The Economy Is Rigged for Billionaires — ft. Gary Stevenson

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27:39Scott Galloway:you talked you brought up miram dami and he's proposing a pied-a-terre tax where essentially if you're on a second home or worth over five million dollars you start to pay an annual tax and i think if you're on a 10 million dollar condominium in manhattan and i'm asking for a friend here, it taxes you about$100 ,000 a year. And my sense is, look, no one likes taxes. I especially don't like taxes that are going to impact me. But as far as a taxation goes, taxing very wealthy people who have a second home somewhere, it effectively is almost like a wealth tax, right? Because it just reduces the value of their second home.

28:22Scott Galloway:They transfer a you know, a certain amount of the value of their second home to the government. This to me, and I haven't seen, I'm sure there's costs that can be cut in New York, but I find this a fairly, I don't know, the idea of decent tax policy, targeting the very wealthy. If you own a second home worth 10 million bucks in New York, you're probably making pretty good money. And this is not an easy tax to avoid. If they decide to sell their house, someone will pick it up. It's basically a transfer of wealth of the value of second homes to the government. And this to me strikes me as a decent tax.

28:56Scott Galloway:Apologies for the word salad. Your thoughts? It's clever because, you know, if we compare it to what we just discussed, right, which is the non-dom tax. The non-dom tax, you're trying to raise tax on foreign billionaires who own foreign assets. This is a group of people over which you, the British government, the American government, has a pretty weak hold, right? Because they're not citizens of your country and they own enormous amounts of wealth not in your country. that these are the people who most easily can leave. And what I said to you was, you want to tax people who own the assets in your country because these people cannot escape the tax.

29:31And I think what Zoram Amdani has done there, I'll be honest, I was quite impressed because you probably picked up from our conversation so far. I am worried about bad implementations coming into place. And what I saw when he did that was pretty much exactly as you say. This is canny in the fact that it's targeted. it will effectively hit, I would imagine, pretty much exclusively very wealthy people and very wealthy people who cannot avoid the tax. And that is smart. But I want to be clear, in theory, in principle, it is a lot less fair than a wealth tax or an estate tax, right? Because this is taxing a specific subset of wealthy people, people who own very expensive second homes.

30:13It's a pretty good proxy because a lot of wealthy people will own second homes. but you know how much is it going to hit the real problem which is like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk in reality it's not so I think it's a cleverly designed tax it's well targeted it reassures me that there are some people working on the design here who are canny and practical and are cognizant of the risks of flight but the real big problem especially in a country like America is the real big dogs, right? It's the Musks, it's the Bezos, it's the billionaires. And this tax is not going to hit them. So clever tax, well designed, not the complete solution.

30:51But of course, Zoran Mamdani is not the president, right? He's the mayor of New York. So I think he's designing a good, he's designed well with tax in the context of the powers that he has. But I think we could do more to fix the real problem if we start talking about what national governments can do, which is obviously more.

31:12Scott Galloway:I'm fascinated with tax policy. I was excited about this conversation. So I'm a fan of the idea of, if you think about it, basically assets grow tax deferred income as tax hit every year. I think that at a very simple level, that is one of the major darters of wealth inequality. And because earners are taxed every year, it's hard for them to ever become owners. The people who are fortunate to become owners become super owners because their assets increase in value tax-deferred, whereas your asset, your sweat, gets clipped 30%, 40 % every year. So I like the idea of going after assets in the sense that if you borrow against the common strategy of the wealthy, you buy stocks, you never sell, you borrow against them to fund your lifestyle, you die, step up in basis, they're never taxed.

32:02Scott Galloway:What about the idea of taxing? It triggers a capital gain event in your tax when you borrow against your assets. It feels to me a little bit technically messy. I think it would be I'm not necessarily against it. I think the most of the more obvious and graceful solution is to just stop step up at death, which seems I don't see. For those who don't know, the idea is you pay your capital gains tax when you sell, and rich people can solve that by never selling. And every time they die and give their assets to their kids, the purchase price gets re-updated to the price when they inherited it, which basically means capital gains tax never gets paid by the rich.

