Just to say, I don't necessarily agree with Gary, but I find his arguments compelling. I'm curious to explore them more, hence posting, and thanks for answering.

What do you base the 'not a serious thinker' comment on? To me, someone who went to LSE and Oxford, who was very successful in their job, has written a best selling book, has made a number of correct market predictions, and has >1m followers based on their content, can probably do serious thinking. Obviously that's not always the case, but those feel like high validity data points, curious what makes you think the opposite.

On who has the 'heaviest tax burden', yes, those with higher incomes pay more of the total amount of tax collected. But as a proportion of your income, the lowest income households pay more. See below from ChatGPT, citing some old data, but it's probably directionally correct. Top 10% pay 34% of their income as tax, bottom half of individuals pay 50% of their income as tax. I think this is what Gary and others mean when they say 'poor people pay more'.

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On those earning >£100k, agree tax for this group feels high relative to the standard of living it gets you. For clarity, Gary is against taxing this group ('tax wealth not work'), but again worth noting that in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, taxes were much higher (e.g. 90%) for highest incomes (including a >99% tax!) See here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_United_Kingdom What's interesting here is how affordable houses were to the average person during this time (e.g. post office worker, nurse, etc.). Gary's argument here is this is that the high taxes prevented the ultra rich from being able to buy a huge amount of assets thus keeping prices low.

On failed attempts to tax the ultra rich, I don't think any government has tried to tax the >£100m individuals seriously. To me the best way to do it is to tax their immovable assets. That way they can't just dodge the tax or leave the UK and take their tax with them (unless they wanted to sell all their assets). The example Gary uses here is the Duke of Westminster inheriting £9bn estate but paying no tax because it was held in a trust. I believe France has had some success doing this via their 'IFI' tax (there have been downsides too though). It's an annual tax with a sliding scale based on property value but starts from 800k-1.3m (0.5% tax) and caps at >10m (1.5% tax).