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Comment by sleavey | Hacker News Reader

All of the main parties in the UK keep skirting around the start of the solution to "rebalancing" the economy: massively increased taxes on the rich to pay for the required investment. This is not a new idea; low taxes for the wealthy are a relatively modern phenomenon yet the social mobility gap has been getting wider. There is surely enough support for it among a properly informed plebiscite, but they are never given the option or they are lied to or given the idea that this tax might affect them when they get super wealthy.

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That’s one possible approach. The one I favour is a total moratorium on new building work in the South East. That’s the only way to force both workers and companies to look to the North.

The problem with “tax the rich” is that the numbers of truly rich are tiny and you could swallow their entire fortunes and they’ll be gone in a week. Exercise for the reader, how long would Richard Branson’s entire wealth run the NHS for?

Why not tax the merely rich too? I'm probably going to be one of them in a few years. I want to pay more tax to help benefit the society that let me get to where I'm going, but I absolutely want everyone else in my position to pay too.

Anyway, I agree with your idea about the south east. As the article points out, Thatcher's policies focused on the south east and ignored the "North" (part of the problem being no one can agree where the North starts or ends). Ideas like HS2 pushed by the new Tories are also just making it possible to live in the north and yet still work in London, not solving any problem.

Ideas like HS2 pushed by the new Tories are also just making it possible to live in the north and yet still work in London . . .

I would also argue that it allows businesses and industry to operate in the north without the location penalty. In other words, it effectively brings the areas served closer together. I won't argue whether it is the best solution, but it isn't as harebrained as some of the detractors try to imply.

I don't get this "location penalty" idea. We have the internet. Businesses already operate globally without the need to constantly fly upper management around the world. The problem is that the talent live in the south east because that's where the jobs are. It's not about the transport links between the south and the north, it's the lack of well compensated jobs in the north to attract business there because of all the other reasons.

And the only way to break the cycle is to stop building more houses in the South East.

Why does ycombinator want applicants to move to the Bay area? Whether it makes sense or not, the location effect is real. Improving transport links increases the size of the "local" area allowing the network effects to reach farther.

I want to pay more tax to help benefit the society that let me get to where I'm going

Well, you can do that anytime you like. Just make a donation to your local hospital, they’ll be more than happy to accept it.

Like the parent, I'm also in favour of proper taxation. And as they said, it needs to be a policy. Nobody is striving to place themselves alone in disadvantaged position, as you surely understand. The rhetoric of it being possible to donate one's money is utterly unhelpful.

I specifically said I want to pay more as long as everyone else in my position also pays more. I also don't want hospitals to have to rely on altruism, they should rely on tax.

Those wanting to "tax the rich", what is their definition of rich? I would hazard a guess it's much less than Richard Branson, and therefore the numbers would be much higher

Single people earning more than 110.000€ p.a. in Germany for example.

All together, UK billionaires have 156 billion pounds [1]. Put a 4% wealth tax on that, and you'll get 6.25 billion pounds. You won't even be making their fortunes smaller, so you could take that amount for forever.

The NHS spent 140 billion pounds in 2017 [2], so you would cover 4.5% of the NHS budget just with this wealth tax. That's not insignificant, and we're just looking at billionaires here.

UK millionaires own 6.5 trillion pounds [3]. With just a 3% wealth tax, we raise 195 billion pounds, which is a lot more than the NHS budget.

So yes, since Richard Branson is not the only rich person, you can tax the rich, let their fortunes still increase by 1% per year, and fund the entire NHS and more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_billionaires_b... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572110 [3] https://www.coutts.com/insight-articles/news/2017/how-many-m...

If you take 4% of somebody’s wealth, of course you are making their fortune smaller. Perhaps what you mean is that their fortunes would normally be growing at 4% per year, so overall, they would not decrease. Maybe. I suspect that billionaire’s capital is rather mobile, though.

> All together, UK billionaires have 156 billion pounds [1]. Put a 4% wealth tax on that, and you'll get 6.25 billion pounds. You won't even be making their fortunes smaller, so you could take that amount for forever.

What a smart and novel idea. Taxing wealthy business owners has worked so well all over the world for years. Let's hope they will never find out about ways to move/split their assets and tax residence.

Yes but you're ignoring capital flight.

Billionaires and multi-millionaires can just up and leave to more tax friendly destinations.

There are actually tax advantaged schemes (EIS and VCT) in the UK to try and funnel money into emerging tech and new businesses. However you would only invest in them if you were extremely wealthy do too the risks involved.

Capital flight is easily challenged if you have the cojones.

Paper assets require a supportive legal framework to transfer them usefully. Imagine creating a blacklist of tax evaders with the sort of teeth we see with, say, the sanctions on Iran/Venezuela/the DPRK. Shut down their economic life until they'll yield a useful cut.

Physical assets can't easily be schlepped across national borders without anyone noticing.

Much of the problem is that so much of the problem-causing wealth sloshing around the country is from overseas, and often from questionably lawless petro-states like Russia and Saudi Arabia.

The most basic start would be to have a proper non-capped property tax. Let's copy socialist New Jersey and charge people 1.89% of their property value a year.

How does that 1.89% work with mortgages?

Do I pay that tax on the amount I have currently returned to the bank or on the full property?

I can't speak for the American system, but as I would propose for the UK it would work like council tax, assessed on the value that you own - which is the full value of the property. We kind of gave up on tax subsidies for mortgage borrowers with MIRAS.

"Despite Joseph's assertions, the middle-aged engineers who were laid off didn't go away and become software engineers – they largely landed up in worse jobs or on the scrapheap."

Reminds me of something a popular 2020 candidate says regularly about retraining failures as automation arrives to suck up jobs.

UK might need a Yang like $1000 pound/month citizen's dividend.

These minimum guaranteed income ideas are really interesting to me. It would remove a lot of the ritual humiliation we put benefit claimants through when they are desperate and often feeling worthless before we push them to sell themselves into a job. Not to mention the reduction in the cost to administrate the welfare system. Some might choose to use their income to take a stress break from work or write a novel or paint something; there may be untold benefits to such a system to society.

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