Rarely do you find someone who gets the liberal left media (as represented in the red corner by The Guardian) and right wing media (as represented in the blue corner by The Daily Telegraph) to agree on something.
Even more curious that they agree when the subject is wealth generation.
I was half expecting the usual “Give me the Burnham wealth tax now” vs “Wealth taxes are anti-capitalist” type rants, but I did not get that.
What I got was more of a character assassination.
More interesting that the left wing media would attack a “working class boy made good” than the right obviously, but still.
Perhaps this was an emotional response from “legacy media” against the “youtuber”?
What I do think is worth saying in the context of me running Prosper is that I firmly agree that wealth taxes are no panacea and that Mr Stevenson clearly hasn’t done any evidence-based research.
I say that as Prosper's CEO, where my mission is to maximise my member's wealth and as someone with a first class Economics degree.
Let me explain...
The claim
Gary's thesis, compressed: inequality is spiralling, the rich are hoovering up the assets, and the fix is to tax wealth itself. Not income. Not gains. The stock of wealth, every year, forever.
It sounds intuitively fair. It polls brilliantly.
And it has been tried. Repeatedly. In more than a dozen rich countries, over three decades.
Which means we do not need to theorise, or shout at each other on YouTube. We can look at what actually happened.
The great abolition
In 1990, twelve OECD countries levied an annual tax on net wealth. By 2017, only four remained. Once France converted its version into a property-only tax in 2018, we were down to three: Norway, Spain and Switzerland (OECD, The Role and Design of Net Wealth Taxes in the OECD, 2018).
Austria abolished its wealth tax in 1994. Denmark and Germany in 1997. The Netherlands in 2001. Finland, Iceland and Luxembourg in 2006. Sweden in 2007.
This was not a conspiracy of billionaires. Austria's went under a social democratic chancellor. Sweden's abolition was never reversed by later left-leaning governments. Germany's died after the constitutional court ruled its valuation methods unfair in 1995, and no government of any colour has revived it since.
The OECD's post-mortem is dry but devastating: wealth taxes were repealed because of efficiency and administrative concerns, because of the limited revenues they tend to generate, and because they “frequently failed to meet their redistributive goals”.
Read that last one again. The taxes designed to fix inequality failed even at that.
France: a €200 billion own goal
France ran the most famous experiment - the ISF, a “solidarity tax on fortunes” - from 1988 to 2017.
Professor Eric Pichet of KEDGE Business School published the definitive study. His findings: cumulative capital flight of roughly €200 billion since 1988, an annual fiscal shortfall of about €7 billion - roughly double what the tax actually collected - and an estimated drag on GDP growth of 0.2% per year (Pichet, The Economic Consequences of the French Wealth Tax, 2008).
France saw a net outflow of around 60,000 millionaires from 2000 onwards. At the peak, roughly two wealthy taxpayers were leaving the country every single day.
A tax that costs the state twice what it raises is not a tax. It is a complete own goal.
Emmanuel Macron - not a man famous for handing gifts to the right - scrapped it in 2018.
Sweden and the pattern
Sweden, the country the British left most likes to point at, abolished its wealth tax in 2007.
Why? By the mid-2000s an estimated 500 billion kronor of Swedish capital - around $70 billion - had been shifted offshore, much of it to escape the tax.
Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA and then Sweden's richest man, was living in... Switzerland.
The same failure modes show up everywhere the annual version has been tried:
• Valuation is a nightmare. What is a private business, a farm or a pension pot worth this year? Ask ten accountants, get ten answers - then litigate all of them.
• Liquidity bites. Asset-rich, cash-poor people are forced to sell assets just to pay the levy.
• Exemptions get lobbied in - businesses, farms, pensions, art - until the base looks like Swiss cheese and the yield is trivial. Most OECD wealth taxes raised well under 1% of total tax revenue.
• And the genuinely rich, the most mobile people on Earth, simply leave.
