Richard Murphy, a UK accountant and tax campaigner, writes about tax, inflation, public finance, and modern monetary theory.
HN commenters point to him as a resource on wealth taxes and the UK economy. One cites his critical review of a Channel 4 ADHD documentary.
I know it's so hard, even in the UK people get upset 'Why does this inner city youth club get X benefit' 'Why are we sending X troubled child to X holiday camp for the summer'
'Why doesn't my child get these things?' is often the question, but the answer that these things are put in place to try and reduce future potential crime and other societal damage are not things that a lot of people want to consider - I'm spending money now to negate possible risk in the future?
I can't find the report now, but there was an interesting experiment in London. In the UK the average homeless person costs the state around £26,000 (http://homeless.org.uk/costs-homelessness#.UgTa1Y3qlNQ) or even more in London.
A charity was able to get £5000 per homeless person from a corporate donation, and offered this money directly to 100 homeless people, with the only previsions being that they did not get to handle the cash directly and that everything they spent money on helping them get off the street.
Obviously this was a self selecting group (people that wanted to leave rough sleeping), but the following year a stunning proportion of those who had taken part had been able to turn their lives around.
Should there be a buffer to help people turn their lives around and stop them costing the state money? I'm all for it, but I have no idea how we could stop abuse of the system. We could start by trialling the idea out though, with money saved by stopping people and companies avoiding paying their…
A good resource on this is UK campaigner Richard Murphy - http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/
The basics are it is foolish to try and introduce a wealth tax - ie Bezos is worth 400Bn so we want 40bn now please. It becomes impossible to actually say how much a person owns - it fluctuates, even if they are co-operating fully it’s a fools game.
Yet tax rates are different for different categories - equalise those, and tax people at points of liquidation events - so capital gains is the most obvious.
Other liquidation events is borrowing against assets (the buy,borrow,die idea).
One can fairly easily imagine a minimum floor for all these - say 5 million in any fiscal year or whatever so we focus on where the money really is.
It’s also worth remembering that tax is simply a way of destroying the tokens of resource allocation (money). We want to tax the wealth to remove say X trillion globally. But remove it from the wealthiest who society has decided to give trillions to to handle covid but society thinks probably should not be having such a ratio of control over societies assets
And the implication is some other more destructive event can / will occur to rebalance - for example a massive stock market crash. The idea of “billions wiped off the exchange” is the same as a tax event - it’s just way more destructive and uncontrolled - event th wealthiest would rather t have tax planning than recessions and crashes
Publicly traded companies (kinda) have to do what their shareholders want them to, but that doesn't have to be maximizing returns (still less maximizing returns in the short term).
Here's some comment on this with quotations from actual law, but note that (1) it's from the UK rather than the US and presumably the relevant laws aren't quite the same, and (2) the author's position is further to the left than is customary in the US. So discount it as you please. http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2011/10/24/companies-do-not-have-a-duty-to-maximise-their-profits-or-to-avoid-tax/
And a more US-centric discussion with some useful links: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-companies-legally-obligated-to-maximize-profits-for-shareholders
And a white paper whose main topic is executive compensation but that has a useful discussion of this issue (in section 2): http://www.neiinvestments.com/neifiles/PDFs/5.4%20Research/Exec_Comp_English_Final.pdf -- reading between the lines, it looks as if there's at least a case to be made that US case law requires corporations to act in the financial interests of their shareholders, but it's debatable, and in other jurisdictions there isn't even much of a case to be made.
(I am not, even slightly, a lawyer.)
>If that’s your personal ideology then fuck old people benefits
No idea what you are getting at here.
>Saying think of the children
The health and wellbeing of children is important. It is not wrong or irrational to think about it. On the contrary, it is irrational to make supposed 'savings' by neglecting the very people who will be the engine of the future economy.
>UK’s debt to GDP ratio was under 30 in 2000, and hit ~70 in 2010. The growth slowed and stopped after conservatives took over.
We're both looking at the same graph. The debt to GDP ratio has been consistently higher under the Conservatives than it ever was under the preceding Labour government. You are picking an economic statistic at random, misrepresenting it, and still failing to point to any tangible benefits of the Conservatives' cuts in public spending. We are supposed to just accept that cuts are good because 'spending less is good'.
More on the Conservatives vs. Labour and debt here: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/06/24/the-tories-have-always-borrowed-more-than-labour-and-always-repaid-less-they-are-the-party-of-big-deficit-spending/
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/10/17/why-we-need-action-to-tackle-wealth-inequality-2/
>However, I include Worstall’s argument for a reason. It is true that some are more productive than others in an economy and it is true that this has always meant, and is likely now to mean, that those who are more productive do earn higher rewards than those who are less productive. In principle I have little argument with this idea: I have no difficulty with there being some differential in earnings within any society and think them inevitable subject to their being a safety net to ensure that all can have access to the resources they need to fully engage in the society in which they live (which means much more than having a basic material standard of living). Importantly though, what Worstall’s suggestion implies is that there are very obvious limits to wealth differentials, because the fact is that however clever someone might be the differences in productivity we humans have to offer is not that big.
I repeat, the differences in productivity we humans have to offer are not that big.
The Economist is a neoliberal dish rag.
There is a completely made up number that is an increasingly large portion of GDP in OECD nations and that number is imputed rent [1]. This is a fictional number that owner-occupiers "pay" themselves to live in their own houses. So as housing prices go up, so does imputed rent. House prices have increasingly become the best vehicle for investment funds because the returns are esentially protected. But none of that produces anything.
The UK in particular has been described as buy-to-let economy.
It doesn't have to be this way. If you limit property speculation then capital will find something else productive to do, like manufacturing. Dish rags like The Economist present it as inevitable that Western nations become financialized. It's simply not true. Look at Germany. Also look at the fact that Germany greatly limits the collaterialization and speculation on property. That's not an accident.
[1]: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2023/02/14/10-or-gdp-is-made-up-it-simply-does-not-exist-in-the-real-world/#gsc.tab=0