Faut-il taxer les riches ? (spoiler : OUI !) Interview de Gary Stevenson et Marlene Engelhorn

Gill, a YouTuber and economics journalist, hosts a discussion on inequality and its effects on economies and democracies.

• Marlene Engelhorn comes from an extremely wealthy family and received an inheritance she found problematic. • Gary Stevenson was a trader at Citibank and bet on increasing inequality.

• Marlene's book is titled "The Money". • Gary's is titled "The Trading Game", in French "Confessions d'un trader repenti".

The guests first present their backgrounds, then the discussion addresses the link between inequality, democracy, and growth.

• Being born into extreme wealth does not shield you from inequality's effects, because they are relational. • She cannot be extremely rich without others being extremely poor.

• She would have preferred to be taxed, but the state did not do so. • She therefore decided to redistribute most of her wealth herself, as close to 100% as possible.

• With the Foresight Institute, 10,000 letters were sent to randomly selected addresses on January 9, 2024. • 1,424 people responded, when typically around 5% is expected. • 50 representative people were chosen to decide how to distribute 25 million euros, with 3 million more to cover costs.

• Over 6 weekends, from mid-March to early June 2024, the assembly discussed wealth inequality in Austria. • It selected 77 organizations fighting for social justice. • Marlene emphasizes that the wealthy can also be taxed without relying on voluntary redistribution.

Gary was not politically engaged and wanted to become rich. He became a trader at Citibank in 2008, trading interest rates, after the financial crisis.

• Every year from 2008 to 2020, economists predicted a recovery the following year and were wrong. • When he asked people why they didn't spend more, they said they had no more money. • The middle class was shifting, in his view, from asset owner to non-owner.

• At a 2011 meeting, an economist mentioned states spending more than their revenues. • Gary realized that families and states were borrowing from people like him and his colleagues. • He bet that the economy would remain weak and rates at zero, and became Citibank's most profitable trader that year.

• He fell ill, feeling it was wrong, comparing it to betting on death toll from a burning building. • He didn't want to tell his children one day that he had predicted society's end and made money from it.

• There is no economy outside a political system: these are questions of power. • We already redistribute, but upward, and it is not a matter of merit. • Money does not work: what matters is access to real resources like houses and land.

For Marlene, taxation is the known effective way to return to society money accumulated by the richest, placing it at democracy's core.

• Gary recounts 14 years of Conservative austerity, then a Labour government that borrowed from the rich rather than tax them. • With the rich unwilling to lend further, there was more austerity. • According to him, democracy without resources or power is meaningless, and British government wealth would have shifted from +100% to -100% of GDP in 40 years.

• Marlene agrees and cites Oxfam on economic violence, and Hannah Arendt on power channeling. • She explains that austerity divides classes, and people without resource access stop voting.

• According to Marlene, resources were never redistributed: the same power systems exist under a different label. • When housing is owned by someone else, that person has real power over tenants' quality of life.

• Poor in his youth, he worked hard and accessed finance skyscrapers. • There he found people who were no smarter than the dealers he knew.

• According to him, the most important factor for becoming rich or poor is father's wealth. • He believes it has become nearly impossible for young people from poor families to become wealthy.

For Gary, it is feudalism, not capitalism, which makes people angry.

Who are the wealthy, how to tax them (salaries, dividends, capital gains, assets, inheritance), and what would the money be used for?

• He judges the result essential: young people become poorer than their parents, which will benefit the far right. • He wants a truly progressive system where the richest pay a higher percentage of their income.

Gary praises Gabriel Zucman and his team, whom he judges the best in the world at knowing how to tax the wealthy, and calls for supporting them.

• She stresses the importance of process as much as result, mentioning the French Revolution and property as a human right. • All taxes affecting the wealthy's assets are good, with increasing rates that would force them to sell their assets on an open market to ordinary people.

Some will say financial markets fund companies, jobs, and growth, and their actors receive fair compensation.

• He is not against markets or capitalism and does not want to close them. • His father could buy a house with a post office job, whereas his sister, holding two degrees, cannot. • He wants to stop the current redistribution upward, which he says requires reforming the tax system.

• She wonders who owns the markets: a non-professional would lose against a professional. • Being an owner is not work, and for some to gain greatly, others must lose. • She proposes cooperation over competition.

Marlene concludes that capitalism must be abolished to create a more equal system where everyone, educated or not, can have housing.