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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 16 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.
Appearances
We're moving increasingly into an economy where the only thing that really matters is what your parents own and the work that you do is less and less important.
The only way that I can see you ready to fix that is through bringing in a wealth tax.
But the economists have said specifically, we don't want wealth taxes, we want inheritance taxes.
And the reason this is interesting is because an inheritance tax is the only tax that is currently in the books that has the power to tax the stock of wealth of the rich people.
It is the only tax that we have in the current system, which is essentially a form of a wealth tax rather than an income tax.
and so when i hear this argument in the economist which is like look inequality is terrible it's growing you know and this is all here in the in the article you know inequality matters growth is better when broad-based when i hear these arguments made inequality is terrible it's growing it's destroying the economy but we can't do wealth taxes it has to be inheritance taxes it sets off these kind of alarm bells in my head which makes me sort of
To be honest, until I read it in The Economist, when it's come up a couple of times in meetings with quite influential people in the UK, both times when that comes up, it immediately makes me think, oh my God, this person has no idea what they are talking about.
And I just assumed that the people that I spoke to were just not very knowledgeable, I guess, on tax.
But to see it in The Economist makes me sort of...
Really amazed, really.
And I want to explain why this stance that we shouldn't do wealth taxes, but we should do inheritance taxes is so stupid.
Okay, so from the perspective of an ordinary person, the wealth that you own and the wealth that you leave to your kids, your inheritance, are very different things.
So what ordinary people do is they do what economists call life cycle savings.
So when you're very young, you don't have any money, you're poor, you work really hard when you're young and you slowly, slowly, slowly accumulate assets and you need those assets to get through your retirement and to get through your end of life care.
And this is the typical wealth trajectory of an ordinary person in Western society.
So if I look at my grandparents,
they worked when they were of working age they accumulated money they bought a house and then they need that accumulated wealth to get through their retirement they do things like they buy equity release schemes for their houses and all of that money gets them through their retirement through the end of life care and even though all of my grandparents owned property when they were alive none of them left any significant inheritance and this is the normal wealth path for an ordinary person so i think from an ordinary person you think oh well
The wealth I own and the inheritance I leave are two completely different things.
But let's consider the financial situation of an incredibly wealthy person.
So the wealth tax which we are proposing here in the UK at the moment is 2% on wealth above 10 million.
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