M0nica
MollyNew
I am not prejudiced towards the wealthiest in society. However, I do object to a tiny minority accruing extreme wealth whilst many live on the breadline.
According to Oxfam, the combined wealth of the richest 56 people in the UK is more than the total wealth of the poorest 27 million (roughly 39% of the population). This cannot be good for society as a whole.
If the wealthiest rely on the poorest to work for them, clean for them, operate public services etc then they should pay more tax. They would not miss it and the poorest would have a better quality of life and be less reliant on benefits to top up their low salaries.
But the wealthy also provide lots of jobs, not necessarily ill paid. In fact many domestic staff, like nannies can be paid very generous salaries indeed. They spend vast sums of money on their houses and estates, their clothes, furniture, cars etc, employ accountants. If the 56 richest individuals were to be deported their would be many hundreds of people, if not thousands would be left unemployed.
Many of those 56 will have built their fortunes by their own endeavours. Pop stars, footballers, people like Dyson (cannot remember his first name. Yes , it may well include foreign Oligarchs and those who made money by exploitation, but, as with everything, do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. 56 taxpayers in 35,450,000, is a very, very, very, very small percentage of the whole.
I think that MOnica is just trying to convince us that the trickle down theory is correct. 
It has been observed that the wealthy have a 'marginal propensity to consume'
AI explains it
The observation is usually phrased in economics as the wealthy have a lower marginal propensity to consume (MPC)—that is, when they receive an extra pound or dollar of income, they tend to spend a smaller fraction of it and save or invest more. The converse is that lower-income households tend to have a higher MPC.
Several economists are closely associated with this idea:
John Maynard Keynes is the person most commonly credited with formalising it in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). Keynes argued that as income rises, consumption also rises, but by less than the increase in income. This became known as the "fundamental psychological law" of consumption.
Simon Kuznets later examined the relationship empirically using national income data, leading to refinements of Keynes's original consumption function.
Milton Friedman developed the Permanent Income Hypothesis, arguing that people base spending on expected long-term income rather than current income alone, though higher-wealth households still typically exhibit lower MPCs out of temporary income gains.
Franco Modigliani, through the Life-Cycle Hypothesis, likewise explained consumption patterns over a person's lifetime.
Today, the proposition is also strongly supported by empirical research. For example, economists such as Raj Chetty, Atif Mian, and Amir Sufi have found that lower-income households have substantially higher marginal propensities to consume than wealthier households, making transfers to lower-income groups more stimulative for aggregate demand.
In other words, the wealthy are able to devote much of their income to increasing their wealth whereas low income groups spend more and have less spare (if any) with which to accumulate more 'wealth'.
So 'trickle down' does little to redistribute wealth while the nature of wealth investment and lower taxation increases the amount of wealth they can remove from the economy.
We need to think about the flow of money. These employees of the wealthy will spend their wages in greater proportion than do the wealthy who have paid them spend from their incomes. And where does their money go? Apart from money spent in their local economy, which will benefit small and medium size businesses? They purchase from large corporations, they purchase from Amazon, they pay their utility bills to privately owned companies. Not only do the wealthy people who own these companies benefit from the profit they make from these employees, the wealthy shareholders do too. And the wealthy employers will inevitably have shares in other companies which pay them dividends out of their profits.
So much of this 'trickled down' money just flows back upwards towards the wealthy....
