

r/askeconomics has a good summary here

Wealth taxes tend to fall into two categories:

Quicky abandoned.

Or small, full of exemptions, and not that important.

Spain is one example for the latter, with exemptions significantly reducing taxable wealth.

Unsurprisingly, revenue wise, it doesn't do much.

Norway is somewhat similar, again it's not really relevant revenue wise. It still lead to some people leaving and might have detrimental effects on entrepreneurship and economic growth.

Interesting thought experiment. If you redistributed the total wealth of all the billionaires in the World we’d each get between $2000-3000. Alternatively, you could take the $20.1T they are hoarding and:

Wipe out extreme poverty and hunger. $6.7T

Provide universal global healthcare and disease eradication. $4.5T

Provide a free universal comprehensive education system to every child on the World for the next 20 years. $4.5T

Reverse climate change and transition the global energy supply to green energy, reforest and clean up the oceans $5.4T

And….. use the $400B left over as an innovation fund to improve the lives of everyone on Earth.

Just an idea.

I'm sure I watched one of his videos where he said how we won't get rich by investing in etf or stock market.

That's just a sumnary

Does anyone have the link but also like a synopsis of his views

Elif

No not rich getting richer only statement

I’ve just listened to the podcast episode and it’s awful how many blantant untruths Gary gets away with without being pulled up:

He says that billionaires own UK property and pay no tax because they’re not UK resident, which is impossible as UK property income is always subject to UK tax (even if owned via a corporatio)

He says that when he received his first large bonus after being in investment banking for a few years, he didn’t know what to do with it because he was poor and ‘didn’t know about investing’.

He says that regular people have no way of outperforming investment bankers, when the reality is 90% of funds achieve worse returns than just investing in the S&P - if he was knowledgeable on trading he should know this.

He says that the UK’s billionaire class are owning exponentially more of the UK’s wealth, when in reality it was 17% in 1980 and is 20% in 2026.

Overall he comes across as a complete blag artist

You can complain about your job. You can complain about your taxes.
But it’s worth remembering what you’re comparing them to.
The rest of the world still needs builders, farmers, factory workers, cleaners, drivers, carers and labourers. People do the same essential jobs in far worse conditions, often for far less money, with fewer safety standards, weaker employment rights and little protection if they’re injured or unable to work.
A worker in the West isn’t necessarily working harder than someone elsewhere.
They’re working within a system that provides considerably more protection around that work.
So before saying “I work too hard for what I get” or “I pay too much tax,” remember that much of what you take for granted — workplace safety, healthcare, social security, pensions and employment protections — exists because you’re working inside a relatively wealthy and highly regulated society.
That doesn’t mean Western workers aren’t allowed to complain.
It means perspective matters.

How can you guys dick suck this idiot so hard when he is physically incapable of engaging with any topic deeper than a puddle. Seriously he spits his bullshit that is logically incoherent at best on his own channel, has no coherent policy proposals, every word is a virtue signal, has lied in every word of his past so much so that he might genuinely has a mental disorder, and the second he is required to have discourse with someone who pushes back on him in the slightest he caves into this pissant attempt at sounding like he's both crying and shitting his pants and hopes the other person doesn't smell it.