Speech delivered at Sands Films Studio event for THE MAN WITH THE PLAN on 12th and 13th April 2025.
A Campaign film produced by Sands Films studio in London.
The Man With The Plan is a new film about William Beveridge, written and directed by Christine Edzard and starring Simon Callow. Contact: ostockman@sandsfilms.co.uk
A Campaign film produced by Sands Films studio in London.
The Man With The Plan is a new film about William Beveridge, written and directed by Christine Edzard and starring Simon Callow. Contact: ostockman@sandsfilms.co.uk
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00We've got a man who's going to tell us how you do it.
00:02He is from the Tax Justice Network.
00:05Please welcome up Mark Beaumont-Sor.
00:17I'm the third Mark today to say good things come in three.
00:20Allow me to prove that wrong.
00:23So I am from the Tax Justice Network and I want to talk about tax.
00:26And usually when I tell people that, they roll their eyes.
00:29But I'm getting the feeling that's not going to be the case today.
00:31It's really good to see so many people talking about tax.
00:34And I think a lot of people here will know a lot more about tax and tax justice than I do.
00:39So thanks again for the opportunity.
00:43Every second, we lose a nurse's salary to a tax haven.
00:48Over the course of a year, countries will lose about half a trillion U.S. dollars
00:53to multinational corporations and the super-rich cheating on tax.
00:59We at the Tax Justice Network believe that tax is our most powerful tool for creating more equal societies.
01:12Societies where everyone's needs is treated with equal importance.
01:16But the problem, as everybody's been discussing, is that our governments for decades have used tax as a tool to prioritize the desires of the super-rich over everybody else's needs.
01:31That has fueled inequality.
01:33It's devastated our public services.
01:35It's destroying our planet.
01:38And it's threatening our democracies.
01:42But the thing is, in the same way that tax was programmed to prioritize the super-rich,
01:47it can be reprogrammed to work for everyone.
01:51And one of the most effective ways to do that today is to introduce a wealth tax.
01:56The average UK worker would have to work 30 years, sorry, 30 times longer than humans have existed
02:15to earn as much wealth as the world's richest man, Elon Musk, has today.
02:24We're talking about working for over 9 million years.
02:28It's, yeah, it's simply impossible to earn a billion dollars.
02:36But there are more and more billionaires every year.
02:39So what gives?
02:42The thing is, salaries and wages don't make billionaires.
02:45Dividends and rent money do.
02:47In fact, three of the world's richest men, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison,
02:52they get paid salaries of $1 a year.
03:01They don't get paid for what they do.
03:04They get paid for what they own.
03:07And in the eyes of our tax systems, that makes a very big difference.
03:13A few decades ago, our governments decided to start taxing collected wealth,
03:18things like dividends and capital gains,
03:20a lot less than the tax earned wealth, salaries, wages.
03:26Billionaires today tend to pay a tax rate that's about half what everybody else pays.
03:30This two-tier tax system for wealth collectors and wealth earners
03:40has allowed the super-rich to quadruple their wealth since the 1980s.
03:46their extreme wealth is directly linked to more households going to debt,
03:54to lower economic productivity,
03:57to people living shorter lives.
04:03Reprogramming tax so that it works for everyone equally
04:06means introducing wealth taxes that end this unequal, two-tier treatment of wealth.
04:14Whether you are a wealth collector or a wealth earner,
04:18you should be treated equally by our tax system.
04:20So the good news is, governments can introduce a wealth tax today.
04:28And they could do that by following Spain's example,
04:39their recent and successful wealth tax.
04:41The Tax Justice Network's research shows that
04:45countries can raise 2 trillion US dollars a year
04:49by implementing a small wealth tax of 2-3%
04:53on just the richest 0.5% of households.
04:59This is a tax that would apply only to the upper crust of their wealth,
05:03not all of it.
05:052 trillion is a big number,
05:07so let me end by putting it into perspective.
05:08In 2021, governments around the world spend
05:13about 6 trillion US dollars on health.
05:18This tiny tax we're proposing,
05:20which applies on just the icing
05:22of the wealth of the 0.5%,
05:26would raise enough money
05:28to match a third of global public health spending.
05:34One in every three dollars spent around the world
05:37on public health.
05:38That this tax is so small,
05:43it's so small that the super-rich probably wouldn't even notice it.
05:46It would keep them the world's richest people.
05:49The fact that it could raise so much public money
05:53is both an indication
05:55of how bad extreme wealth has gotten,
05:58but it's also an indictment of decades of government decisions
06:03to use tax as something to cater with
06:06to the whims of the super-rich
06:09rather than as something with which
06:12to look after
06:13the well-being and the livelihoods of their people.
06:16Wealth taxes are powerful,
06:29not just because of the amounts of world-changing public money they could raise,
06:36but because they reclaim tax as a tool for equality.