Gary Stevenson read this week's Economist so you don't have to. His summary is the most concise version of the argument I have heard so I am going to give it more air.

The magazine's line is that we should not tax the wealth of the very rich but we should tax their estates more heavily when they die. Oppose the wealth tax. Broaden the inheritance tax.

Here is the problem. Stevenson lands it cleanly. For the people these taxes target, the two are the same tax.

An ordinary person saves across a working life then spends it down through retirement and care, so the wealth they hold at any moment is mostly gone before it reaches their children. The very rich are the opposite. A fortune of £20m throwing off a conservative 5% is a million a year in passive income that has nothing to do with work and does not stop. You cannot outspend it. The wealth only compounds, so every pound held today is a pound the children inherit.

That person is the only target the wealth tax has. For them an annual wealth tax and a one-off inheritance tax are the same instrument on a different clock. One takes a slice every year. The other takes a bigger slice once every thirty.

Which means every argument the magazine throws at the wealth tax hits the inheritance tax it claims to prefer. If a 2% annual charge deters innovation, a 40% charge on the same fortune deters it harder. If a wealth tax is confiscatory, so is an estate tax, so is income tax, that is what a tax is. The objection is not an objection. It is a preference for the one version of the tax that will never pass, because inheritance tax is the most hated tax we have and they know it. Back the popular tax in a shape the public will reject. That is the whole trick.

This is Stevenson's argument. I will not dress it up as mine. It is the clearest demolition of the position I have seen.

What it leaves out is the part he cannot say without breaking his own frame. The frame is deliberate. Stevenson works to keep this off moral ground. It is not about envy. It is not left against right. It is about whether your children can own a house. He is tactically right that the moment you moralise wealth you hand the other side the word they have been waiting for.

The moral revaluation is coming anyway, with him or without him.

Watch the low multimillionaire, the man worth two or three million who goes to war in the comments for a billionaire he will never meet. Stevenson explains him as a hoarder, Gollum with his precious. That is half of it. The other half is that this man will never pay the wealth tax and knows it, so the ferocity cannot be about money. He is defending the story that his money makes him good. Take a swing at wealth and you have not touched his bank balance, you have touched his soul.

That is what is shifting under all of this. Wealth is starting to read as a mark, evidence of having taken rather than made. The people who hold it can feel it coming. Soon they will call the reckoning puritanical, joyless, a war on success. Watch for the word. The irony is that the Puritans were the ones who sanctified getting rich in the first place, accumulation as the sign of being one of the saved. The moral charge that once blessed the fortune is turning to face it.

Stevenson wins this on the arithmetic and not the sermon. He is right about that. The sermon is coming anyway. The rich can already hear it.

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