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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's impossible to tax the super rich. The current situation is a violation. The explosion of billionaire wealth has been one of the most striking features of the world economy. In the Sunday Times rich list, they own in wealth the equivalent of 25% of the UK's GDP. That's incredible. Has increased from 5% to 25%.
Chapter 2: How has billionaire wealth changed over the years?
That's not okay.
You came up with a proposal to impose a 2% annual levy. Frankie, it's the beginning of the solution.
The leader of reforms taking money from billionaires. Surely they'll find ways to make their wealth not look as big as it is. As you say, they've got the power. Yeah. So they can play the system on that front.
If...
you were to do this all of these people would relocate elsewhere and would also stop investing in the uk yeah that's the central question and so we're delighted to say that this year the rest is money is powered by octopus energy and we've got greg here greg good to see you so oil prices are very volatile if they stay like that what can we do to protect the uk economy
In the long run, electrification's the answer. Ever since I was a kid, we've had periodic fossil fuel shocks and more fossil fuels aren't the long-term answer because the reality is that industry will never have spare capacity. They wouldn't invest in stuff unless you're using it every day, which means that whenever there's a constraint on supply, prices go up.
We never used to have an alternative, but now with electrification, we do.
Nice one, Greg. Thanks for explaining that. Right, we're going to go to the episode. Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Money with me, Steph McGovern.
And with me, Robert Purston.
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Chapter 3: Why do billionaires pay almost no income tax?
And we're talking about roughly 3,000 households at the global level. You know, that's the billionaires that Forbes captures in its ranking.
So just to summarize, 3,000 households control or, you know, have wealth equivalent to 17% of global income. Correct. Exactly.
Yeah, that's the number. And 3,000 households, you know, it's a tiny fraction of the population, clearly. 0.0001% of the world population. 17%, it gives you a sense of... their power and their influence. Because wealth, you know, for most people, it's a good thing. For the middle class, it means owning their home. It means having some pension assets for retirement.
So we'd like to encourage wealth accumulation for the middle class. We'd like the working class to have access to property. They are largely excluded from property ownership today. The bottom 50% of the distribution of wealth owns almost no wealth at all. Their assets are about as large as their debts. So we'd like them to have more wealth.
But for billionaires, of course, they're not accumulating wealth for their old days, right? For them, wealth is power. It's the power to influence markets by buying competitors. It's the power to influence the prevailing ideology by buying media, companies, newspapers, and so on. It's the power to buy elections. It's the power to influence policymaking.
And so an extreme concentration of wealth always means an extreme concentration of power. And this is a tension that's really fundamental in our democratic societies. All the thinkers of democracy have written about that from Aristotle to someone like Lea Yipi today at the London School of Economics.
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Chapter 4: What role do tax havens play in wealth accumulation?
I mean, this is something obviously that's concerned me and Steph for years, this concentration of power, particularly what it's doing to our politics. But if we could also just think for a second about the main drivers of this extraordinary concentration of wealth. Yeah.
I mean, one of them I'm assuming are the sort of winner takes all nature of the digital economy that started to explode in size from the mid 1990s that we created. What we saw is the creation of businesses.
whether it's your Google alphabets or these days, your Claude's and your open AIs that become essentially networks where the rewards for whoever happens to be the early owners are just off the charts huge. And then I assume the other big driver, since you're talking about the post 2007 and 8 period, is just the way that zero cost of money, very low interest rates, inflated assets.
asset prices, but what would be the other drivers of what's doing this?
I think those drivers have played some role, but they are not the most important ones in my view. What's been really essential is two things. One is the general shift towards more pro-capital policies. After World War II, you had a number of regulations, whether it's of the financial industry or whether it's of the real estate market, like rent caps or rent regulation.
You had all sorts of relatively anti-capital policies and relatively pro-labor policies, and unions were powerful and so on. And then there was a shift that started in 1980s in the opposite direction. So that's financial deregulation, that's the massive changes in taxation.
So this is staturism and Reaganism?
Yeah, pretty much, yes. You could call it that way. And what's been key in those changes, in this broad set of changes, is what has happened to taxation.
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Chapter 5: How would a 2% global wealth tax impact billionaires?
Because taxation is really at the heart of the explosion of the wealth of the super rich. Why? Because what we've discovered recently is that billionaires essentially pay almost no income tax. That's the reality today. And some people suspected that this was the case. But until a few years ago, there was no study to demonstrate it with actual data.
Perhaps let me give one example so that everybody understands. So a few years ago, you had revelations by the US media ProPublica on the taxes paid by US billionaires. And you saw people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos in some years reporting very little taxable income and paying very little in income tax.
Chapter 6: What are the practical challenges of implementing a wealth tax?
Even in one year, Jeff Bezos says, oh, look, I'm so poor that I'm going to claim family benefits. And he receives family benefits. That was about 10 years ago. The revelations were in 2022, I think. And he received a check from the IRS. One of the wealthiest persons in the world. And look... Don't get me wrong. There's nothing illegal in that. It's not fraud. It's the way the system works.
What the recent studies have shown, there's been a wave of research that started a few years ago, and now we have studies for about 10 countries, is that it's not just a few isolated cases like Bezos.
Chapter 7: How can countries prevent tax avoidance by the wealthy?
It's a structural feature that the wealthiest persons in the world can easily structure their wealth so that they will not have any taxable income to report. How Bezos did it is very simple. As CEO of Amazon, he didn't pay himself any wage. As the controlling shareholder of Amazon, he instructed the company not to distribute any data dividends, and so he didn't have any dividend income.
And then he didn't sell shares in Amazon, so he didn't realize any capital gains. And so his taxable income was really low, even though his true economic income, his share of Amazon's profit or his wealth was really large. So his ability to pay taxes is really large. And so the fact that the billionaires kind of live in their own parallel society tax-free.
But how did he get money out then?
Chapter 8: What are the potential economic effects of taxing billionaires?
Makes their wealth grow faster than the wealth of everybody else.
But with someone like Bezos, if you're saying that he didn't take an income, he didn't take dividends, how did he then, where did the money come from in terms of how he could still spend loads of money and have loads of money?
If he wants to spend some money, he can borrow some money at the bank. There's a whole industry, a whole part of the financial industry that provides liquidity to the super rich.
But then if you borrow money, you have to pay interest, but assume the interest is less than what you would pay in tax is what you're saying.
Well, you have to pay interest, but that's really negligible relative to whatever his true income is or what he would have to pay in tax if there was a wealth tax, for instance.
The key point is that when you're extremely rich, it's true you need a little bit of money for your own personal consumption expenditures, but your personal consumption is always only a very small fraction of your true income. If your income is like £1 billion... You know, maybe you can consume 10 million and that's already quite an achievement, but it's only 1% of your true income.
You know, surely you're borrowing money vast amounts against your slime business. I have a retail business. And funding your lavish lifestyle.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, I properly pay my taxes. But the point you make as well, I guess to summarise a bit, so what you're saying is part of this growth has come from the fact that they've got more powerful so they can be part of controlling the system here too. So it's kind of like gaming the system, which gives them greater power, greater wealth and then greater power again.
at least they've been very effective at preventing the necessary changes, meaning the changes to the tax system that would just make sure that they pay taxes like you and me.
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