The art of the fair deal

In the UK the top 50 richest families in the UK - worth around £466 billion - now hold more wealth than the poorest half of the population, comprising more than 34 million people.

In the USA the 400 richest Americans are now worth a record $6.6 trillion. The entire bottom 50% of America, comprising 260 million people, is worth just $4.2 trillion.

If this doesn’t strike you as unbalanced, then you’re probably not going to like what comes next.

Every system is perfectly designed to deliver the results it does.¹

Pure capitalism prioritizes profit over everything else and that’s the world we now live in. I don’t recall ever voting for that.

When you have companies focused purely on delivering profit as its most important need, human needs inevitably fall below that. Things like fair working conditions, support, time-off, infrastructure, education, housing and standards of living.

When you have a system that normalizes companies buying votes to influence elections, you can see that companies can out-vote people every time.

We’re playing a game of Monopoly when all the pieces and places are already owned.

In the US, a couple of new ideas have emerged to try to recalibrate the economy and I’ll come to those in a moment, but first, let’s frame the discussion.

Argue me if you want, but super-wealthy people can avoid paying their fair share of taxes because the laws allow them to; through shell companies, tax havens and loopholes. They’re not doing anything illegal, and yet they still act as if they’re accused of a crime, when confronted with this reality.

There’s a big difference between wealth and income. A wealthy person can own assets like companies, yachts, properties and shares, and yet still only earn a modest income. If those assets are then offloaded to shell companies and estates, then - on paper - it looks like that person doesn’t actually own or earn much.

In the UK, the Labour government is struggling with the fact that the cost of living, housing, education and childcare is climbing out of control, and wage inflation is stagnant – it’s the same in the USA.

As much as these governments try to raise a bit of tax here and there, they are avoiding making the hard - but the right, decision.

The only way to raise significant amounts of revenue is to create a new form of tax for the super-wealthy.

I’m talking about people who have a net worth of over £100m. There are approximately 4,000 people in the UK with a net worth over £100 million.

If you just taxed 2% of the top-of-the-top wealthy people – the 50 richest families – the UK government would raise nearly £9.5bn.

Every year.

To give you an idea of scale, that enough to fund 5% of the NHS budget or enough to cover the entire budget of the BBC (no license fee then, see?)

2% from 50 families. Imagine what you could raise if you lowered the bar to the top 1000 families.

With that sort of income, governments would then start addressing issues that affect everyone – infrastructure, energy, pollution, equality, education, healthcare, cost of living and immigration.

But how?

As I said, wealthy people are very good at avoiding paying taxes for these assets, they pay very good lawyers and accountants lots of money to do this.

In the USA, California recently unveiled a wealth tax to cover the healthcare shortfall caused by the Republicans’ Big, Beautiful Bill which cut taxes for the wealthy by reducing funding for Medicaid. This tax would levy a 5% tax on the wealth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires.

In New York City, Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani aims to raise the income taxes of residents with annual incomes in excess of $1 million by 2% in order to fund universal child care.

Whenever such ideas are floated, the super-wealthy always threaten to leave the country; to pick up their ball and leave.

Yet there’s very little evidence this would happen.

When the US state of Massachusetts passed a “millionaires tax” in 2023, conservatives claimed the rich would flee. But two years later, they haven’t — and Massachusetts has collected $5.7 billion for infrastructure and public education, creating a better world for everyone. Better schools, libraries, nicer housing, happier people, less crime.

The tax applied needs to be on wealth, not income and it could be adopted internationally.

This isn’t my normal lane of expertise; I’m a sales guy. I like doing deals, doing business. But the art of a good deal for me is one where both parties walk away feeling good about it.

Equity.

A deal will go wrong as soon as one party feels they are being taken advantage of. There’s the art of the deal - and there’s the art of the good deal.

It’s time to rewrite the civil contract and renegotiate the heads of it.

Let’s encourage our politicians to listen to what we need, not what they need.

1  Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Deming estimated that 94 percent of the problems in an organization are created by systems that aren't functioning as needed, rather than from individual actions. "A bad system will beat a good person every time."