r/GarysEconomics

Wherever the topic of a wealth tax comes up the neoliberal media is quick to spin it as unworkable due to the problem of capital flight, and we never hear anyone seriously push back on this point. At best a wealth tax advocate might suggest setting the tax so low that the rich will pay it voluntarily.

I’m convinced they intentionally promote a straw man version of wealth tax to discredit the idea and to ensure that if one ever does get enacted it will be low and easy to avoid.

The problem of capital flight is quite easy to avoid if you actually try. The US levies income tax on all citizens, not just those who reside within the country, but nobody ever suggests this as a solution to the problem of capital flight.

It makes the tax impossible to avoid legally, and doesn’t disincentivise foreign investment.

I’m sure someone will say that the rich will just renounce their citizenship, but there’s a simple solution to that problem - the state can just say no. Once a tax citizen, always a tax citizens, and your children inherit that status automatically.

What about people who flee and refuse to come back? Simple, try them for tax evasion in a tribunal system where they can’t buy better representation. Create a rule that they have to attend in person or they lose by default. The minimum sentence is the death penalty, but it will be cancelled if they just pay up. Once the judgement is in the government sends assassins or puts a bounty on their head.

Since we don’t need to depend on the rich paying voluntarily we can set the rate of the wealth tax at a high enough level for it to actually be useful. Say 10-20%.

Why do we never hear this steel man wealth tax mentioned by the neoliberal media?

Hello everyone,

Just sharing our latest piece on how wealth inequality will affect all the classes when we move to other side of the Hubbert's curve. Would love to hear your thoughts on it.

How do we act on this trend as a solar punk community.

This was posted on :
https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/1vom8w9/early_20s_attempted_to_build_a_business_for_past/

People just assume that wealth is made easily. While people campaign for a wealth tax, no one talks about compensating the losers when people risk their own money and lose it. This person has lost £40k.

A wealth tax does not distinguish between wealth that was made easily and wealth that took 30 years of work and risk to build. A celebrity might earn £5 million from a brand endorsement and have that money sitting as cash in the bank. That is not the same as someone who has spent 30 years building a business, risking their own money, with most of their money still tied up in that business. They can't go out and spend that money. Also, does n't factor, that someone may be 60 years old, but the time they build up something substantial.

No one seems to talk enough about the wealth of large corporations either, including lobby governments for favourable tax and regulations.

COVID ENDED. THE PRICES DIDN’T.
Using 2019 as the pre-Covid baseline:
2019
2026
Bread £1.00
~£1.30
Milk £1.00
~£1.35–£1.40
Eggs £1.00
~£1.50+
Butter £1.00
~£1.45
Chicken £1.00
~£1.30
Beef £1.00
~£1.30
Cooking oil £1.00
~£1.40–£1.50
Timber £1.00
~£1.40–£1.50+
Bricks £1.00
~£1.50–£1.60+
Rent £1.00
~£1.25–£1.30
And while ordinary people were paying more for the basics: Tesco**:** ~£1.8bn → ~£3.1bn operating profit
Centrica**:** £240m loss → £6.5bn pre-tax profit
Energy companies: record profits during the energy crisis. Not every company benefited, and profits alone don’t prove price gouging. But six years later, we’re still paying 25–50% more for many basic necessities than we did before Covid.
The crisis ended.
But the cost of living continued.
Sources: ONS, UK Parliament, Tesco, Centrica.

The UK median full-time salary is £39,039 — around £2,650/month take-home. And median literally means the middle Sources: ONS — Employee earnings 2025⁠ · ONS — Family spending 2024–25⁠: 50% earn less and 50% earn more. By age, take-home is roughly: 20s £2.2k | 30s £2.75k | 40s £2.95k | 50s £2.8k | 60+ £2.25k.

Now consider roughly £2,490/month for one adult: rent, council tax, energy, water, food, phone, car, fuel, insurance, maintenance and basic social spending. In your 20s, you can be below the cost of simply living; even at the overall median, there’s only a few hundred pounds left. The ONS says the average UK household spends £676.60/week (~£2,935/month).
So if you’re on median pay or below — literally half of full-time workers — working full-time can still leave very little room to save, build wealth or get ahead. You can work, pay your bills and still feel like you’re permanently treading water.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, FTSE 100 CEOs are taking home millions: Pascal Soriot (AstraZeneca) £17.7m, Emma Walmsley (GSK) £15.6m, CS Venkatakrishnan (Barclays) £15m, Wael Sawan (Shell) £13.7m, Bill Winters (Standard Chartered) £12.7m — with the top 10 ranging into the multi-million-pound packages. Across the FTSE 100, £856.6m was paid to executives, including £550m to CEOs, with bonuses and long-term incentives making up a huge proportion. The median FTSE 100 CEO package is now £5.06m — about 130× the median UK worker’s pay.

Sources: ONS — Employee earnings 2025⁠ · ONS — Family spending 2024–25⁠

The bottom 50% of British households own roughly 10% of the country’s wealth.
The richest 1% own roughly the same.
The top 10% own around 41%.
And it doesn’t stop there.
The IFS found that children born to parents in the bottom 20% of wealth are far more likely to remain near the bottom themselves.
Only about 5% of children from the poorest fifth make it into the wealthiest fifth.
For children from the wealthiest fifth, it’s 42%.
That’s an 8× difference in the chance of reaching the top fifth.
So when someone says:
“Anyone can become wealthy if they work hard enough.”
I think the better question is:
How much does your starting position matter?
Because some people inherit money.
Others inherit a house deposit.
Others inherit a safety net.
And some inherit none of it.
It’s still possible to climb.
But we’re not all starting at the bottom of the same ladder.
Sources: Institute for Fiscal Studies; ONS Wealth and Assets Survey.

