Peter Hargreaves Quotes
There is an old adage that the quickest way to drop your tax take is to increase taxes. If capital gains tax is going to be 50 percent, my contingent capital gains tax is going to be 250 million pounds.
Hargreaves, Peter. Interview. The Sunday Times, 12 June 2010.
This is the most articulate historical statement of the modern conservative mantra regarding taxes. However, one change has taken place. The words “necessarily” and “often” tend to be left out of the more modern ideological statements. Mellon’s original statement has never really had any politicians or economists who disagreed. Politicians of all economic persuasions have generally accepted the Mellon statement but the extreme conservatives’ creed is that a lowering of taxes always produces more revenue and a tax increase will inevitably lead to greater tax revenue—a position which Mellon never took. Mellon however was very solicitous of the wealthy, felt the welfare of the nation depended on their prosperity, and was a strong advocate of what was later called ‘trickle down’ economics {628592}.
He turned out to be very wrong as there were a number of times in American history when there were tax rates in excess of 70 percent, and they were collected.
Peter Kendal Hargreaves CBE is an English co-founder with Stephen Lansdown of Hargreaves Lansdown, one of the United Kingdom's largest financial services businesses. He is a shareholder of Hargreaves Lansdown but no longer a director or employee. He is a partner in Blue Whale Capital, an investment boutique that was launched in 2017.
