to be utterly incensed that the gap between the very richest people and everyone else in society is getting wider and wider?

[Mintyy]

They are rich. Why can't it stop there?

Why do they have to go from being multi millionaires to billionaires to multi billionaires?

I wouldn't find it so hard to swallow if the opportunity to earn more was open to everyone, but it most definitely is not.

The fact that the gap between the richest and the poorest in our country is widening enormously really sickens me to the back teeth.

[troubleinstore]

garlic ... sorry .. not that they work harder or invest more but this is how their wealth does grow ...just commenting on OP's original post about why rich people have to go from being rich to super rich etc

Didn't see your graphs until I'd posted ... but it is true that a small percentage pay most of the tax for the rest of the country...

[Mintyy]

I don't know but if I found myself in possession of £50 million I don't think the first thing I would be inclined to do with it would be to invest it - in London property or anywhere else - to earn more interest on it, or hide it to avoid paying tax on it.

I would think I was incredibly priviliged and lucky to have it.

[troubleinstore]

Mintyy ... OMG if I had the 50m I would feel lucky too.. but YY to investing ... if someone gives you money for nothing the least you can do is give the interest back to the poorest .. would be a waste not to .. that and a good percentage of the 50m too : )

[PacificDogwood]

I would be delighted to win a 6 figure sum in the lottery, I really would (particularly as I don't play it ).
But if I won 170 mio as happened not that long ago near me, I'd be petrified about what it would mean for my life and what I feel is a 'moral' way of earning ones keep.
I suppose I was raised with a fairly calvinistic work ethic and I find it distasteful that there is a tiny proportion of people whose money will truly always keep growing, no matter how much they spend.
Or rather, I find it repulsive that a system exists that allows for that to happen.

And the fact is because we (as a society in most of the Western world and now China and India and other emerging 'markets') have bought in to the concept of 'it could be us' as a desirable thing rather than considering us all to be 'in it together' (I hate to use this phrase at the current time, but I hope YKWIM). Better and more equal distribution of wealth is better for everybody.

If things don't change I do fear for some kind of French Revolution situation once the wrong person with too much power and money is heard to say the equivalent of 'let them eat cake' too publicly. And I don't mean people in this country, although more extreme voting behaviour is of course a symptom of this malaise, but the truly disadvantaged and disenfranchised all over the world. And who could blame them?!

[gertiegusset]

I remember when the national lottery first started, I wanted to win £4.3million, four for me and DH and the .3 for the kids to go in a trust.
It sadly never happened
I would have bought a nice enough house and gone on a few hols but we would have needed to keep working.
Never wanted posh cars and things.
The school swimming pool was always going to get a big donation and Amnesty and Greenpeace too.

[MillieH30]

Mintyy - I DID read your posts and was responding to one of them. . Hence my comparison of the relative tax paid by people earning £31,866 and £150,000 (namely, to reassure you that they don't pay the same rate of tax). See YOUR earlier post:


I'm also pretty uncomfortable with the idea that people earning £31,866 pa pay the same rate of tax as those earning £150,000 pa.

[TucsonGirl]

"I agree though that a lot could be achieved if current taxation and tax laws were actually enforced and loopholes for the super rich closed."

Please explain how this could be done. At the end of the day it comes down to sticking guns in peoples faces, because that's the only way you can take money from people who are determined not to pay it, and once you do that, you're fucked as a country. How about the government and public sector get their act together and actually make people feel they are a force for good and run with ruthless efficiency, and not just a make-work scheme where nothing gets done because of mindless bureaucracy?

[GarlicJulyKit]

Pretty sure you don't need guns, Tucson. Not until you get to gangsters, anyway! There's billions waiting to be collected by HMRC, who could do with having enough of their staff reinstated and another round of 'renegotiations' with the many corporations (and a few individuals) who've taken the piss until now.

As people keep saying, there's a long list of loopholes already identified by HMRC and waiting to be fixed. Likewise, banking regulations. The way the govt seems to be dragging its heels over all this doesn't do much to improve its image as friend of the wealthy, and fuck everyone else.

[GarlicJulyKit]

I made this earlier, while I was looking at the Office of National Statistics' income/tax/benefit stats. I'm an interesting person like that
Thought I may as well put it on the thread.

It shows that, although the bottom three tenths of the UK receive more in benefits than they pay out in taxes, the top one-tenth is still left with a disproportionately high income compared to everyone else.

You can see how the richest 10% of households skew our income distribution, because they've pulled the average higher than it ought to be.
If the distribution was more 'fair', at least to the middles, the 'average' line would cross the tops of the 5th and 6th bars - be in the middle.
As it is, it only just meets the top of the 4th decile.

Soaring final income levels at the 1st decile are causing too much inequality.
The answer isn't to reduce the average, but to pull some more of that 1st decile income down into the poorer groups: make the final bar shorter, and the 10th - 5th bars taller.

As we've seen upthread, improved income equality has a highly positive effect on economic growth. (This makes sense: more people buying more stuff means more people trading, so good news all round.)

In reality, the top decile's bar could be pulled down efficiently by taking more taxes and/or awarding fewer benefits to the top 1%. A household income of £80k isn't that high. Lumping the data into deciles hides the fact that a few hundred thousand households have extremely high incomes.

Similarly, a few hundred thousand of the poorest households actually have an income of around zero.

[caroldecker]

garlic $98.7 trillion is c. 99 thousand billion. Shared equally between the world's 7 billion population is $14,000 each, less than £10,000. significant outside the UK, but hardly a huge amount.

