Your editorial (16 January) calls for wealth taxes to address extreme inequality, but this is just a sticking plaster. We must dismantle the mechanisms that concentrate wealth in the first place. Your editorial three days earlier correctly identified the extractive model of housing as one of the most powerful of these, but there are many, including private monopolies of essentials; insecure employment on poverty wages; bailouts for the rich and austerity for the rest.
The amassing of vast fortunes by a few while millions cannot afford the basics is not the natural outcome of market forces in a meritocracy, but a deliberate political choice. A wealth tax, on its own, would allow the heist to continue, while taking a small rake-off, like a bent cop. We should turn off the wealth pumps. A flatter distribution will result. Progressive taxation can help, but cannot do the job alone.
Martin Lyster
Oxford
• At Davos some of the ultra-rich were calling for governments to introduce wealth taxes (‘Tax us now’: ultra-rich call on governments to introduce wealth taxes, 19 January). I’d like a way for people like myself, the modestly rich, to be able to pay more taxes too. As someone in my 80s who has had an easy ride – some inherited wealth, no tuition fees for myself or my children, getting on the property ladder in the 1960s (my first house cost £1,200), I could afford to contribute more. It is possible to donate to charities – for the local NHS charity to help to buy super scanners, perhaps – but I want to help raise nurses’ salaries.
I want to show that I do not share the Tory mantra “no one wants to pay more taxes”. Some of us do. Just how many people are there who feel like me? Could we speak at Davos next year about this?
Naomi Roberts
Bristol
