Gary Stevenson warns billionaire wealth growth will make your children poorer

The compound interest trap and the billionaire class

The fundamental problem is the power of compound interest when applied to extreme concentrations of capital. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk do not just hold wealth; they hold engines of accumulation that outpace national GDPs. When a billionaire makes 5% on a $300 billion fortune, they generate $15 billion in a single year. Without aggressive taxation, that fortune doubles in roughly fourteen years. Stevenson points out that even taxing these individuals at 40% of their income is insufficient to stop this divergence. To prevent a total monopoly on national assets, taxation must target the holdings themselves through wealth and estate taxes.

This isn't about envy; it's about the physics of the market. If the billionaire class is allowed to grow its wealth share indefinitely, there is less for everyone else. In a zero-growth or low-growth environment, wealth is a zero-sum game. The explosion of billionaire wealth since 2008 correlates directly with the collapse of government wealth and the erosion of middle-class savings. They are two sides of the same coin. The policy of the last forty years has been to ignore this math, effectively giving the keys of the economy back to a rapacious elite.

Designing taxes that billionaires cannot avoid

A common critique of wealth taxes is that they are easy to avoid. Critics often point to the flight of wealthy residents from the United Kingdom following changes to the non-dom tax status as proof that capital is too mobile to be pinned down. Stevenson acknowledges that poorly designed taxes are ineffective but rejects the idea that we should stop trying. Just as a poorly designed plane doesn't mean we should abandon flight, a poorly designed tax means we need better economists. The key is targeting assets that cannot move, such as domestic land, property, and infrastructure.

Zoran Mamdani has proposed a "pied-à-terre" tax in New York City that targets second homes worth over $5 million. This is a "canny" policy because the asset is fixed. If the owner sells the condo to avoid the tax, someone else buys it, and the market recalibrates. Beyond property, national governments should implement exit taxes and taxes on foreign owners of domestic assets. The goal is to ensure that if you make your money using a country's infrastructure, legal system, and workforce, you cannot simply "piece out" when it comes time to pay the bill. If we don't fix the tax code, we are essentially subsidizing the billionaires who are outcompeting our children for homes and assets.

The myth of the naturally occurring middle class

There is a dangerous misconception that the middle class is a naturally occurring organism. History suggests otherwise. For 99% of human history, society has been defined by abject poverty for the masses and extreme wealth for a handful of owners. The period from 1945 to 1980 was an anomaly—a deliberate policy achievement fueled by 90% top marginal tax rates and robust inheritance taxes. These policies prevented the accumulation of dynastic wealth and allowed working families to accumulate assets through labor.

Today, we have returned to the "law of the jungle." The middle class is being pickpocketed by a system that taxes sweat at 40% while letting hoarded wealth grow tax-deferred or tax-free. When Jeff Bezos moves to Florida to avoid Washington state's capital gains tax, he is exploiting the very system that allowed him to build Amazon in the first place. This isn't capitalism; it's a transition into an inheritocracy where your life outcomes are determined by the assets your parents own rather than your contribution to the economy.

Why the UK is the sick man of the West

The United Kingdom serves as a grim warning for the United States. While the US has maintained higher headline growth, the UK has suffered through fifteen years of catastrophic economic decisions, specifically austerity and Brexit. Austerity dismantled the state's support systems during a decade of zero interest rates—a time when the government should have been borrowing to invest in infrastructure and technology. Instead, they chose anti-investment.

Stevenson argues that living standards are falling across the entire Western world, but the UK is the standout weak performer. When people feel their standards of living slipping, they turn to populist solutions like Brexit or Donald Trump. However, these are false answers. The real issue is that neither side of the political spectrum is willing to have a "grown-up" conversation about inequality. The left acknowledges it but lacks the funding to design effective tax policies, while the right ignores it until the social fabric begins to tear. Without a cross-factional consensus to tax wealth as aggressively as we tax work, the decline will continue.

Reframing the IRS as a defensive force

To fix this, we must rebrand the concept of taxation. In the US, the Internal Revenue Service has been effectively neutered through underfunding, creating the greatest "stealth" tax cut for the rich in history. Auditing a middle-class family is easy for an AI, but auditing a billionaire requires an army of experts. By defunding the Internal Revenue Service, the government has surrendered its ability to police the most aggressive tax avoiders.

Taxation should be viewed as an army that protects your family's assets from domestic billionaires. Just as you fund a military to prevent foreign invasion, you must fund a tax authority to prevent domestic hoarding from consuming all available resources. If the public doesn't demand this, the billionaire class will continue to buy up every home, every business, and every piece of land until the next generation is a permanent tenant class. The choice is binary: aggressively tax extreme wealth or accept a future of permanent poverty for the many and absolute power for the few.