| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re: Not propaganda - just fact! | |
| Posted by: | Kathleen Healy | |
| Date/Time: | 05/05/26 19:56:00 |
| Wealth can be income or assets. Assets generate income. Wealth accumulates. In Thomas Pickety's book Capital in the 21st century, he analysed economic data to show how when the rate of return on capital exceeds economic growth, wealth concentrates and creates social instability, as economic activity slumps. He showed this happened through history, the post war period being an exception. The wealthiest don't have jobs in the way that people whose income is derived solely from working do, they own assets. The people at the top of the asset pile, mostly inherited their wealth. We are currently in an unusual phase where more than half the worlds top wealth owners created it themselves, mostly the tech billionaires. That will be a one generation only thing. Once they pass it on, it will become part of the great pile of inherited wealth. And it will be vast, predictions are that we will have the first trillionaires in the next few years. Elon Musk tipped as the likely first. The wealthiest are able to employ tax avoidance, non dom status, etc. and to take out of the tax pot. SIPPS where you can put 60k each year into your pension pot and, not only pay no tax on it, but get a top of 7,200 from government. Or environmental land management subsidies for large land owners. Prior to the French revolution, the country slipped into an ongoing depression, poverty and hunger, everyone getting poorer and poorer. The causes were the cost of fighting the war in America, bad harvests and an aristocracy that spent lavishly and wouldn't pay tax itself. Initially Marie Antoinette and Austria were scapegoated. She was spending all the money and she was Austrian, the enemy. All kinds of stories were circulated about her; Madame Deficit, foreign beast, treacherous, immoral, licentious. The middle class petitioned about their grievances. They were paying too much tax and the aristocrats were not paying their share and spending lavishly. They demanded that the aristocrats pay more taxes and tried to abolish exemptions that enables the aristocrats to avoid paying tax. Their grievances were ignored and attempts to bring about change, failed. The rest as they say is history. |