Transcription
What constantly amazes me is how few people seem to recognize that these two things are the same thing. Billionaire wealth has exploded and government wealth has collapsed and middle class working-class wealth has collapsed. That is the same thing. That is wealth transfer. That is two sides of the same coin. And that is quite simply what happens if you allow a billionaire class to go on tax.
But the truth is, if you were to raise billionaire income tax effectively up to 40%, which it should be because that's what ordinary working people pay, but you kept billionaire inheritance tax and wealth tax at zero, you would not stop wealth transfer from continuing. You would only slow it down. That's the truth.
>> So you need to do both is what you're saying.
>> 100%.
The reason we had these like 50 years, well, what you want to call it, 30, 40, 50 years, the golden age of capitalism after World War II, we kind of lucked into that by accident, right? Because we had these very high rates of income tax and we had these very high rates of inheritance tax. And for people who don't know, both in the UK and the US, we're topping these out at sort of 90%ish. It stopped there from being a class of incredibly rich people who are rapidly growing their wealth share. That's what it did. And as soon as you cut those taxes down, which we obviously did in the 80s, suddenly you open the box. You allow there to start to be a class of people who aggressively increase wealth share. And we forgot that the last 2,000 years of human history is everybody being unbelievably poor while 10 people owning everything. You know, that is the history of Europe, right? And we, we, we managed to stop that for a period of time.
You know, if you look at the sort of the founding fathers and the start, the founding of the US, they have all of these ideas about we have to stop aggressive concentration and accumulation of power. And then we created finally, you know, in this 30, 40 years after World War II, we had this situation where ordinary working men and women could go out, get a regular job, buy a house, have a family, get a retirement, get a pension, have holidays, have a good life. And we did not have a essentially rapacious super-wealthy class owning everything. And then in the 80s, we were like, you know what, let's just give it back to them. Let's just give it back to them.
You have a choice. You have a choice, right? If you allow the people with all the wealth and the power to use that wealth and power to take the rest of the wealth and the power from the less powerful, they will do it. All of history tells us that is true. You have a choice. Either very high rates of tax on the very rich or extreme inequality and poverty.