How does anyone outside the top .1% argue against this?

By Isabella Weber

I’ve just picked up my copy.

Anyone else?

TL;DR - “We estimate that California's billionaires contribute $3.3–5.8 billion annually in state income taxes. The present value of permanently lost income tax collections from departures more than offsets the one-time wealth tax revenue, yielding a net present value of negative $38.9 billion.”

Billionaire used to be scared

So scared they built schools, hospitals and libraries for the poor

Beautiful, permanent cut stone classical buildings, filled with knowledge and wisdom with the financers name proudly displayed above the door. They still exist over a hundred years later

Previous billionaires actually helped massively to build society, one of educated, reasonable, self sustaining people

It’s nearly as if distribution of wealth, goods and services matter. Do you think more politicians and rich people will think maybe Gary got a point, when he points out how comfortable of life they got and where maybe asking them all to be just 2 or 3% poorer for good of society and to stop it collapsing.

I’ve seen loads of arguments like this and I don’t see how it necessarily would be a bad thing. I’ve seen videos of business owners saying if they had to pay different tax rates they would work up to a point and then put the business in hibernation for the rest of the year to not break tax thresholds. Or people say they will simply leave. Whilst I can see that in the short term that would cause disruption but this is the uk, we’re entrepreneurial and have so much ingenuity, and above all entitled. We’ve become accustomed to certain things and the general public wouldn’t just accept a back slide. The point I’m basically getting at for example is say you own evri delivery trucks, and you decide once you’ve made X amount of money instead of continuing to run the trucks you mothball the business until next year, surely that just gives some one else the opportunity to break the monopoly you have deliveries. Deliveries are still going to be needed and the person who would’ve actually done the delivery is still in the country. By the time you come back to the country and start up your businesses again all of your staff are likely working for the competition and your market share is smaller. Also there would be knock on effects, if you don’t pay your staff for 50% of the year they obviously have less spending power, they stop buying things and there for stop needing deliveries, so your business takes a hit as you have a less active customer base (this is more of a problem in a wider example where more billionaires and big business leave as obviously I understand the people who work for evri aren’t it’s sole customer base but if you degrade the spending power of the general public you end up have a less profitable market place to work). The same applies for saying the billionaires would just leave. If some one like that leaves then surely that leaves the opportunity for someone else to take their revenue streams and become a billionaire them selves? But if this time as we are taxing billionaires appropriately the new ceo only becomes a millionaire, the rest of the wealth is shared more equally throughout the company and tax revenue. It’s crazy to me that people think people won’t do the work because they can only become a millionaire and not a billionaire, or that if people don’t do the work that someone else won’t fill that opportunity. The super rich aren’t the most talented people in society they are simply the greediest

What do the following have in common?

Energy. Water. Rail. Airports. Traffic control. Telecommunications. Postal service. Ports and logistics.

They are all part of vital UK infra-structure essential to the seamless running of modern Britain, and they are all privately owned or controlled.

Britain has an unusually high level of private ownership and private operation across national infrastructure compared to many other countries. The evidence doesn’t just show high privatisation, it shows Britain is an outlier in how much of its core infrastructure is run by private companies, and how dependent the system is on private delivery. This is supported by multiple UK infrastructure studies and international comparisons.

The reason for this is because UK governments from the late 1970s onward embraced a free‑market ideology that claimed private ownership would make infrastructure more efficient, cheaper, and less politically influenced. This ideological shift — especially under the Conservative governments of 1979–1997 — drove the privatisation of telecoms, energy, water, rail, and postal services.

Despite all the negative evidence regarding efficiency and cheapness, it is still not fashionable to criticise free-market ideology.

“Capitalism is what these people do. Free enterprise is what these people do. These people take risks… that’s what free market enterprise is about. It’s about risk. It’s about reward.” (Nigel Farage: Yahoo Finance: 10/11/250

“We need to have free trade and free markets, because when you don’t, weird things happen.”  (Kemi Badenoch: Cato Institute: “Getting back to Free trade and growth in the UK, the U.S. and the world” (Jan/Feb.2023)

Farage is right, it’s all about reward: the only “weird thing” that has happened is that under privatisation Britain pays significantly more for vital infrastructure upgrades than other countries. For example, UK energy and transport infrastructure projects cost 65% more on average than similar projects in Spain, France, Germany, Italy, South Korea, and Canada.

Across the UK’s privately run vital infrastructure, companies collectively make £25–35 billion profit per year, with typical margins of 4–10% depending on the sector. This is far higher than most UK industries.

The reason profits are so high is because many of these companies are running privatised monopolies – water, electricity networks, rail rolling stock. There is not even a hint of free market competition. What is more, government regulators, such as Ofgem and Ofwat, set guaranteed returns. Again, no hint of a competitive market. Governments also sign long-term contracts with these private companies where payments automatically rise every year with inflation.

