As the Guardian notes this morning:
Approximately 344,000 highest earners who received more than £175,000 before tax accounted for 17% of the UK's pre-tax income, including capital gains, over that period but made just 6% of all charitable donations.
Bening rich clearly does not make you generous: instead it makes you mean.
And this is getting worse:
Incomes of the healthiest have risen, as other evidence also shows.
However, charitable giving has fallen.
As Thatcher's children have come to be the rich, and get richer, so the country gets meaner.
No wonder we get people like Rishi Sunak arguing that new covid boosters require the imposition of austerity. This is simply indicative of the self-serving thinking of the very rich in our society.
And it is because of the harm that these people cause, and the impact that their wealth has on growing inequality that we must tax the multi-millionaires more. We do not need their money to pay for public services. What we do need is to stop the power that they have to destroy wellbeing in our society.
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I wonder what the situation is like in lower tax countries. In the USA there is an expectation that the rich give massively to charity. In the UK for example DfID gives a million a year to the Carter and Clinton Foundations so some people may think why should I bother doing so myself when the government does it for me.
As you say, we don’t need tax off rich people to pay for public services, so we could in theory tax the rich less and their charitable contribution would likely rise.
Two comments made and both prove you are a troll
Please don’t call again
“…so we could in theory tax the rich less and their charitable contribution would likely rise.”
We already do. And apparently they don’t.
🙂
I’m sure I heard a treatise on Radio 4 recently about Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and how it was really a fable about enduring human frailties.
This greed you describe accurately is what I think Tolkien describes as the ‘Dragon Sickness’ that afflicts the King of the Elves (Thorin?).
There’s a lot of it about these days. Money changes people. I’ve seen it change their capacity for compromise – one of the worst things that can happen I think.
Money – for all its utility and possibilities – is also The Devil himself.
Speaking of Lord of the Rings, surely those rich folk who would rather crouch underground in doomsday bunkers than help address climate change, pandemics and inequality should be referred to as ‘Gollums’?
https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-moguls-8-million-doomsday-bunkers-new-zealand-2018-9?r=US&IR=T
🙂
I agree about the effect money can have on some people from when I worked in The City. There is a sense that some in the financial markets believe they are god-like. Just as God created ex nihilo, so they believe that they are god-like because they think that they create and amass wealth ex nihilo through their operation in the markets. (Nothing could be further from the truth because they quietly forget that it also requires capital and a banking licence.) St Paul got it right … The love of money is the root of all (sorts of) evil; in other words, covetousness and greed.
*Pedant alert*
Thorin was king of the dwarves, and I think you’re (correctly) referring to Thorin and his behaviour in The Hobbit
But otherwise, yes, you are correct PSR 🙂
Matthew who, as a tax collector in 1st Century Palestine, knew a bit about money told of a rich young man and his conversation with Jesus. Nothing much has changed with regards to most rich people and their money.
Personally, in my 20s I spent 90% of my money on wine women and song… and the other 10% I wasted. (A great quip from George Best)
In my 30s I was making good money but found it quite hard to give it away. I embraced the idea of giving 10% to charity but in practice always looked for excuses to weasel my way out of it.
At 39 I was made redundant and my income dropped hugely and became very variable – but I had little problem giving away 10% despite the responsibilities of a family.
With hindsight, it is clear that to me that having money really did cloud my thinking and in a way that is really hard to explain… and that we are all (well, me, at least) susceptible to its lure. My father always used to say “I never play the lottery – I dare not take the chance that I would win”… now I think I understand what he meant.
So, beware being too judgemental… “there but for the grace of God, go I ” etc…..
But, for their own good (yes, really) we should tax them more.
Thanks
I just happened across the attached on YouTube this morning.
After reading you blog, I thought it an appropriate video to describe certain elements of our Society.
Nothing attached
https://youtu.be/3O9FFrLpinQ
Did it work this time.
Tom, sorry for the error
It will be on the blog in the morning
Definitely worth listening to
[…] By Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant and a political economist. He has been described by the Guardian newspaper as an “anti-poverty campaigner and tax expert”. He is Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London and Director of Tax Research UK. He is a non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics. He is a member of the Progressive Economy Forum. Originally published at Tax Research UK […]
Richard,
The universally-accepted measure of inequality, the Gini coefficient, shows that inequality is lower than it was 15 years ago.
What measure are you using and why is this more useful than the tried and tested measure that economists use?
Thanks, Brenda
Wow
You have had a gender change since this morning
Your question then was crass and showed a total lack of understanding
And this is the same
This is one area in which I think the mantra that government spends out of tax revenues is really toxic.
Some 60 years ago I was very involved with a local charity for the blind. I spent hours going from door to door and standing on street corners collecting donations. It was very noticeable that more was collected in poorer areas than richer ones. This was partly because such areas are more densely populated but it was also because individual donations were larger and, I may be imagining this, seemed to be given less grudgingly. One thing I heard in the richer areas were people saying they had already paid to help the blind through their taxes.
I have also heard the charitable status of private schools being defended on the grounds that having paid for the education of one’s children one should not be under an obligation to pay for it again through taxation.
That all rings true with me