32:47The reason, again, this doesn't actually solve your Bezos-Musk problem. And I think, you know, I know Bezos and Musk are only two people, but what they stand for is the billionaire class, which these are the guys who are really going to eat everything. You know, the rate at which these guys are going to go. It doesn't solve that because people like Bezos and Musk, they use, as you say, this borrowing solution. So the reason they borrow is because it means they never have to claim any income. Right. And they're using the borrowing to cover their day to day spending. And of course, the day to day spending of somebody like Bezos is obviously massive.

33:21you know famously he rented out the whole of venice for his wedding whatever from the perspective of an ordinary person his day-to-day spending is enormous bezos's lifetime spending is nothing it is a drop in the ocean compared to bezos's lifetime income so if you try and fix this problem of he's borrowing again this thing that gets made a lot of in the you know on social media and the press which is these guys don't pay tax because they borrow against it to be honest that it's it's actually that is not really the problem because that is to cover their spending and their spending is like less than like 0.1 % of their lifetime income.

33:54The problem is quite simply that they pay an incredibly low percentage of tax as a percentage of their lifetime income. But to be honest, it's not even that. It's not even that. The problem is quite simply, if you do not tax very rich people like Bezos and Musk at really very high rates, the problem is quite simply compound interest. It's as simple as that. Even if you were to successfully tax Bezos and Musk at 40 % of lifetime income, excluding inheritance, once you start including inheritance, then you can actually stop aggressive wealth growth. But if you were to tax them even at 40%, which is, you know, a million miles from where you tax them now, their wealth would still grow much faster than the economy.

34:36The question here is really, it's quite a simple mathematical question, right? Do you want everything to be owned by the tiny elite or not? if you do not want everything to go and buy a tiny elite you have to aggressively tax extremely high levels of wealth because otherwise if you're Jeff Bezos what's he worth 300 million dollars 300 billion dollars right even if he makes five percent a year right which he's going to make way more than that even if he makes five percent a year he's making 15 billion dollars a year right And it's just going to grow, right? It's going to grow unbelievably quickly, right?

35:16So really, to be honest, I think the borrowing thing is a bit of a myth because the amount that these guys borrow is immaterial relative to how much they earn. So I think that's a little bit of a red herring.

35:30Scott Galloway:It strikes me that the most effective and simplest way to get at this problem would just be an AMT. Corporations in the US, I don't know how it is here in the UK, paying their lowest taxes since, I think, 1929. You talked about, mentioned what's happening in the UK in terms of the wealthy not paying or the super wealthy not paying their fair share. Absolutely the same thing. And this occurs because of loopholes that are inserted into the tax code. It's actually, I find that the argument, and you made this point, is a false argument, and that is we argue about tax rates when we should be arguing about tax code.

36:03Scott Galloway:There are five Fortune 100 companies that don't pay any taxes. I took advantage of something called 1202 where the first 10 million in proceeds when I sold my last business was tax-free, which quite frankly just makes no fucking sense. I don't understand why entrepreneurs don't pay taxes on a gain. But anyways, wouldn't the simplest, most effective means of maintaining a progressive tax structure, raising revenues and addressing these problems without going after individual loopholes just be an alternative minimum tax? Yeah, so the big proponent of this minimum tax is Gabriel Zuckman. Have you spoken to him?

36:35Have you had him on? I haven't. Well, you should. I mean, if you're interested in this, like he he is the guy on tax code, you know, much more than me that this is. Anyone who doesn't know, Gabriel Zuckman is a French economist working out of Paris who is trying to basically bring in a minimum tax. But on exactly as you say, on billionaires and he's basically saying everybody should be paying at least 40 percent, you know, including billionaires. First thing to say, I'm 100 percent supportive of a minimum tax rate. And at the moment, ordinary people in America and the UK are paying their 30, 40 percent and billionaires are paying effectively nothing.