Rich people get seriously rich from one of four things:

1. Owning land/mineral deposits - no added value, tax them to the hilt
   
2. playing with others capital (bank traders) little added value, large tax bills
   
3. being skilled at something (eg football, music) which they can perform once and sell to thousands of people at a time
   
4. inventing something that lots of people want (microsoft, apple etc)
   

If you 'equalize' things, so say to a sports star or college student you have 2 choices:

1. Choose a safe profession/job, gte an average salary guaranteed or
   
2. take a huge risk, set up our own business, fail and starve or succeed and get an average salary so you won't be too rich
   

everyone will take option 1 and there is no apple, no computers, no cars etc because the inventors/popularisers of all these took a large bet and won - remove the winnings and no-one plays, we end up with no innovation.

That does also mean that any profits on houses (inclufding the one you live in) should be taxed at 40%

[Joysmum]

I get incensed, and then I get real.

When starting out, my aim was to have X wealth. Then we achieved X and Y was the aim. Then we achieved Y and are aiming for Z.

I can't see treading water as ever being satisfying for us. Even if we ever get to stage of being set for life, there's always the dream of being able to share that with friends and family and give to charity. That's the reality for me.

[GarlicJulyKit]

$98.7 trillion is c. 99 thousand billion.

It is 41% of ALL the wealth. In the hands of 0.7% of the people (32m).

Shared equally between the world's 7 billion population is $14,000 each ... hardly a huge amount.

Well, 3.2bn people have only 3% of all the wealth between them.
That is $7.3trn in total.
Shared equally between the them, the bottom 68.7% have $2,281.25 each at the moment.

So I would disagree that $14,000 is hardly a huge amount.

[settingsitting]

Joysmum, but will you ever think that enough is enough?

[settingsitting]

caroldecker. Your point 2.
What happens in reality with already rich families, is that yes the son's first business fails. And maybe the second too. But he doesnt starve! So he may go on and make a success of the third business. Rich people have that safety net of family wealth to fall back on.

[TheWordFactory]

The super rich have always existed. As have the super poor. When the comfortable middle were just that; comfortable, they didn't give much of a shit about either. Now the middle is disappearing, they're suddenly up in arms. Tis self protection, and little to do with social justice!

[settingsitting]

I think that you do have a point.

But my personal shock is that it is happening but more importantly, being allowed to happen in Britain.

When it is on my own shores, we have more control. And I for one at least am going to vent at the very least. And educate myself further how the financial and political scene works.

[settingsitting]

morethanpotatoprints. Your post has been troubling me since you posted it.
I have seen some of your posts on mumsnet and sometimes agree with you.

But I am very surprised by what you wrote.
You dont have to contribute further obviously, but would you care to write a bit more?

[settingsitting]

[now seen that you have not been on mumsnet since thursday]

[edamsavestheday]

this is the pitchforks article by the super-wealthy guy

Rich people may have always been with us but extreme riches were rare. The gap between rich and ordinary, let alone poor, is growing exponentially - it's a huge change.

[FraidyCat]

Someone said

When we think of distribution of wealth, is it just among people who live in the UK or is it the whole of the world. If the latter we would all be paying so that everybody could have sanitation. If not, are some people more entitled to basic human needs than others?

which triggerered a bit of back-and-forth including this (as an example response)

I don't quite see the point of comparing ourselves with other countries. May I complain when I'm on the same play as a starving Bangladeshi ?

If one person has an income of 100K a year, another 10K a year and a third 1K a year, it's difficult for some of us to understand why it's more urgent to close the gap between the 10K and 100K person than the 10K and 1K person.

I suspect it's because the people outraged by inequality in this thread are best represented by the 10K bracket.

[edamsavestheday]

I think it's a bit arrogant of the £100k person to try to defend the growing gap between rich, middle and poor by saying ooh, just be glad you aren't starving in the third world or working in a sweatshop in Bangladesh.

We don't justify sexual assault by saying just be glad you weren't raped, or living in a country with a horrendous number of rapes and murders like India.

You can and should take both sexual assault and rape seriously, and express sympathy with/campaign about the horrendous treatment of victims of violence against women and girls in India and elsewhere. It's not either/or and it's not sensible or just to pretend there's no problem here because there are other problems elsewhere. Should we shut up about foodbanks if there's a famine in Sudan?

[FraidyCat]

I think it's a bit arrogant of the £100k person to try to defend the growing gap between rich, middle and poor by saying ooh, just be glad you aren't starving in the third world or working in a sweatshop in Bangladesh.

But it's not the views of the 100K person that are being asked about, it's the views of the 10K one. The 100K person is not being logically inconsistent, the 10K one is.

[GarlicJulyKit]

Fraidy - "May I complain when I'm on the same play as a starving Bangladeshi?"

By that point, the speaker will have lost the means to complain.

You're trying to silence cries of "It's getting worse!" by saying it isn't yet as bad as it will be

I reserve my right to express my anxieties, and explain why I'm right, regardless of my income bracket.

[GarlicJulyKit]

And supposing that rich people can't care about poverty is the mistake of the stupid. There's no logical inconsistency to it.

[PacificDogwood]

The arguments in favour of less unequal distribution of wealth do not depend on every individual's income - not on this thread and not in society IMO.

Just as an example (I am not picking on her specifically, but using her as an example of the hyper-rich) if Petra Ecclestone can suggest she had a 'normal upbringing' and is in some way one of us because she works (she designs handbags) than that is just a reflection of how somebody in her position with that ridiculous level of wealth has no idea what it is like to have to work, whether that is for minimum wage or for 100k.