I originally posted this on another subreddit where they were doing character attacks on Gary, but I feel like this summary may help the people in here as well. Feel free to correct me if I made any mistakes.

Here's the plot you should actually care about (yes this is US, not UK but it's what I'm able to find, and Gary's arguments apply to the US too): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLTP1246 US inflation since 1990 is ~155% so you divide the right edge of the graph by 2.5 but it still shows the growth. Yeah sure maybe they were richer in the gilded age, but I don't think we want to go back to that.

Why do we care about the 0.1%, not the 1%? Well that's who Gary usually targets with his proposed wealth taxes. I believe it can be mathematically shown that untaxed or low-taxed wealth leads to wealth accumulation, because wealth always compounds faster than the economy grows. Sure, you can say some eye-watering numbers like "Bezos paid 1.4 billion dollars in taxes between 2006 and 2018". But when you realize it's less than 1% of his net worth over 12 years, you can see it's doing nothing to stop his wealth accumulation.

Gary's argument is that asset prices then all go up because the ultra-rich have nothing to spend their wealth on other than assets (you can only buy so many private jets, yatchs, supercars...), so their accumulating wealth, which IS provably becoming a larger and larger fraction of all wealth: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSTP1300, is used to buy assets, faster than the growth of the economy can create new assets.

Why not make the first X units of a utility free or very cheap, then charge progressively more for higher consumption?

If calibrated correctly, couldn't this be revenue-neutral for the utility while:

- Reducing costs for low-income/low-usage households

- Making excessive consumption much more expensive

- Encouraging conservation of scarce resources

Malta does something similar with water.

What am I missing? Why isn't this more common in the UK?

national corporatism is a mix of guild socialism market socialism social corporatism and localized planning, the shortest explanation for what it is it's basically a economy we're all private corporations are owned by the government but is trying to be as close to capitalism as possible without becoming capitalist, what it believes is that unions that are basically part of the government manage factories stores and workplaces and get quotas from local governments instead of the central government like in Soviet Central planning as well as State corporations doing everything that's not directly production related, prices are still dictated by supply and demand like capitalism, if in the event local planners set quotas too low factories are too inefficient and the government owned corporations fail to meet expectations, they're very likely to get fined shut down or fired, so what do you think of this economic system.

So what the paper proposes is something thats already happening in the UK. We have 'Investors' buying up UK goods and services that make things expensive for everyone else. These so called 'Investors' want to precipitate large UK returns and if those profits are not foreseen they dont want to get involved. Quite often they are borrowing money from banks to buy UK assets and this is often seen as 'Investment' by the government.

The stock market is at the root of drawing liquidity out from every area of the UK economy. This needs to be looked at deeply by leading Universities.

Memo: From Nick Hanauer
To: My Fellow Zillionaires

"the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution."

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/

Been looking into who actually owns the land we live on, and the concentration is crazy.
🏰 **Aristocracy & landed gentry:** \~30% of England
👑 **Royal family:** \~1.4%
🏛️** Public sector**: \~8%
🏠 **Ordinary homeowners:** \~5%
💰 **Top 1%:** estimated to control around **50% of England’s land**

**If land is finite, and a tiny number of people control so much of it, how much influence does wealth actually give you over housing and development, what does it mean to be a regular person working 25 years for a small plot in the middle of nowhere?**

**No hate, Late night maths, just curious for opinions**

Sources -
[www.committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/108111/pdf/\](http://www.committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/108111/pdf/)
[www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/totalwealthingreatbritain/april2020tomarch2022\](http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/totalwealthingreatbritain/april2020tomarch2022)
[www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/privatelyownedwealthintheuk\](http://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/privatelyownedwealthintheuk)

What they usually mean by this term is that what someone is saying does not match up with their orthodox understanding of economics, which is generally based on massively simplified models of the economy that bear only a passing resemblance to the actual system.

And in a world of climate change, ecological limits, financialisation, housing crises, ageing populations, technological disruption etc, a lot of these models are arguably becoming less and less useful anyway.

It’s also just become a shorthand way of dismissing things people don’t like without actually having to explain why they’re wrong.

Make no mistake, these people often have absolutely no idea how the system they’re talking about actually works. They know a handful of concepts like supply and demand, inflation, government borrowing, “the markets”, investor confidence etc, and then treat them like universal laws of physics.

These economic models aren't reality, though They are fantasy. Physics is the reality. The carbon that we are pumping into the atmosphere and the cascading effects of this are reality. The biosphere is reality. Not an equilibrium model.

Nevertheless, these concepts persist despite being so often plain wrong, because they conveniently protect particular financial interests and ensures that the status quo continues lumbering us all towards environmental catastrophe.

These people are very literally toxic to society and toxic to the planet. And for some reason, multitudes of the smug stupid assholes have infested this very sub.

Like flies to shit.

I wonder if it really matters that the wealth of the wealthy can grow to inconceivably huge levels with minimal taxation. Even the richest man on earth will one day die, until then let him be rich, but when that day comes don't just let it all go and make those who did not earn it similarly rich without the society in which that money was made, and came from, taking a fair share. Tax inheritance properly, without the tax loopholes, and it all gets reset with every generation. Not just inheritance, but all income should be taxable... www.maketaxfair.uk