37:12It would be an improvement. But even if you were to tax billionaires 40 percent like an ordinary person, it would not be enough. Unless you have a rapidly growing economy, which we don't, it would not be enough to stop their wealth growing. And if their wealth is growing quickly in economies that are not growing. that wealth is going to be coming from somewhere. And I think that the big part of the story that we've had in the last 20 years, but especially the last five, six years since COVID, we've had this context of simultaneously rapidly growing wealth at the top end, in particularly billionaires, and this collapsing government wealth, and significant falls in middle class and working class wealth.

37:52And what constantly amazes me is how few people seem to recognise that these two things are the same thing. Our economies have not grown. Billionaire wealth has exploded and government wealth has collapsed and middle class working class wealth has collapsed. That is the same thing. That is wealth transfer. That is two sides of the same coin. And that is quite simply what happens if you allow a billionaire class to go untaxed. But the truth is, if you were to raise billionaire income tax effectively up to 40%, which it should be because that's what ordinary working people pay, but you kept billionaire inheritance tax and wealth tax at zero, you would not stop wealth transfer from continuing.

38:31You would only slow it down. That's the truth. And I think if you look historically, the reason we had these like 50 years, well, what do you want to call it? 30, 40, 50 years, the golden age of capitalism after World War II, we kind of lucked into that by accident, right? Because we had these very high rates of income tax and we had these very high rates of inheritance tax. And for people who don't know, both in the UK and the US, we're topping these out at sort of 90 %-ish back in these 30, 40 years after World War II. Even though I don't think that was a perfect tax system, but because it targeted a lot, it didn't hit the very wealthy more than it hit your high earning workers, like famously, the Beatles paid 95%, you know, this kind of thing.

39:12And, you know, much richer people were not paying more. What it did was, it stopped there from being a class of incredibly rich people who are rapidly growing their wealth share. That's what it did. And as soon as you cut those taxes down, which we obviously did in the 80s in the UK and the US and eventually all over the world, suddenly you open the box and you allow there to start to be a class of people who aggressively increase wealth share. And that comes from everybody else's wealth share. And this was such an unbelievably naive thing to do. And I think This could only have happened, in my opinion, because of those 30, 40 years where we thought, you know, everything could just be perfect for everyone.

39:54And we forgot that the last 2000 years of human history is everybody being unbelievably fucking poor, while 10 people own fucking everything. You know, that is the history of Europe, right? And we managed to stop that for a period of time. Now, you know, if you look at the sort of the founding fathers and the start, the founding of the US, they have all of these ideas about we have to stop aggressive concentration and accumulation of power. We have to prevent that. We have to have division of power. We cannot allow America to reproduce the mistakes that have destroyed Europe and created a Europe of disgusting inequality and poverty.

40:28and then we created finally you know in this 34 years after world war ii we had this situation where ordinary working men and women could go out get a regular job buy a house have a family get a retirement get a pension have holidays have a good life and we did not have essentially rapacious super wealthy class owning everything and then in the 80s we were like you know what let's just give it back to them let's just give it fucking back to them and you you have a choice you have a choice right? Either, it's just purely because of compound interest. If you allow the people with all the wealth and the power to use that wealth and power to take the rest of the wealth and the power from the less powerful, they will do it.

41:09All of history tells us that it's true. It's as simple as that. All of history tells us that it's true. You have a choice, either very high rates of tax on the very rich or extreme inequality and poverty. Tell me one point in history that It disproves that.

41:26Scott Galloway:I think the only exception to the rule is occasionally a nation is blessed with some sort of natural resource that gives them abnormal errant wealth. And they can have both low taxes and support the middle class because they're making billions in oil revenue or something else. If you look at the early US, the early US has effectively infinite land to grow into, right? And then what you can have, a rapacious billionaire class that wants to rapidly expand without eating its own. because it has infinite resources to eat into. But once those hit the boundaries of the infinite limited resource, if you allow them to keep growing their wealth when the economic opportunities for rapid growth have stopped, then, you know, I mean, this is why, obviously, you see, this is why colonialism happens, right?

