Comment on Gary Stevenson: 'Tax wealth or we'll return to the feudal age'
druk@feddit.uk 22 hours agoI think you’re missing the main point a little bit, the problem with Gary is that he oversimplifies everything. He bigs himself up as this decisive voice without actually engaging with inequality research and policy holistically, consistently. He is not an exceptionally good economist, however he has vast reach and a large social media presence. The problems arising from this sort of populism is less apparent while his mission is aligned with what one believes, but is concerning nonetheless. He is just a burnt out millionaire turned influencer/media figure, who larps as this down-to-earth campaigner for good, while building his youtube brand and selling a book about how he was the tippy-top trader at Citibank.
hark@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
When you want your message to reach the masses, you have to oversimplify, otherwise it gets bogged down in details that ultimately may not even matter. People are having trouble with basic cost of living: shelter, healthcare, education, and even food. Focusing so heavily on numbers and graphs is how you get clowns claiming that it’s just a “vibecession” just because some dumb metric like GDP or their arbitrary basket of goods looks fine, meanwhile these people can’t afford the basics.
The problem is that the field of economics is biased so heavily towards policies that benefit the rich because that is how you get funding. Economists are largely in servitude to the rich and that is why they consider an effective tax on the rich “bad economics”. What these past decades have clearly shown that catering to the rich does not work. Why do you think they’re so vehemently against a wealth tax? If it was so ineffective then they wouldn’t care about a wealth tax getting established.