Comments by "" (@lonevoice) on "Who is asking the big economic questions right now?" video.

Do we really get much thinking by commentators? Sadly, there isn't much evidence that this happens. I am not an economist but I can see that the biggest problems have been an unwillingness to invest and the surging wealth inequality with their allied asset prices. There is so much else but I think that they are the fundamental starting points. Just focusing on the wealthy, the main problem is that they are incapable of spending enough. They always have a surplus beyond their spending needs and they use that to invest in assets such as housing and shares etc. If this increases significantly, which it has, then the problem then is that increasing amounts have been withdrawn from the active economy of business, jobs, services into asset purchases. What we then see is that asset prices increase and there is an increasing drain on the active economy which gets worse and the lives of the public becomes increasingly sh*t. Some people say that we can't tax the rich because they will just emigrate. That's fine. If a board member from a top company decides to go and live abroad then there is always someone else willing and quite possibly more able, to take his or her place. If a businessman sells up then he may go but the business, now in new hands remains. One thing that we should be doing and don't even talk about is taxing those significant assets in the UK where the owner either lives in a tax haven or can't be identified. In a similar way we should tax the UK profits of those businesses that are based in a tax haven and disallowed certain expenses such as intellectual property rights unless that have previously been taxed in the UK.
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