42:11Because you have this rapid growth, you have the creation of a billionaire class in Europe, and then they rapidly run out and eat the entire world. And what happens when they eat the entire world? World War I. You know, this is what happens. you simply cannot allow a tiny group of people to own everything. And if you don't tax them, you know, this is just the force of compound growth. You know, if you allow these guys to grow, then that means, you know, the people listening to this now, how are their kids going to compete for ownership with Bezos' and Musk's kids when they're growing their wealth at 10, 15 % a year?

42:46And if you tax them at 40 % and don't tax them on wealth, don't tax them on inheritance, then all that means is instead of going at 15 % a year, they go at 10 % a year. And it's still too much. That's the truth.

42:56Scott Galloway:I see it as, and I think it's just different sides of the coin, that conservatives or the incumbents have managed to convince the general population that the middle class is a nationally occurring organism. And I don't think there's any evidence of that. I think it's actually an accident in history by a group of progressives who said, unless we redistribute income, the middle class dies. And it feels to me that the only way we make progress is for economists and historians to say, the middle class is an experiment and something that requires, and I'll use the R word, it requires redistribution.

43:32Scott Galloway:That the luckiest and the most talented among us who become very wealthy have to give a disproportionate share of their wealth back to the middle class or the middle class dies. And we're returning to your point to the way history has been 99 % of history. From 45 to 2000, the equalization of equality was the anomaly. And it doesn't happen naturally. that if we don't interject and recalibrate the law of the jungle, it goes back to the jungle. Isn't it just we need to puncture this myth that the middle class is a naturally self-occurring healing organism? Once you allow there to exist this class of people that rapidly, rapidly, rapidly grows their wealth share, then what you will see is the weak holders of wealth will be picked off one by one.

44:26and I think the first weak holder of wealth which to be honest we've already lost was the western port so you know I talk about my dad quite a lot my dad worked for royal mail with the post office here in the UK for 35 years earning 20 ,000 pounds a year low earner and he's born in 57 so he's working in 70s 80s 90s and he's able to buy a house and get a pension and get retirement and what you see here is this like freak occurrence which is incredibly rare in history of people in the bottom 20-30 % of society being able to accumulate wealth. And that's gone. This is the first group of people that lost out when we start creating a super rich class.

45:08And the reason that they were able to be lost is because they thought we lived in a world where I don't need to give assets to my kids because work can accumulate assets. And as you say, that was only possible because they lived in this very unusual period of time where you did not have a tiny group of people eating everything. So they thought, I don't need to worry about like protecting my wealth, protecting my wealth, because we live in a world where working gives you assets. And you see, it's really interesting. I grew up in a very, very immigrant area of East London. And you see this difference between like the English families and immigrant families, which is the English families thought we don't need to give wealth to our kids because work gives wealth.

45:54But these Indian families have come from poverty, have come from very unequal society, and they recognise, no, working people don't get assets. We're going to work our tits off, and we're going to make sure we get some assets. You know what I mean? So I think people need to recognise, yeah, it wasn't normal, but it can be normal again. You used the term accident of history, and I'm going to push back a little bit on that, because it wasn't an accident of history, Scott. This is the result of generations and generations and generations of working men and women getting their heads down in abject poverty and working and struggling together so that their kids and their grandkids will have a fairer share.

46:33That's what it is, Scott. And to be honest, whether this country and whether the future of the UK and the US is the kind of poverty that my granddad lived in, or the kind of relative security that my dad lived in, is a simple question of whether the men and women today get their heads down and work together to protect the position the collective power position of their kids the way that our grandparents and great grandparents and great great grandparents did that's for me to be honest i don't like using this term but it is class struggle it is class struggle because that's what's happening

47:05Scott Galloway:we'll be right back

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48:42Scott Galloway:We're back with more from Gary Stevenson. The next topic I'd love to get your insight on is I'm constantly asked, what is the difference between the U.K. and the U.S.? And I struggle to explain why the U.K. has done so much less well than the U.S. because when I look at the underpinnings of the UK economy, I think the education system here is superior to the US. I've had my kids for extended periods of time in the US education system, in the British school system. And while obviously it's situational, I find on average, the approach to education here is better. There's tremendous IP. There's a decent argument that AI was actually invented in UK universities.

