Against a wealth tax economic
Discourages saving and enterprise
By penalising accumulated wealth, the tax may deter saving, investment and entrepreneurship, weakening growth and job creation.
- 3 counters
- 37 sources
- 6 people
- 1 evidence
The counters
Rewards productive investment A recurring charge on passive holdings nudges capital out of speculation and idle assets and into the productive economy. Limits dynastic wealth Taxing large fortunes slows the entrenchment of inherited advantage and supports a more meritocratic society. Untaxed wealth discourages working-class enterprise The same logic cuts the other way: workers and the middle class pay higher effective taxes and own few assets to borrow against, so leaving wealth untaxed starves the saving and enterprise of everyone below the top.Copy-paste rebuttal Drop a sourced reply where this argument shows up
Reddit / long form
You're making the "Discourages saving and enterprise" argument against a wealth tax. A recurring charge on passive holdings actually nudges capital out of speculation and idle assets and into the productive economy — it rewards enterprise rather than punishing it. The real drag on saving and enterprise is the status quo: workers and the middle class pay higher effective tax rates and own few assets to borrow against, so leaving wealth untaxed starves the saving and enterprise of everyone below the top. Taxing large fortunes also slows dynastic entrenchment and supports a more meritocratic economy. Learn more: https://wealthtax.now/arguments/economic-disincentives/
X / Bluesky / short form
You're making the "Discourages saving and enterprise" argument against a wealth tax. A charge on idle holdings pushes capital into the productive economy — and it's untaxed wealth at the top that starves saving and enterprise below it. https://wealthtax.now/arguments/economic-disincentives/
Backed by
- The Great British £3 trillion wealth windfall is unequal, unearned and untaxed
Britain's wealth boom is not the reward for saving and enterprise. UK household wealth jumped from around three times national income in 1980 to roughly seven times by 2019, and the majority — about 53% of the rise since the early 2010s — came from passive gains such as rising house prices, not from active saving or investment. A recurring charge on these idle, unearned windfalls can't discourage enterprise that didn't create them; it targets exactly the speculative, untaxed gains that crowd workers off the wealth ladder.
Where it's been said
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Why The Economist hates wealth taxes.Raised as a counter-argument to rebut. “wealth taxes would become confiscatory and deter innovation.”
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Could we be about to get wealth taxes in the UK?Raised as a counter-argument to rebut. “I don't want to introduce anything that is going to hurt the UK economy, right? I want these things to be planned incredibly well.”
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Why are the far right doing so well? And can they be stopped?Raised as a counter-argument to rebut. “When I look at Reform, when I look at Farage, what I see is a party run by rich people, funded by very rich people, that have a policy, as soon as they come in,”
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Politics has broken a 200 year trend. Here's what happens next“growing wealth inequality hurts the economy and hurts living standards.”
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Are we living through a new Victorian era?“We expect life to get better gener generation after generation. We expect and hope that as we get older we will get richer and more financially secure until we ”
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How to convince your friends to back wealth taxesRaised as a counter-argument to rebut. “if you tax people so much they will eventually like avoid the tax so if you really increase tax on work people will stop working or people will leave the countr”
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Why your government is about to raise YOUR taxesRaised as a counter-argument to rebut. “They constantly say what Gary wants is to tax high earning working people despite the fact that I constantly aggressively very clearly say I am trying to tax th”
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Signing off: how close are we to winning higher taxes on the rich?Raised as a counter-argument to rebut. “raising tax on on wealth is like is pulling up the ladder you're you're preventing people from being able to get rich now you are rich yourself and this is just”
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The week Trump nearly crashed the world economy“So if we tax people based on their spending rather than their income, then the richest people will get taxed at the lowest rate. So what this means is tariffs a”
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Special: Can tariffs make you rich? with Ha-Joon Chang“Now, the US financial system is actually going to drain this extra resource from these companies and make, the income inequality even worse, yeah?”
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Immigration, the alt-right, the left and young men - Gary meets JimmyTheGiant“if those stocks used to be owned by ordinary people and then one generation down, then the other ordinary people don't have them. This is a problem. It's a prob”
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Don't be a dickhead.“he's obsessed with getting richer and I he's obsessed with getting richer and I he's obsessed with getting richer and I think this is you know a big part of the”
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How to live in a collapsing economyRaised as a counter-argument to rebut. “you can't tax wealth you can't deal with inequality because we need the rich to invest to grow the economy”
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What's next for me and this channel?Raised as a counter-argument to rebut. “we have an incoming Labour government, who are advised by a group of mainstream economists and journalists who are super, super resistant to taxation.”
