Here’s a weird question: would burning rich people’s tax money improve living standards?
Gary Stevenson, of Gary’s Economics, has said it would in interviews.
But is he just having a laugh?
Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!
Let’s find out what he has to say about it:
So he reckons destroying this money – belonging to the rich, remember, not to anybody else – would be reversing what happened during the Covid-19 crisis, when rich people were handed huge amounts of cash by the government in return for nothing worth having.
Do you believe his claim that, because these people are sitting on the money they’ve been given, the government is also paying interest on it? I don’t understand why that would be, so I’m not convinced that there would be no need for those interest payments and therefore no need for austerity, if this money was burned.
It is possible that much of the cash handed out during the pandemic crisis – £320,000 each if it only went to the wealthiest one per cent – has been invested in assets. This means those assets would have to be sold to raise the tax money – most probably to middle class people. Inequality would then decrease as more and different people benefit from those assets. This seems reasonable.
With a significant amount of money spent on tax, rich people would have to reduce their spending, meaning they would not be able to push up prices and inflation would fall. It might even go negative. If it goes below two per cent, the central bank would have to act – cutting interest rates. This means mortgage payments would fall.
Apparently the government debt and deficit would also fall. And living standards would increase.
Whether these things would happen, This Writer doesn’t know.
But the next bit rings true: during Covid, faced with predictions of what would happen (that came true), many people asked why the rich becoming richer mattered. “It’s the politics of envy,” they said.
Gary comes up with a very good response to this, which is that if the rich had been given real resources, then society would have become more productive because those resources would have been used.
Money is not a real resource. It’s what we use to determine how the real resources are distributed. So give the rich more money and they would use it to deny wealth and resources to the middle- and working-classes – meaning housing, food and energy are suddenly priced out of our reach.
Of course, Gary doesn’t want to burn the money.
It’s enough – £800 billion was handed to the rich during the Covid crisis – to give every adult in the UK £16,000 each. And that could radically change all our lives.
So, he says, taxing the rich is not about the politics of envy, but the politics of power, of distribution; a group in society is taking resources away from us and the government, and making us all poor.
Taxing them is the only way to stop this from happening.
How we do that is an important debate – Richard Murphy recently had something to say about it and I would like to know what Gary has to say about his ideas.
What do you think?
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The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
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Would BURNING rich people’s taxes improve living standards?
Here’s a weird question: would burning rich people’s tax money improve living standards?
Gary Stevenson, of Gary’s Economics, has said it would in interviews.
But is he just having a laugh?
Buy Cruel Britannia in print here. Buy the Cruel Britannia ebook here. Or just click on the image!
Let’s find out what he has to say about it:
So he reckons destroying this money – belonging to the rich, remember, not to anybody else – would be reversing what happened during the Covid-19 crisis, when rich people were handed huge amounts of cash by the government in return for nothing worth having.
Do you believe his claim that, because these people are sitting on the money they’ve been given, the government is also paying interest on it? I don’t understand why that would be, so I’m not convinced that there would be no need for those interest payments and therefore no need for austerity, if this money was burned.
It is possible that much of the cash handed out during the pandemic crisis – £320,000 each if it only went to the wealthiest one per cent – has been invested in assets. This means those assets would have to be sold to raise the tax money – most probably to middle class people. Inequality would then decrease as more and different people benefit from those assets. This seems reasonable.
With a significant amount of money spent on tax, rich people would have to reduce their spending, meaning they would not be able to push up prices and inflation would fall. It might even go negative. If it goes below two per cent, the central bank would have to act – cutting interest rates. This means mortgage payments would fall.
Apparently the government debt and deficit would also fall. And living standards would increase.
Whether these things would happen, This Writer doesn’t know.
But the next bit rings true: during Covid, faced with predictions of what would happen (that came true), many people asked why the rich becoming richer mattered. “It’s the politics of envy,” they said.
Gary comes up with a very good response to this, which is that if the rich had been given real resources, then society would have become more productive because those resources would have been used.
Money is not a real resource. It’s what we use to determine how the real resources are distributed. So give the rich more money and they would use it to deny wealth and resources to the middle- and working-classes – meaning housing, food and energy are suddenly priced out of our reach.
Of course, Gary doesn’t want to burn the money.
It’s enough – £800 billion was handed to the rich during the Covid crisis – to give every adult in the UK £16,000 each. And that could radically change all our lives.
So, he says, taxing the rich is not about the politics of envy, but the politics of power, of distribution; a group in society is taking resources away from us and the government, and making us all poor.
Taxing them is the only way to stop this from happening.
How we do that is an important debate – Richard Murphy recently had something to say about it and I would like to know what Gary has to say about his ideas.
What do you think?
Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:
Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical
3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/
Join the Vox Political Facebook page.
4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com
5) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical
6) Feel free to comment!
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.
Cruel Britannia is available
in either print or eBook format here:
The Livingstone Presumption is available
in either print or eBook format here:
Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:
The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:
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