A modest proposal

There has been no shortage in recent years of statistics demonstrating the huge and ever-expanding gap between the wealthiest people in society and nearly everyone else. In Britain, North America and all around the world there are quite shocking accounts of how the richest 1 % or even the richest 3 persons in the USA own more than the bottom 50%.  And there are plenty of variations dealing with the proportion of wealth owned by all the billionaires. We could fill a page with different versions of the same truth.

Oxfam calculate that the wealth of the world’s Billionaires increased by $2 trillion last year. In noughts that is

2,000,000,000,000 dollars.

Enough of that. Hardly anyone challenges the truth of the problem. Former governors of the Bank of England, religious leaders. Vast quantities of economists. Political persons of nearly every shade., centre right, liberal, social democrats all bemoan this ever-increasing divide between the oligarchs and pretty well everyone else. It is unhealthy. It is a threat to democracy, and so on, and so on.

So, what’s to be done?

At this point a great blanket of silence seems to descend. Despite this gross inequality causing serious societal breakdown, environmental degradation, massive delusion in any political system and many other ills readily outlined by many a scribbler, very few want to put forward any practical measures that might help.

So here are some suggestions.

Empower an agency to collect most of these huge surpluses and convert into paper money. Then have a huge bonfire. Bad for global warming, mind.

Or.

Design an On-line version of the process that involved the IRA demonstrating that it had but its weapons “beyond use”. In the days o the Good Friday agreement this involved some serious metal bashing and a trip to some really remote areas, accompanied by an Irish Canadian General.

Or.

Convert it into some kind of Crypto Currency. Transfer the whole lot to a single laptop. Then encase the laptop in huge layers of re-enforced steal and drop it in the Mariana Trench. (10 + Kilometres below sea level and the deepest place on the planet).

There are many other possible ways of trying to deal with the basic problem.

But after some reflection it came to me that we could turn to the idea of “Taxation”.

And then it dawned on me that we could spend all this excessive wealth on all these things that Rachel and Keir say we can’t afford.

And have huge tax cuts for the worse off.

What’s not to like?