49:29Scott Galloway:great culture, rule of law, a general kind of zeitgeist of fair play. People from all over the world want to live here. It just feels like all the under, and a strong immigrant popular. It feels as if all the underpinnings are here. And yet if you take out London, the household income of the UK is lower than the poorest states in the US. And it feels as if there's no growth here. I'm curious to get your, if you were to summarize, and also growth solves a lot of problems, right? The way I think the U.S., if they ever address its deficit, will not only be fiscal responsibility, but the fact that we're growing, that just kind of helps everything.

50:07Scott Galloway:Whereas the U.K. doesn't appear to be growing. I'm curious, I'd your meta level here. What do you think the big difference is between the U.S. and the U.K., both in terms of culture and economic policy that was resulted in, one, 1995, same GDP per person in Europe as the U.S. Now I think we're 30 or 40 % more. What in your mind is the difference? I think just first, before I get into that, it's important to recognize that I think sometimes these narratives of US outperformance do sometimes gloss over the fact that a lot of the better big level macro numbers from the US are really not filtering down to a lot of the American public.

50:45So obviously US has had higher GDP growth and this is true.

50:48Scott Galloway:Average versus mean. Yeah, and I think it's important to recognize that living standards for a lot of Americans have really significantly fallen. financial security for a lot of americans have really significantly fallen and poverty has significantly fallen but that's that's not to say your point is untrue i think like the uk i think when the uk the last 15 16 years the uk has been really the standout weak performer in the western world in terms of economic growth you know some interesting things have been happening in japan the last couple of years but i think really the uk is yeah it's it's it's the big one you know So I started work in 2008.

51:24And at that time, I think the UK was probably seen as one of the strongest, if not the strongest economy in the world, really, of big countries. And the collapse has been pretty catastrophic. And you can trace that back to, you know, quite simply, a number of really catastrophically bad economic and political decisions. the first of which is austerity you know so for americans that don't know you know and this is very relevant for americans given you know the doge and the recent aggressive attention on government cost cutting you know we had our cost cutting experiment in the 2010s right so we had the david cameron uh the start of the conservative government was in in 2010 and their big economic plan was to aggressively cut back the state right was austerity and then what you have is this insane period of 10 years of zero interest rates, when the government could have been borrowing and investing essentially for free, when what they're actually doing is just basically dismantling the state and dismantling all of the protection systems for the poorest people in the country, and basically creating a permanent unsupported underclass in the country.

52:33And other countries did this to various degrees. You look at, for example, Greece, which is effectively forced into doing it. But with the benefit of hindsight now, with long-term interest rates in the UK 5%, the fact that we had 10 years of zero interest rates and chose rather than to invest at that time when investment was free, like they could have literally just borrowed and bought the stock market and they would have been like incredibly rich. But instead, they basically did the exact opposite of that anti-investment. It was a catastrophic economic error. And, you know, I think this is really relevant for anybody watching now in the US because, you know, the US is starting to look at this narrative as, you know, the way to solve economic problems is to dismantle the state.

53:16You know, did it work for the UK? You know, did it work? It was a catastrophe. And then obviously, you know, after that, you don't need me to tell you, obviously, Brexit, you know, I don't think you'll find many economists who think that that was wise or at least a wisely implemented economic policy. But, you know, what is happening now in the UK is happening all around the world. I did a video a couple of weeks ago, which looked at the share of seats in parliament going to the main two political parties. So you will be aware that across the world, we have had for a long time, essentially two-party politics with a big centre-left party and a big centre-right party.

53:53And since 2008, the financial crisis, that has basically ended. And you can look all across Europe and you see these parties used to take something like 80 or 90 % of the seats, depending on what country you're looking. and now they're down to 30 or 40 or 50 percent of the seats and in many cases it's not even the same two parties because they've collapsed and what that is essentially is the western world across the western world and it's definitely happening in the u.s it's the western world that saw that hasn't has seen living standards consistently fall since 2008 and has not been given a solution by any major political party which is turning in on itself and saying well what the fuck do we do what the fuck do we do and every country is trying to figure out how to stop living standards from falling you know and the UK settled on Brexit which was to be quite honest a shit answer you know the US is looking at Trump that's not going to work either you know I'm out here making a pitch I think unless you stop aggressive increasing inequality you are going to see living standards collapse everywhere and it's really important to recognize as much as you know the UK has become the sick man of Europe and I don't deny that Living standards have collapsed everywhere, Scott.

