![]() ![]() If we exist in some kind of national community then the inevitable question its members may legitimately ask is what contribution each of us makes. Fair and quite modest proposals have been proposed and these are based on a position that we are in this altogether, despite tax evasion, avoidance and inherited wealth. But these gains need to be set in context. Yet even a hint of a suggestion of increasing taxes mobilises a thousand responses in the comments sections of articles in the FT, sees the big guns wielded out by lobbyists paid for by big money, only to be relayed by tabloid newspapers and more or less absorbed by sections of the public who see any form of tax proposals as an attack on liberty and personal hard work. In the same decade there has been a massive enlargement of the public’s awareness that fiddling with income inequalities is a concern with small fry, property wealth and personal wealth more broadly is where the big fish lie. Despite this, the public are in fact very supportive of attempts at finding fair methods for taxing unearned income. Austerity was the very core of this project, an attempt at cutting public costs while leaving private and corporate wealth untouched. The past decade has been a period marked by a politics that has consistently rejected the possibility that the state tax and invest, whether this be corporations, land, property or other forms of wealth. Those same young people are more likely to emerge as renters as house prices rise out of reach. Today, most young people have grown-up in these same wealthy households, or have looked-on bemused and angry at the unending flows of luck flowing to those have been able to afford their own homes. The property wealth of homeowners is among the most significant elements of national wealth and, of course, the key to the wealth of these households. Even a light tax regime on the estimated $35tn of monies held in offshore tax havens could pay for the entire cost of the COVID-19 pandemic. ![]() But we do, at least, have the money to do the job. Making arguments for social investment, reducing inequalities of various kinds and addressing structural divides across regions and communities require significant public investment. The social sciences often have a hard time being heard. ![]()
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