Britain’s Top 1000 Rich List could pay off deficit just from last 3 years profit: Michael Meacher letter

I’ve banged on about this before, but here’s another reminder of how much wealth there is sloshing about in Great Britain.

MP Michael Meacher’s letter to the press has been doing the rounds and points out that the richest 1,000 people make up only 0.003% of the population and yet they have made £155bn extra in the past three years, in the depths of the recession. If they paid off the entire deficit they’d still have £30bn with which to console themselves.

Their combined wealth is the highest in history: 1,000 individuals own £413bn, more than a third of Britain’s GDP.

Their increase in wealth has been £315bn over the past 15 years. capital gains tax on this at the current 28% rate would yield £88bn, that’s 70% of the entire deficit. And yet it’s the poorest and weakest who are paying: 77% of the budget deficit is being recouped by public spending and benefit cuts. Only 23% comes from tax increases, and half of that is from VAT which we all pay and hits the poorest hardest. None of the tax increases are specifically aimed at the super-rich.

Meanwhile. the bankers and feral mega-elite who powered the crash and are still trashing the economy have “not been made subject to any tax pay-back whatever commensurate to their gains”.

The decision to target the poor, stop paying benefits to the sick and needy, to starve our NHS into sickness and submission, to pay rail owners huge subsidies and allow utilities to carry on charging what they want, is political. It has nothing to do with national debt. This is the mega-rich moving in and swallowing up everything.