55:02In France, in Italy, in Spain, in Japan, in Australia, in America, in every country, living standards are falling. So yeah, look, you know, I don't think the UK's done a great job of it in the last 15 years. And if you want me to put that down to two things, it's austerity and Brexit. But the truth is, this is happening everywhere.

55:20Scott Galloway:What? By the way, Gary, I always find when I talk to you, the time, literally, the time-space continuum goes on pause. I can't believe I've been talking for 56 minutes. So if there was some sort of star chamber of Fed chairs and heads of tax policy across the West, the G7, and you could implement one or two policies to effectively go after income inequality without lurching too far to the left and stopping growth, there are some dangers. We have a tendency. The clock appears to never be its center. We have a tendency to swing back and forth. And I would argue that some of the taxation policies, progressive policies in the 70s and 80s may have actually done what the rich catastrophize about, and that is slowed growth.

56:05Scott Galloway:What are the one or two policies you would want to see implemented across the West to try and address income inequality effectively? So I push more on wealth inequality in particular, because really, if you're working for your money, you've already lost, basically. It's about wealth inequality. I think the two, it needs to be taxes which aggressively go after the top 1%, not of earners, but of holders. This is, because at the moment we have an unbalanced system, which does aggressively in most case tax high earners, but does not effectively at all tax high holders, high owners, high hoarders. I think the two taxes which have the real power to get wealth back into the hands of ordinary families are wealth taxes and estate taxes.

56:49But I think when you bring them in, the debate always tends to focus on rates. But really, the question should be entirely about avoidance. How do we bring these taxes in in such a way that the super rich cannot avoid them? And I think, to be honest, the real way that you do that is exit taxes and tax on foreign owners. because if they leave and they're still being taxed on their holdings of American assets or British assets, then they can't afford to tax without selling the assets. And then that means you can get your assets back. I think really, I think this is the key here. And look, China would not allow you or I to own$10 billion of Chinese assets.

57:32And when they come to us at the end of the year and say, hey, can we get our tax on your Chinese assets? We say, hey, I live in Marylebone because it's good for my dogs. You know what I mean? They're not going to listen to that, you know, you know, and I think we I think we're stupid. We're stupid, but we're not. The thing is, we're not stupid because the people who set the tax policy, it's fucking working for them. It is fucking working for them. And that is why I don't talk really. Well, I mean, I do increasingly more and more, but I don't talk primarily to politicians. I talk to the public because I honestly believe the politicians, especially the high level ones.

58:07Listen, David Cameron made 10 million pounds within a year of leaving office. Is he going to be the guy? You know, Rishi Sunak's father-in-law is one of the richest men in the world. You know, are these guys going to be the guys who change tax policy against the very rich? It's not going to happen. So really, my message is not so much to the politicians, it's to the British and American people. I guarantee you, unless this is pushed for aggressively by the public, it will not happen. and ordinary people see their kids and their grandkids be significantly poorer than they are. So to be honest, I don't want to talk to the politicians.

58:42I want to tell the public because they are the guys who will fix this if it ever gets fixed.

58:46Scott Galloway:Well, you'd like to think we have a democracy. And if enough people buy into this philosophy, they'll elect people who will also, they can hold accountable. The notion of taxing wealth where it is, or I would argue it's been created trickles down to, I think, state taxation policy. So for example, Jeff Bezos just announced he's moving to Florida to spend more time with his dad, which is adorable, but is a lie. And that is he aggregated$120 billion in wealth using the great infrastructure, the great state of Washington, their schools, their hospitals, their technology. And then about the time he's going to register those blessings, he pieces out to Florida such that he doesn't have to pay back to Washington in taxes.