Norway: the experiment running right now
If you want a live case study, Norway is kindly running one for us.
In 2022 the Labour-led government raised the top wealth tax rate from 0.85% to 1.1%, alongside higher dividend taxes. The hoped-for gain was modest - roughly $150 million a year.
What happened next: 82 wealthy Norwegians with a combined net wealth of about 46 billion kroner (roughly $4.3 billion) left the country in 2022-23, more than 70 of them for Switzerland. They included Kjell Inge Røkke, one of Norway's richest men and one of its largest individual taxpayers.
In the spirit of the evidence-first approach I promised: the net revenue effect is genuinely contested. Total Norwegian wealth tax receipts have kept rising, because the tax has a very broad base - it reaches deep into the middle class. But the people who left took decades of future dividends, gains and company-building with them. Even analyses sympathetic to the tax concede the departures were real; the argument is only about the size of the damage.
There is also a first-principles problem hiding in Norway's design, and it is the one that offends the economist in me most. A wealth tax is levied on the stock of assets, whatever they actually return. If your portfolio earns 2% in a bad year, a 1.1% levy takes more than half your real return - before any income tax. Worse, Norwegian founders holding illiquid companies were forced to pay themselves dividends (taxed at 37.8%) simply to fund a wealth tax charged on paper valuations of businesses that generated no cash at all. Taxing unrealised paper wealth forces the sale of productive assets to pay the bill.
That is not redistribution. That is capital destruction with extra steps.
Raising a rate by a quarter of a percentage point and watching your billionaires stampede for Zug is not a triumph of redistribution.
What the referees say
You do not have to take my word for any of this.
The IMF, in its 2024 guidance note How to Tax Wealth, concluded that taxing actual returns to capital is less distortive and more equitable than an annual net wealth tax, and recommended that governments strengthen capital gains taxes and close loopholes instead of introducing wealth taxes.
And here is the bit Mr Stevenson never mentions. The UK has already run the most thorough investigation of a wealth tax anywhere in the world: the Wealth Tax Commission of 2020, led by economists openly sympathetic to taxing wealth (Advani, Chamberlain and Summers), drawing on half a million words of commissioned evidence from over thirty papers.
Their conclusion? They did not recommend an annual wealth tax for the UK. The international record was too poor, the administrative costs too high, the behavioural responses too corrosive. Reform existing taxes instead, they said. The only version they could defend was a one-off emergency levy - and a one-off is only clean if nobody believes it will be repeated. Good luck with that.
When your own side's expert commission declines to recommend your flagship policy, that is not the establishment silencing you. That is the evidence talking.
But Switzerland though...
Balance demands I give the other side its best case, and its best case is genuinely interesting.
Switzerland has taxed wealth since the 19th century. Cantonal rates run from roughly 0.1% to 1%, and the tax raises around 3.7% of total Swiss tax revenue - by far the highest share in the OECD, and roughly ten times what these taxes raised elsewhere before abolition. No serious Swiss politician wants to scrap it. Spain technically retains one too, though its regions compete to neutralise it - Madrid rebates it entirely.
So an annual wealth tax can survive. But look at why it survives in Switzerland:
• Switzerland levies virtually no capital gains tax on private assets. The wealth tax substitutes for other taxes on capital; it does not stack on top of them.
• Rates are set by 26 competing cantons. If yours gets greedy, you can move 20 minutes down the road. Competition keeps rates honest and low.
• It is a low rate on a broad, honestly declared base, in a country with an exceptional tax compliance culture built over generations.
• Most importantly: Switzerland is the world's biggest net importer of millionaires. Political stability, privacy, lump-sum deals for wealthy foreigners. The wealth tax is, in effect, the membership fee for the world's most attractive wealth club. People queue up to pay it.
