I received this in an email yesterday from the company noted in the text:
Nigel Green, CEO of global financial advisory giant deVere Group, has warned that recent speculation about a possible UK wealth tax could already be harming Britain's economy—and urged Chancellor Rachel Reeves to shut the conversation down immediately and decisively.
“Even floating this idea is dangerous,” he says.
“Every day that the government fails to rule it out, confidence erodes. Wealth is highly mobile. So are the people who create it. The longer the uncertainty lasts, the more capital quietly moves out of the UK.”
My series on wealth starts in earnest this morning, and there will be at least ten more videos to come covering many aspects of this issue. Ultimately, my question will be a very simple one: Do we need the wealthy? Mr Green may not like the conclusion I am now expecting to reach.
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I guess Mr Green is deeply immersed in the establishment’s blindly held premise that the wealthy earn, and are deserving of their wealth, that trickle down economics is a thing and that the wealthy pay the most tax…. we’ll see where all that goes won’t we?
I am sure he is…
“the wealthy pay the most tax”… they have taken the biggest share of the money pie for themselves, and every time they make this claim it is on a *collective* basis, as a percentage of all taxes paid. Never do they state the percentage of tax paid on their individual personal incomes. So little is shared amongst the rest of us that it’s hardly surprising that they insist on this approach to make their claim.
Agreed
“Wealth is highly mobile. So are the people who create it”
But, as understand it, they mostly (no doubt with a few exceptions) create the wealth for themselves. So, apart from a minimal amount of future tax revenu?, what is there to loose if they move and take it with them?
I will get to this in the wealth series – it is total nonsense
Hmmmmmm…………..
Define ‘need’?
It is true that real long term investment creates jobs and that the highly paid can and do (did even) employ a lot of people. But that model is being destroyed by stock markets as wealth derived by financial means buys the right to rob genuine industries and leave the social consequences for others to sort out.
If someone has a taken an idea, the personal risk, and then made money out of it, I have never had a problem with that if they have been rewarded highly and they pay their taxes. Good for them.
So we do need – or it is helpful rather – that the genuine wealthy who have added value to society exist – they are useful.
But, I do not in the other sense believe that we need the wealthy at all. If we accept that a fully functioning economy is made up of a wide distribution of transactions through social classes, then the idea that a few wealthy people are the economy is complete tosh. As Nick Hanaeur has pointed out, the rich do not buy more everyday stuff to keep an economy ticking over. Talking about wealth like this creates the impression some think that the wealthy ARE the economy. It is as if it is OK to have such a narrow band of consumption, available cash, which to be honest just sits there offshore or in assets when it could be distributed amongst more pockets, more people – that to me is the efficient use of money for economic objectives.
We also do not need the rich destroying bona fide industries, corrupting our politics with their spare cash and ‘investing’ in stuff we know that causes inflation, like property.
And by the way – government could do all of this without wealth.
Now then, lunch over, back to work…………………..
I will get to these points in the series….
Even the genuine entrepreneur who took a risk and was successful still didn’t do it in isolation. They benefited from a legal system and rule of law, an educated workforce, a stable infrastructure, all paid for and created collectively. I get so sick of people saying they dragged themselves up from nothing, like a single celled organism from the primordial soup. Nope. They had hundreds of years of developed society behind them. Pay your fair share.
Agreed
Evidence suggest Nigel Green is wrong.
https://www.ft.com/content/42327e45-5867-46b6-9ef2-22d6efe73349
https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/2024/a-January-2024/super-rich-unlikely-to-leave-uk-for-boring-and-culturally-barren-tax-havens
And:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/do-higher-taxes-really-drive-millionaires-to-flee/
https://cristobalyoung.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Millionaire_migration_Jun16ASRFeature.pdf
Thanks
Take your so-called wealth, domicile it elsewhere, don’t ever reveive anything again from the state: be it access to leaders, legislation beneficial to your company/companies, infrastructure needed by your investors or trade deals reached by the state.
Take your “wealth” away from society and see how long your “wealth” actually means something.
Wealth is created by the workers. The rich are parasites.
Adam Smith knew this and somehow the Adam Smith Institute is neoliberal I believe.
It’s more TINA and mind control, not even allowing curiosity. The very thing that propelled development.
I mentioned in another post I am understanding wealth as like a symbiotic relationship , it depends on interdependence and balance, the problem seems to be denial of our symbiosis, which then permits destructive imbalance.
Agreed
I’m already seeing the push back, land lords saying they are being punished, rich people saying they will leave (presumably taking their assets with them?), and high earners misunderstanding what a wealth tax would be. The fact that tax has been higher on the wealthy in the past and it was fine seems to have been forgotten. The revolution of the rich was so successful that it has erased the memory of how things used to be, so much that even the wealthy have forgotten.
I will deal with these issues in videos to come (the series is up to video 10 right now, and I think there will be 12)
Nigel has missed the chance to buy his friends something suitable to carry their money away in, sadly. See link
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8zvexp42o
It’s often claimed that the wealthy will flee the country if they are faced with higher taxes. @garyseconomics has argued that the solution to this is to tax their UK assets – buildings etc are hard to expatriate!
A video will be coming on this
Capitalism doesn’t create wealth, it destroys it . By its rapacity and plunder it is destroying the earth which is our true wealth. They omit from their balance sheets the cost of repairing the damage they have done. In its imperialist form capitalism generates war which also destroys our wealth. Look at the remains of Gaza. Our common wealth that previous generations built up – public housing, welfare arrangements of health and benefits for the vulnerable, our ownership of water and other utilities, have been taken away from us, destroyed. We’d be far better off without these ghouls.
“Even floating this idea is dangerous,” he says.
Sounds like a poorly written Mafia film.
We need investment in education, public services and infrastructure; the wealthy will not invest in these without poisoning them with the profit motive. We do not need them. Unless you work in luxury sales.
If you’re truly rich then you can afford to pay taxes in order to live in the country you want to live in.
Another take on neoliberalism – emphasising family/dynasty aspects
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/katrina-forrester/i-appreciate-depreciation
My goodness you are truly delusional and so jealous of successful people!!!!!
It is bloody hilarious.
Why not just say it? You want anyone who earns more then £30,000 per year to have their tax return made public alongside their bank accounts/investment accounts. Then you and the other jealous morons can decide what you believe is “a fair amount of tax” to pay.
It is insanity.
On the moronic points the pratts on here are making of course they won’t take assets with them. They will sell them. See most entrepreneurs do not see the UK as the only place to do business/invest money. They will go anywhere and find opportunities. You all see the UK as the best and the only place because you want people to pay tax here. However it isn’t!!!!
Enjoy your pathetic little poor lives (:
I am not sure why, bit it seems like today is one for the mad trolls to come out.
Just for the record, I have never called for gtax returns to be published.
I have no idea where the figure of £30,000 comes from.
I support the rule of law.
I would really rather like the wealthy to oay taxes at the rates working people do, though.
And I oppsoe a wealth tax.
As for envy, that is deliberately hiked by the wealthy. There is a whole indudtry dedicated to the task. They want the world to admiore them in a state of envious desire. That is theior whole goal.
And, the ealthy are not entrepreneurs, almost ever. I have a video comomng on that. They are far too frightened of losing theior wealth to ever be that.
And now, I suggest you get a life.