59:25Scott Galloway:I mean, it seems to me that a very basic policy of paying taxes on where you have assets and where you aggregate wealth kind of makes sense. And to your notion of the tax gap and tax enforcement, supposedly there's$750 billion a year in the U.S. of taxes that are owed to go uncollected. And I don't know if the same, and this is my final question, but in the U.S., the biggest tax cut that no one has ever seen is that they basically neutered the IRS. And if you're very wealthy, you're encouraged not to hide income, but to be as aggressive as possible because AI can audit your taxes. It can audit lower and middle income households, but it takes an army of auditors to come in and audit the wealthy such that, again, you neuter the IRS.

1:00:12Scott Galloway:That's the greatest tax cut in history. It's the same thing happened in the UK. I think they definitely should fund it more and they would get more. But I think the reason that they've been able to sort of defund the tax collection agency is because nobody is protecting the brand of tax in the eyes of the public. I've been thinking about doing a series of videos called The Joy of Tax because people hate tax. Obviously, people hate tax. Nobody wants to pay tax. So it's like really, but this is why Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan could do what they did and slash taxes and basically destroy the poor and have the poor actively cheer on their own destruction because people hate taxes.

1:00:49People need to understand what tax is. Tax is your army that protects you from your domestic billionaires. If you do not have an army, then you can't stop Putin. And if you do not have an IRS, then you cannot stop Musk and Bezos. And both of those groups of people want the exact same thing. They want your mum's fucking house and they're going to get it. Unless this is it. Listen, if you do not fund your army, you will get invaded by a foreign army. And if you do not fund your IRS, then Elon Musk will have your mum's fucking house. This is your army to protect your assets from your domestic billionaires, your domestic.

1:01:22And they are the real threat to the American public's wealth.

1:01:27Scott Galloway:Well, let me provide a suggestion. I think so much of this, because you have such a huge following, I think so much of this comes down to words. And I think we would be much more effective in restoring a progressive tax structure if instead of calling it an estate tax, we called it, or a wealth tax, we called it a hoarder's tax. Because that's effectively what I see is going on is our hoarding. And just as we felt, we built up resentment towards people hoarding hand sanitizer or toilet paper during COVID, is it any less damaging to be hoarding wealth well beyond what you and your kids will ever need?

1:02:03I mean, shouldn't it be a hoarding tax?

1:02:06Scott Galloway:Your thoughts? Yeah, you know, I've thought about using the term hoarding more. The inheritance tax, the estate tax has been massively, massively, massively demonized for a long time. And I understand why. I think the most obvious thing that you should do to change estate tax is change the timing. There is no reason why, there is absolutely no reason why that tax needs to be timed at the time your dad dies. There's no reason. You know, your dad dies when you're 30 and my dad dies when he's 70 and we pay the tax at totally different times. set it on your dad's 110th birthday and set it at an incredibly high rate on incredibly high amounts simple as that and then it's then it's not it's not an it's not a death tax anymore it's a hoarding tax and but what you what really needs to be done is people need to understand that if you allow the super rich to accumulate wealth very quickly what that means in very literal terms is your family loses its wealth and your government loses its wealth you know that's People need to understand that we do not live in an infinite sum world.

1:03:04And you cannot have a group of people who own everything unless you and your group of people own nothing. I think if you generate that understanding, to be honest, and that's the number one. What I want is to be in a very situation where if I walk out here and go on the street and pull some guy over and say, why do you think living standards are falling? Why do you think your kids will be poorer than you? And I want 70 % of people to turn around to me and say, because of growing inequality. Simple as that. And if I achieve that, then this problem will fix itself.

1:03:32Scott Galloway:Gary Stevenson is a former trader turned economist and activist behind Gary's Economics. His work focuses on rising inequality, wealth concentration and economic policy. Gary, I always love listening to you. I think you're able to kind of distill fairly complicated concepts down to kind of basic human emotions and, I don't know, just rationale and reason. I think you're doing great work. Very much appreciate your time, Gary.

1:03:59Scott Galloway:This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Genere. Cami Reek is our social producer. Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG pod from PropG Media.

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