[zgiber]

Britain isn’t really poor as a country if we look at all the money/wealth in it. The distribution of the wealth is very one sided though. Recent decades of law making favouring the top few percent. Giving more to the wealthiest few doesn’t seem to trickle down apparently.. eroding middle class and diminishing purchasing power is what bothers me most. Privatised energy, water, public transport aren’t serving the public’s interest anymore but the shareholder’s. Housing prices getting out of reach of the average workers is rubbing salt on the wound. These are mostly symptoms.

[physicsguy]

Much of that wealth is mobile though, it’s not that straightforward to start taxing it unless you introduce capital controls.

[paulmd]

If that wealth wants to be used to do business in the US, there’s ways to tax it. If it sits in a cayman bank account somewhere fine but that’s not doing the owner any good, and its value will be eroded over time. Even if it’s used to do business elsewhere, we have ways of getting at that (see: FINRA) if the place you’re trying to use it wants to do business with any of our banks.

Maybe it’s different for the UK but they’ve always framed themselves as an economic mover, fundamentally not believing that there is something in the UK that business wants to access is a refutation of this idea of there being any domestic economic value in the UK as an institution.