Even, the Polly Toynbee problem explained in her own words:

The mantra for a long time was that wealth taxes don’t work. But that can no longer be the answer. In a recent paper for the Institute for Public Policy Research, Tom Clark lays out the reasons why, showing how much faster the value of wealth has grown compared with the value of work.

It could be true, or not true, that wealth taxes work or do not work. Whether or not they do or not is a function of reality. But the claim here is that wealth taxes must work because Polly thinks that they should. This is not - not necessarily - coincident with reality. Which is indeed that Polly Toynbee problem writ large in her own words. Desires are to be imposed upon reality.

As to the Tom Clark report. Just roughly,. you understand, without being so tiresome as to actually look up the exact numbers. Household wealth is about £15 trillion. Some £2 trillion of that is financial assets. The sort of thing we think of as billionaires waving in our faces as they shout “Loadsamoney!” at us. The other £13 trillion is - v roughly - equally split between pensions and property.

Property - by which is meant here housing - is grossly expensive. It is so because we have the idiot Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors which - as so often with the nationalisation of something, here the use of land - has left us with a shortage of land that can be used to build upon and thus grossly extortionate pricing. It is - again, roughly - true that about half the value of Britain’s housing (let us not be so gauche as to actually look up the number) is the chitty that allows a house to be built on that piece of land. Destroy the TCPA - proper blow up, kablooie - and we solve that problem neatly. Yes, there will still be positional differences in price but that gargantuan mugging of the general householder will cease.

The other half, pensions. Which brings us to the bit that an actual economist really should have noted:

Over the 30-odd years from 1980, the ratio of private wealth to national income steadily doubled, from the typical post-war ratio of about 3:1 to roughly 6:1 by the time of the financial crisis….(and a very large elision here)…..Intellectually, Thomas Piketty’s unlikely but perfectly timed blockbuster, Capital in the 21st Century (2014), woke the world up not only to the vastly unequal facts, but also to certain dynamics which could – without action – propel us towards a new “patrimonial capitalism”

What also happened from the 1960s to today was that expected time in retirement moved from a mere handful of years after the gold watch presentation to a mere handful of decades. Those 20 and 30 years requiring financing. Which is why pensions savings are now a several times multiple of annual national income.

That ratio of wealth to GDP is down to just those two factors. The idiocy - no, too weak, gross and rampant stupidity - of our planning system and the very welcome expansion in lifespans and the associated saving so as to have a crust to nibble upon during retirement.

Once we take account of those vast majority parts of household wealth there is no problem with that remaining financial wealth. It’s still under annual national income after all.

Kill, kablooie, our planning system and we’re done.

And wealth taxes still don’t work whatever Polly’s desires.

Tim Worstall