Now compare the UK. A wealth tax here would stack on top of capital gains tax, inheritance tax at 40%, stamp duty and dividend taxes - not substitute for them. There is no cantonal competition; the nearest “canton” is Dubai, and the moving vans are already busy (consultancy estimates such as Henley & Partners' suggest the UK is losing more millionaires than almost any country on Earth - the precise numbers are contested, the direction is not). And nobody has ever accused an HMRC valuation dispute of being quick.
And before anyone claims Britain does not tax wealth at all: we do, extensively. Capital gains tax, inheritance tax, stamp duty and dividend taxes between them raise tens of billions a year. The honest debate is about how we tax wealth, not whether. On thirty years of international evidence, an annual levy on the stock of wealth is simply the worst-performing instrument in the toolkit - which is why Sarah Perret's OECD review in Fiscal Studies (2021) is literally titled “Why were most wealth taxes abandoned?”.
The conditions that make the Swiss tax work are precisely the conditions the UK does not have and cannot legislate into existence.
Where Gary is right - and what I'd do instead
Here is where I will agree with Gary: the diagnosis. It is far too hard for ordinary people in Britain to build wealth, and that failure corrodes everything it touches. He is right about that, and he deserves credit for dragging the subject into prime time.
But the prescription has been tried by half the OECD and abandoned by almost all of it. Raise little, cost lots, chase capital away, repeal quietly. That is the record, and no amount of shouting changes it.
The fix is the boring, compounding stuff: helping ordinary people build wealth the way the wealthy always have. Investing early. Keeping fees low. Letting compounding do the heavy lifting. Remember that paying just 1% more in annual fees compounds to nearly half your potential returns gone over 20 years (Source: James Coney, Money Editor, Sunday Times, 2022).
That is the problem I have devoted my life to fixing. We built Prosper to help people keep more of their money and make more of their money - the tools the wealthy have always had, without the fees that quietly eat the difference.
If you want to fight inequality, start by ending the quiet transfer of ordinary savers' returns to an industry that has overcharged them for decades. That is a wealth transfer Mr Stevenson and I could both campaign against - and indeed the one he made his money in.
Visit prosper.co.uk if you want to see what different looks like.
Capital at risk.
P.S. The rich can move to Zug. Your pension can't. Which is exactly why the fees on it will do more damage to your wealth than any wealth tax will ever do to theirs.
References
OECD (2018), The Role and Design of Net Wealth Taxes in the OECD, OECD Tax Policy Studies No. 26 - https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-role-and-design-of-net-wealth-taxes-in-the-oecd_9789264290303-en.html
Pichet, E. (2008), The Economic Consequences of the French Wealth Tax, La Revue de Droit Fiscal - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1268381
IMF (2024), How to Tax Wealth, IMF How To Note 2024/001 - https://www.imf.org/en/publications/imf-how-to-notes/issues/2024/03/08/how-to-tax-wealth-544948
Advani, A., Chamberlain, E. and Summers, A. (2020), A Wealth Tax for the UK, Wealth Tax Commission Final Report - https://www.wealthandpolicy.com/wp/WealthTaxFinalReport.pdf
Eckert, J-B. and Aebi, L. (2020), Wealth Taxation in Switzerland, Wealth Tax Commission Background Paper 133 - https://www.wealthandpolicy.com/wp/BP133_Countries_Switzerland.pdf
Perret, S. (2021), Why Were Most Wealth Taxes Abandoned and Is This Time Different?, Fiscal Studies 42(3-4) - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1475-5890.12278
Fortune (April 2024), Wealthy Norwegians flee to Switzerland to evade high wealth taxes - https://fortune.com/europe/2024/04/19/wealthy-norwegians-flee-to-switzerland-to-evade-high-wealth-taxes-bankers-following-dnb-abg-sundal-collier/
The Guardian (8 July 2026), How to Get Filthy Rich with Gary Stevenson review - https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/jul/08/how-to-get-filthy-rich-with-gary-stevenson-review-channel-4
The Telegraph (July 2026), The unbearable lightness of Gary Stevenson - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/tax/income/the-unbearable-lightness-of-gary-stevenson/