Zack Polanski tells the Canary a wealth tax is essential to tackle our “fundamentally unfair” system

New Green Party leader Zack Polanski spoke to the Canary recently. And he stressed that we need to:

fundamentally change the relationship between wealth and power and the 99% in our society.

And the first step to doing that, he said, is with a wealth tax. As Oxfam has explained:

A wealth tax is a tax on the total value of a person’s assets over a certain amount set by the government. Assets can include cash, property or land, stocks, businesses, valuable possessions, and other forms of wealth.

The Green Party has clarified that its:

Wealth tax will be levied on individual taxpayers with assets above £10 million at 1% and assets above £1bn at 2% annually. We estimate less than 1% of households will pay this tax.

Zack Polanski: Wealth tax is “the beginnings of tackling inequality”

On the topic of the wealth tax, Zack Polanski told the Canary:

the question that I’m not asked, that I would love to be asked is, ‘is that enough?’ And the answer is ‘no, it isn’t’. But actually, that’s the beginnings of tackling inequality.

He added that there’s no point falling into discussions about what loophole or measures ultra-rich individuals would take if a government implemented a wealth tax:

because actually, if we’re in government, you would have an entire civil service, an entire institution to go, ‘here’s the principle of what we want to do. Now let’s invest in making sure we’ve got tight structures to be able to avoid tax evasion or tax avoidance etc’. And I think all of those things are possible.

Zack Polanski also emphasised:

assets can’t just leave!

One of the most important things to talk about, he stressed, is that:

there are people in the country earning more money while they sleep than any of us could earn no matter how hard we worked.

He also pointed out that:

If you believe in that system of ‘if you work really hard, then you will have enough money and you can aspire and you can do whatever you want’, that’s not true. All of that is a lie.

These people aren’t working really hard. Some of them might be, but a lot of people have assets or inherited assets that are unearned wealth that we’re not taxing at the same rate as earned income. That’s fundamentally unfair!

Polanski is seeking to rally people from different communities around the common cause of tackling economic injustice. People in cities and countryside, he has said, face the “same power dynamic” of inequality, and should focus on coming together to address that.

We’ll be releasing the rest of our interview with the Green leader over the coming days.