Indeed, then programme The Decade the Rich Won on last week argued that most of the money created by Central Banks for quantitative easing ended up in the pockets of the already super rich.
Does anybody have ideas on how to ensure the state takes more wealth from these people?
If feel you question deserves a longer answer than I gave just now.
If we want to take more wealth from billionaires, we must stop believing the economic lies that justifies enriching the rich and impoverishing the poor. We seem to accept that making the rich richer is a good thing and making the poor poorer is necessary. This trick is achieved by controlling the narrative. We are told that wealth is good and we all benefit from eye watering amounts of money going to rich people because they are wealth creators, which is a good thing. On the other hand we are told that relatively small amounts of money going to the poor or immigrants is money going to scrounges and people seeking to rip us off, taking money away from taxpayers and undermining the NHS, which is a bad thing.
We believe this narrative to such an extent that when the chancellor announces tax rises that come into effect in the very near future and make everyone significantly poorer, and the poorest especially so, there is barely a murmur of protest. There is no challenge to the underlying assumption that the government is like a household that can only spend from income. That government spending is constrained by tax revenue.
We believe that tax rises are necessary to fund our NHS. But if we stopped and thought about it for a moment we might ask how a government that issues the money we have in our pocket can run out of the thing that it issues? If government has its own money that it issues, why does it need more of ours to pay for the NHS?
So when it comes to ideas for stopping the wealthy getting wealthier while the poor get ever poorer, how about we start asking ourselves a few questions, and not accepting government narrative as definitive? not taking political assumptions at face value?
If we want to change wealth distribution, we need to start changing the narrative, and we can start by calling out any voice that says that taxes fund government spending
