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SOCIAL ISSUES
WEALTH
Some of the Wealthiest Individuals
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I grew up in the UK. We were 'middle class'. Both my parents had university educations and both were teachers. My mother did not 'work' after she was married. That was in the early '30s when social norms were a little different than they are now (2022)! We were comfortably off, but not by any means wealthy.
After WWII, Britain ... and indeed much of Rurope, embraced moderately left wing politics. In the UK tha Labour Party was elected on a platform to nationalise much of Britain's industry including critical sectors like, coal, steel heavy industry, electricity and gas, health, and transport ... in other words, all the big sectors of an industrial economy. Much of this was reversed over time, but the rail system survived as a national enterprise for a long time and still has major elements of government involvement. The health service ... the National Health Service or NHS remains a nationalized industry and has been considered very successful (though perhaps more recently underfunded under Conservative government management and increasingly maligned).
After my university eduction I did 'articles' in the accountancy profession in London with Cooper Brothers & Co (which is a founding part of the modern PwC international accounting firm. As part of my training I had to do a stint in the tax department where I did some of the 'grunt' work on tax returns for some the UK's wealthiest people. While they were rich and powerful by the standards of the day ... this was in the early 1960s ... their wealth was very modest compared to modern individual wealth.
Several things account for this.
(1) the overall economy was much less productive in the 1950s and the 1960s (and before) than it has become in recent years ... essentially since the 1980s. Two things accounted for this:
(i) the emergence of digital technology; and
(ii) the increase in out-sourcing to low cost countries (mainly low wages and minimal regulation)
(2) very low taxation in recent decades compared to the 1940s, 50s and 60s. In addition to low tax rates for smaller simple companies, there has been aggressive development of all sorts of schemes to avoid taxes using a variety of tax shelters and other subterfuges that are widely used by international companies and the world's wealthy. When I was doing tax work in the 1960s the tope income tax rates were in excess of 90% and cut in at a quite low level. The idea that wealthy people today are grumbling at the current high rates is laughable ... convenient maybe by otherwise laughable.
Peter Burgess
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