In addition, we have marginal pricing operating in our energy sector, which allows privately produced cheap renewable energy to be charged at the same price as the most costly gas generated energy. Equally as stupid is the asset-heavy financing structure that UK governments allow. UK infrastructure companies load themselves with huge amounts of debt, use that debt to pay shareholders, and rely on the fact that regulators guarantee stable, inflation‑linked revenue from their physical assets (pipes, cables, power lines, treatment works). It’s a financial engineering model — not an operational one.

The reason I mention all of this is because UK security agencies have been telling privately‑owned infrastructure operators to prepare for attacks from hostile states.  Lately, these warnings have become unusually direct and public. The alerts cover cyber attacks, sabotage, supply‑chain infiltration, and state‑backed hostile activity.

In April 2026, Bridewell's 2026 Cyber Security in Critical National Infrastructure reported 93% of critical national infrastructure had been the victim of a successful cyber attack in the past year.

While you and I are now officially being told to stock-up on essential provisions and to prepare for disruption caused by attacks on our infrastructure, the private companies running this infrastructure are only now beginning to spend money on defence. For years they have been raking in profits for their shareholders, repeatedly prioritising shareholder returns over long‑term security and resilience.

These private companies have been so resistant to funding security measures that a new law is being put before Parliament: the Cyber Security Resilience Bill. As the 2026 Bridewell report on vital UK infra structure security concludes: the privately run companies running the UK’s  infrastructure are beginning, finally, to take security seriously for the first time, the new proposed regulations acting as a forcing agent.

In short, you and I are being told to “prep” for possible outages caused, essentially, by under-investment in security and resilience measures by these private companies. Next time your flight abroad is disrupted by a cyber attack, your water is cut off, your mail doesn’t arrive, NHS 111 services are down (all real incidents) then you know who is mainly responsible.

When these private companies, who have been making billions in profits for their shareholders year in, year out,  come cap in hand to government asking for money to upgrade their security arrangement, it is going to be very hard to refuse otherwise we all suffer.

What we should do, however, is extract, as a nation, a very high price for taxpayer intervention maybe in the form of shares that go towards the beginning of a Sovereign Wealth Fund and not the sham National Wealth fund that exists at the moment. Failing that, they should be nationalised without compensation.

I'm just about to come to the end of my dual fuel energy tariff... Have gas prices really doubled in the last 2 years?!

My total bill is estimated to increase by 55%! This feels insane! Please tell me I'm looking in the wrong place, but the best fixed deal I can find is from Fuse Energy:

Tariff: October 2026 Fixed (24m) V5

Electricity

unit rate: 24.590p/kWh

standing charge: 52.760p/day

Gas

Unit rate: 8.970p/kWh

standing charge: 15.100p/day

Caught my eye

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0032wnh/panorama-roman-abramovich-how-he-hid-his-fortune

Go debate.

I get that 2% on over 10 million is a starting point to create a system that is capable of taxing wealth. It is the first step.

What’s your opinion on how to set bands?

For me personally it should be a living wage linked system that only rises with the living wage.

For example the current living wage is £24,785 for 37.5hrs a week at £12.71 per hour.

10m is over 400 years of untaxed, unspent work at the living wage and 125 years of untaxed, unspent work at 80k per year.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe the free market and capitalism should exist, just with heavy curbs to prevent excess.

So if 2% on wealth kicks in at 400 years worth of work, where should 10%, or 50% or higher kick in?

(Noting that we should want to build a system that auto adjusts to predictable things like inflation, which is why arbitrary lines are counter productive).

E.g if the living wage rises to 15 per hour due to inflation or other reasons, that’s 29k per year, then wealthy people get a tax break with 10m rising to 11,787,750.

Personally just vibing it I think the graph should be pretty aggressive. 10% should kick in at 500 years equivalent, and 50% at 600. Millionaires should exist as an incentive for work and innovation, but there needs to be a limit to how much influence one person can exert before our systems become undermined.

As a side note I also think this kind of system should apply to income tax. The living wage should be entirely untaxed because that’s what we have assessed is the minimum required to live (this may see a drop in the living wage but a rise in real income for those on it). We have VAT as a consumption tax anyway so the living wage is taxed 20% on spending anyway. After that, up to double the living wage should be between 10-20% etc.

This kind of tax system frees up money at the lower end of the spectrum. This is what actually drives consumption and economic growth due to a persons marginal propensity to spend.

New post in the Wall Street Journal

https://www.wsj.com/world/uk/united-kingdom-welfare-disability-payouts-737d77a0?mod=mhp

I don’t understand the point of tax havens like Jersey and Monaco. Why aren’t they abolished? They seem out of date historic nonsense.