Gary Stevenson
speaker
5,834 appearances
16 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Gary Stevenson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 16 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.
Appearances
So wealth taxes really are the only tax that has the power to really rebalance the current very unfair tax system.
I think if you look at Zuckman's work, he talks about ordinary workers are paying 50%, billionaires paying 20%.
Wealth taxes, because they tax your stock of wealth rather than just your income every year,
They effectively get around this problem that we have, which is very rich people don't get their money from working.
And because we have a tax system that is largely based around taxing work based income, very rich people are generally effectively able to almost completely avoid tax.
And this is very important within the context of what is currently happening to the wealth distribution in our economies, in our societies, which is most groups of society, poor people, average people, and even higher earning individuals,
are getting poorer, governments are getting poorer, ordinary people are holding less wealth, governments are holding less wealth, and all of that wealth is being accumulated amongst the richest people in our society.
Now, when we can see that this is the way that wealth is being moved throughout society, it's really, really important that we introduce a tax into the system which can effectively target not just high-earning workers, but the very, very rich.
And if we don't do that, wealth will continue to be squeezed out of ordinary families and will continue to accumulate in the very rich.
It's this shift in wealth which is basically driving living standards down.
If we want to drive living standards back up again, and if we want ordinary people to again be able to own assets, own housing, we need something in the tax system which is able to squeeze wealth back out from the very rich.
it's very very difficult to do this with taxes on income alone because very rich people if you start to tax their income at very high rates you know you know even if you were to tax their income at 100 number one they could simply stop receiving their income you know it has very bad negative economic consequences
And two, it's not going to squeeze wealth back out of that group.
The only real way you can get wealth out of this basically billionaire class who is accumulating the wealth is to tax the stock of the wealth itself.
So if you are an ordinary family and you are worried about the ability of
yourself or your kids to own assets in the future, you really do need to be supporting a wealth tax or some sort of tax on the stock of wealth.
This is the only way that we can get wealth back into the hands of ordinary families.
And The Economist essentially recognised this in what it says.
It says that the tax system must ensure that meritocracy prevails over inheritocracy.
So this is the system that we're in.
Showing 2821–2840 of 5,834 · page 142 of 292
← Previous
Next →