Comment on Gary Stevenson: 'Tax wealth or we'll return to the feudal age'
gtrcoi@programming.dev 2 weeks agoIt’s great for Gary because the 4th bullet point you forgot to add is “involve Gary in economic policy making cause he’s so smart and the academics in their ivory tower are all useless”. He sounds just like the Eric Weinstein complaining that the Trump admin didn’t call the intellectual darkweb for help.
Everything is downstream from that with these people, because they rely on simplifications of complex issues to dupe laymen into thinking they are the only ones with the answers.
Here is a OECD paper looking at the pros and cons of a wealth tax oecd.org/…/the-role-and-design-of-net-wealth-taxe… it won’t go viral because it isn’t written by slopulist clout goblins like Gary. I doubt he’s read it because it contains a LOT of graphs, but that’s just the kind of thing you need if you’re going to start advocating for tax reform. Showing a graph or two might have helped him if this article is to be believed.
Gary is a flashy spiv with boring, half-baked ideas and he will never provide information in this much detail. He needs to keep it simple for the clicks, inevitably pushing his audience up mount stupid so they can walk into the ballot box with confidence and vote for economic arsonists with shiney slogans like his. People like Nigel Farage who also benefit from Gary’s bipartisan message of broken institutions and elite corruption.
hark@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The report won’t go viral because it’s a 100+ page report. Everyone plays a different role, Gary’s role is to raise awareness of the solution of wealth tax and push for an implementation. He’s done a great job at that. I have watched the documentary written about in that article and I agree it wasn’t good, he didn’t push back enough most of the time. His skill was limited in that respect, but his skill at getting clicks is still good to give traction and momentum to the idea of a wealth tax where others can pick up the torch and carry it to the goal.
Farage does not advocate for a wealth tax and Gary has talked about Farage multiple times on his channel, pointing out that he is taking advantage of the situation where institutions and the elites are indeed corrupt, but will not implement a solution to fix it and will actually do the opposite. I don’t see how that messaging benefits Farage. If you make a wealth tax a partisan issue, then you’re cutting along party lines rather than class lines and that will mean people in poorer classes not supporting a wealth tax simply because of allegiance to their party of choice.