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What's my favourite tax?Raised as a counter-argument to rebut. “I'm not calling for redistribution I am I'm not calling for redistribution I am calling to stop the redistribution away calling to stop the redistribution away ”
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Jeremy Hunt No Alternative #shorts“the Richer got richer they'll use that the Richer got richer they'll use that money to buy the Assets in the middle money to buy the Assets in the middle class ”
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Why Your Economists Suck“aggressively incentivising through money all of the best people to not work in the public sector and then creating incentive structure in the public sector such”
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Inflation, Interest Rates & House PricesRaised as a counter-argument to rebut. “if you keep trying to provide living standards without the ability to tax the people who increasingly own everything it's not possible”
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Wasting Time #shortsRaised as a counter-argument to rebut. “set of models that have no distribution in them keep predicting things will get better things keep getting worse and they will never figure it out”
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The City, Levelling Up & £700billion - Gary on Politics LiveRaised as a counter-argument to rebut. “he doesn't want regulation and high taxes in order to create jobs and pay those people well”
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Flows of Wealth and How People Get RichRaised as a counter-argument to rebut. “in a strong economy with lots of growth opportunities this isn't necessarily a bad thing because they can use that money to make new investments and create new ”
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Politics - Liz Truss and LabourRaised as a counter-argument to rebut. “I spoke to some people recently about the prospect of raising a one percent wealth tax on wealth assets above 10 million pounds and even that doesn't look like ”
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Debunking Trickle Down EconomicsRaised as a counter-argument to rebut. “the idea that if you allow rich people to get a lot of money, to accumulate a lot of money, it will grow your economy”
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Post-Budget: The Reality of the Cost of Living Crisis“if you smash an equality through the roof you destroy the economy and destroy a living standards for ordinary people”
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The Queen & Inequality - Interview with Germany's ZDFRaised as a counter-argument to rebut. “you can't tax the rich because it's bad for the economy”
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The Decade The Rich Won on BBC2 - Intro, Outro & Gary's Highlights“their incentivizers to take a load of risk and they know if it doesn't work out they're already millionaires they're not going to lose out you know they might g”
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Economic Disaster - What Can We Do?Raised as a counter-argument to rebut. “oh no you shouldn't tax the rich if you do it be an economic disaster understand that's [ __ ]”
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Predicting the Post Covid EconomyRaised as a counter-argument to rebut. “some of them put a lot of money into paying economists and think tanks to tell you that inequality is important for the economy that is not true”
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The Rich are getting even Richer - @conversationofmoney podcast“if the rich are accumulating massive amounts of wealth that means we have to pay them more every year and it's us all the new people that drive the economy”
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Who's Paying for your Social Care?“this is going to mean that ordinary families cannot afford to get homes for their kids um ordinary families kids will struggle to find a place to raise their fa”
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Gary Destroys Billionaire Defender - on Cristo's talkRADIO Political Panel“what an earth incentive is there to work hard and get wealthy if you know that your money is going to be going to a northern rail company”
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Mortgage Interest Rates - The BasicsRaised as a counter-argument to rebut. “inequality is is important for the economy that is not true”
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National Living Wage Rise - too little, too late? Gary on LBC with Richard SpurrRaised as a counter-argument to rebut. “some of them put a lot of money into paying economists and think tanks to tell you that inequality is important for the economy is important for the economy tha”
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UK Millionaires - Tax us Please??? Gary on Times Radio with Mariella Frostrup“if we do that it's going to crush the economy as well in the longer term”
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Why are BILLIONAIRES growing MORE wealth? Gary on LBC News with Martin Stanford“if we let the rich accumulate huge amounts of money the rich don't spend money on ordinary things it doesn't drive wages they invest money they buy assets stock”
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Tesla stops taking Bitcoin - How can CRYPTO hurt the environment? Gary on BBC Radio Kent“in my opinion it's basically become a speculative bubble that ordinary people are looking looking at this and thinking thinking thinking well you know i'm stuck”
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BITCOIN: Boom or Bust? - Gary on Sky News Podcast with Dermot Murnaghan“I think most people buying these cryptocurrencies including bitcoin especially in the last year have been doing it largely rather than with the intention of usi”