https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/rich-are-threat-our-economy-and-our-democracy

HMRC’S ignorance about how much tax British billionaires pay exposes the missing factor in government announcements on public spending.

Tight finances are used as excuses to attack pensioners and deny justice to the wronged, like the Waspi women.

Even when — thanks to a welcome revolt against Rachel Reeves’s renewed austerity by Labour MPs — cuts to disability payments are reduced in scope, ministers suggest the pain will be shunted sideways: it will make it harder to lift the two-child benefit cap, or force a regressive freeze on income tax thresholds (so they don’t rise with inflation, distributing the tax burden downwards).

The public accounts committee’s Lloyd Hatton says its report is “not concerned with political debate around the redistribution of wealth,” and is intended solely to address shortcomings in HMRC’s ability to collect the tax owed.

But the doubt it casts on HMRC’s own estimates of the “tax gap” (the difference between tax owed in theory and tax collected) has significant implications for public spending choices.

Besides, the failure to introduce land and wealth taxes is one reason the very wealthy are able to hide their assets, and indeed real incomes, so effectively.

The concentration of extreme wealth among an ever smaller number of people is accelerating. It is pronounced enough — with just 50 families owning as much as the poorer 50 per cent of the British population — to distort the entire economy.

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