Comments by "Michael RCH" (@michaelrch) on "Nurses to stage 48-hour strike in March as pay dispute escalates" video.

Hard to argue with that...
7
@teelo523 Yes. I am wealthy and that's precisely what I think. You have no idea how easy it has been to acquire wealth in the last 2 years if you already had it. Rents have shot up so landlords have been able to increase their income by about 20% while asset prices have gone up by nearly as much. The stock market is at a record high even while the economy is in the toilet. Interest rates are up so bond yields have spiked. It's easy. If you have assets. The big machine that hoovers up money from workers and dumps it in the coffers of the rich is working overtime. All the furlough money that the government handed out during COVID has been used to pay rent and mortgages and other bills and it has wound up with the rich. It's one of the biggest reasons for inflation, which btw was climbing fast months before Putin invaded Ukraine. All that new wealth needs to be taxed back. And that would not only pay for services, but it would cut inflation by cutting the ability of the rich to bid up assets.
7
✊ Solidarity with the nurses. The government wants to kill the NHS. We must support our nurses and doctors in their action. They are the only thing standing between us an a collapse of the system. If you don't want a US-style healthcare hellscape, back the nurses.
2
@Proman476 The wealthy got £600 billion in new wealth during COVID. Taxing that properly is an easy place to start dong you think? All the pay rises being demanded in the NHS would cost about £11 billion per year. That's easily covered by raising cap gains tax and dividends tax to the rates paid on waged labour. The money is there. The Tories just won't tax their wealthy masters.
2
The wealthy got at least £600 billion of new wealth during COVID. There is tons of money. It's just all in the hands of the Tories obscenely wealthy mates. The answer is simple. Tax that money back.
2
@teelo523 rich people don't have vaults full of cash. They have assets. They own your house. They own the business you work for. They own the mortgage you pay interest on every month. Etc. They cannot just pick those items up and take them somewhere else. Switzerland has a wealth tax. It's about 0.5% per year, depending on where you live in the country. Every year, you do a tax return. You declare your assets. They get a value assigned according to a system and you pay a percentage of that to the tax man. It's easy. It's uncontroversial. It works. The reason why wealth taxes are considered unworkable in the U.K. is not because that's true. It's because the media is owned by billionaires who don't want to pay them, and the media is full of people who don't understand economics (as a recent internal BBC report found explicitly) and they indoctrinated into a certain set of orthodoxies about economics that comes from neoliberal capitalists. In fact that orthodoxy is weakening. Even some centre-right think tanks like the IFS have mused about wealth taxes. When you have large, stubborn and growing inequality, wealth taxes are a very powerful tool to both redistribute wealth to where it's needed AND to boost the economy by giving people money in their pockets to spend in the real economy. And they don't affect inflation much because they take as much money out of the economy as they put back in in the form of better services.
1