Huh?
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Thank you for volunteering. Good of you.
Look at that spineless little cunt. Despicable. Not that I’m surprised, mind…
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A stunning takedown of Musk here from a guy (Silicon Valley founder Philip Low) who knows him better than most. Well worth the read :
‘a fellow who got his BA in Econ at 26 all of a sudden pretending to be an expert in mechanical engineering, chemistry, rocket science, neuroscience and AI and keeping the people actually doing the work hidden and paying people to play online games in his name to appear smart and feed his so-called “Supergenius” Personality Cult — the “Imperator” has no clothes, and he knows it’
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Very refreshing:
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The responses to this have been deranged.
Many point out that his mother is wealthy (a famous Bollywood director) and he had a privileged upbringing. And? That is only a retort if you pretend he is going full communist and saying that people should not be allowed to make money. His point is the gap between even that level of privilege he experienced and Billionaire is astronomical and something has gone wrong with an economy when so many people are able to bridge that gap.
The other popular retort is to point out the benefits that Gates, Bezos and the Google lads have brought society. This of course is an argument that ignores the wealth of anti-trust and workers rights issues all of the companies headed by these people have waded through to earn their owners their billions. Which again is his point.
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I continually come across arguments that the tax contributions made by the extremely wealthy dwarf everyone else (bots perhaps?). The maths of it all would probably fascinate me, but at the end of the day too much money is heading in the wrong direction.
There may be some truth in this terms of income tax alone but not so much in terms of total government income.
This is a breakdown of UK government income for 2023/24:
2023-24
Receipts (£bn)
Share of total government receipts
Income tax (gross of tax credits): 268.0
National Insurance contributions (NICs): 172.3
Value added tax (VAT): 162.2
Other indirect taxes (e.g. fuel and other duties): 93.4
Capital taxes: 41.8
Company taxes: 101.0
Other taxes: 37.6
The very rich will typically pay more income tax so that will be skewed towards the highest earners. VAT is paid by everyone as are duties. NICs tend to fall mostly on low to middle income workers. Capital taxes tend to be skewed more to those with wealth and company taxes will affect middle to higher earners more.
Overall it is reasonably balanced. However as a percentage of available income (i.e. what is left after food, shelter and the basics to actually survive) those on low to middle incomes are paying a fair percentage more of what is left. Remember, council tax is not included in this breakdown, and there are incredible disparities in that. For example, the King pays less for Buckingham Palace than someone does for a 3 bed semi in Nottingham.
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Would also like to add that the UK has a much more even, progressive taxation system than America. America’s approach is like the worst instincts of the British right… taken farther.
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100% agree and thanks for the actual numbers. Always good to see this in numbers and I’ve always argued against the low tax for the extremely wealthy.
This is exactly how I see the UK / US from a taxation perspective and the UK is teetering on the edge of going further in the same direction as Orange Land.
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I looked at this in great detail just over 30 years ago for Canada, at which time the conventional wisdom for Western governments was that you couldn’t really solve the fiscal problem by just taxing the rich. I would be very curious about what it looks like now. The fundamental problem back then was that the demographics were a pyramid. The person who earned $1M/year might pay far more tax than the person who earned $100K/year, very often a higher percentage as well (as the system was structured to do). But there were far, far more of the $100K earners, much more than a factor of 10x So to increase government revenue by a given amount, it would take a much smaller percentage on the lower cohort. To continue this thought experiment, a 10% increase in gross taxation on the millionaire would produce far less revenue than a 5% increase on the 100K earners.
Once you factored the greater capacity of the millionaire for avoidance/minimization/optimization (entirely legally), it was pretty clear that the middle class really had to do the heavy lifting.
However, that was 30 years ago, for Canada. Canada is not one of more extreme cases, and overall wealth equality has improved. At the same time, concentration of capital has shifted - while the gap between the broader classes is narrower, the gap between the extremes is much wider. I would be very curious to see an updated revenue potential analysis
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I’d definitely like to get into the numbers on it but I also think there’s a softer reasoning that needs to be addressed here. And that is you cant keep hammering lower and middle earners while the top keep taking huge amounts of the cake for nothing in return.
Essentially the UK is broke and something needs to change to reverse that. I’ll be honest, I dont know what that is without the government finding a good chunk of money down the back of the sofa. I do appreciate, its not an overnight process either, but Labour may reverse the current trend but its entirely possible (likely even) they wont be there next term.
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This is an international problem with some regional variations (eg Scandinavia).
The rich, that is people with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars/euros/pounds, are able to afford tax accountants and advisors who help them hide their money and thus they pay far less than they should, either legally or illegally.
Added to this, as rich people have more power and influence, policy is made in their favour, especially in hyper capitalist countries like the US.
The more money you have, the easier it is to make money and thus wealth and power are concentrated as we see. Only some seismic event like a war or a revolution will change this pattern.
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I listened to a podcast with Anthony Scaramucci recently, and he was talking about Mamdani and the effect it might have on wealthy people in NYC.
Scaramucci is rich, not a billionaire but wealthy, and he said he was committed to staying in NYC as it is his home. He likely has other homes too, but NYC will remain his main home and base. He said several times how he pays all of his taxes.
Scaramucci was at pains to point out that wealthy people not only have numerous ways to shelter their money from taxation, but if things are too disagreeable - and the context was a discussion over Mamdani winning the Mayoral election and saying he would raise taxes on the wealthy in NYC - then wealthy people are by far the most mobile, and they will just up sticks and move to another place in America with a more favorable tax regimen.
And on that last point, Scaramucci talked about the migration there has already been from NYC to Palm Beach and elsewhere in FL. I think he said it was in the hundreds of thousands of wealthy and relatively wealthy people, which is putting a huge hole in the tax raising plans for NYC.
The Chretien government of the time spent a lot of time internally weighing pros and cons. One of the reasons they walked away from repealing the GST (a VAT) was that while it was theoretically regressive (same % on all, regardless of income), in practical terms it was collecting significant revenue from a cohort of high earners who were otherwise successfully minimizing their exposure
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Exactly, he is talking about something that is already happening. The sort of people impacted by the increase in city tax are almost certain to already have other homes they could call their residence with a change in paperwork. The ones who keep their official residency in NYC have already done so in the face of significant tax penalty already. In almost all case they made that decision because being in NYC is too important to them to spend enough time in Montana or South Florida to qualify that as their primary residence.
I’m not sure that is what is happening though. According to some figures I saw recently the share of tax paid by those paying the basic rate of income tax since 2010 has fallen from just under 34% to 27.5% while the share paid by those on the higher additional rate has increased from 28% to 41%.