Thanks for that, Jim

We can save the UK economy with a celebrity podcast tax.

So, Andy Burnham has House of Cards’d his way into being Prime Minister and now he’s got to try and find a way to pay for some of the stuff he’s been promising. He can’t raise income tax and he’ll struggle to find money by cutting public services that are already teetering like a coach full of gold on an Italian cliff.

Most people quite like the idea of a wealth tax, but these can be hard to target and administer. We need something that is transparent, hard for the rich to dodge and ultimately capable of redistributing money effectively.

I think the solution might have been staring us in the face all this time: We need to massively tax celebrity podcast advertising revenue.

Let me try to justify this with a few examples and then show how lucrative such a tax could be…

Five men are sitting in a room that looks like a cross between a posh kitchen and a wanky bar. Each is dressed in casual, but no doubt expensive clothes. They are wearing the sort of watches that will allegedly get your arm cut off in London. For twenty minutes they sit and discuss how much money they earned as professional footballers, reeling off the sort of figures that would compel Hans Gruber to blow up Nakatomi Plaza, or perhaps could be used to build a hospital. They laugh about how some of them only earned millions as opposed to tens of millions of pounds a year, then some music kicks in and Gary Neville puts down his highly visible bottle of Huel for just long enough to announce that this episode is “bought to you by Arne Clothing.”

Richard Osman (a multi-media multi-millionnaire) and Marina Hyde (literally an aristocrat) can’t wait to tell you all sorts of interesting news and opinions about happenings in pop culture, but first and most importantly they have to tell you about how great it is to pay your massive electricity bill to Octopus Energy because they have good hold music while you are waiting for an hour on the phone to query your direct debit.

Alastair Campbell (at one time possibly the powerful man in the country) and Rory Stewart (Eton, Oxford, mates with the royal family etc) are having an emergency zoom meeting to discuss some earth shattering event - but before they get into the war in Iran or the situation in Gaza they want to let you in on a sweet Nord VPN discount when you sign up using their special code at checkout.

And so on and so on.

My proposal is this:

We should tax any income from podcast advertising (including the subscriptions that remove advertising) paid to a person with an existing net worth of more than £1,000,000 at a rate of 95%.

Why this is fair

  1. They are all stinking rich already. No one will care if Micah Richards has to wait a bit longer for a new Lamborghini if the local school can suddenly afford pens.
  2. Podcasting for many is a hobby or a passion project, they do it for fun. For the new breed of celebrity podcasters it’s a side hustle, an easy way of making colossal amounts of money for relatively little effort - anything they get from it is a bonus.
  3. This only affects the rich ‘talent’. Producers, engineers etc get taxed normally and we allow for production costs from the ad revenue.
  4. Adverts are fucking annoying and we all hate them. They know this or they wouldn’t charge you a fee to take them away.

How much could it make?

Podcasts make advertising money in a few ways:

Rory Stewart was reported three years ago as being shocked by how much money he was making each month, noting that it was far more than he’d earned doing anything else. So, let’s use The Rest is Politics as an example. I’ve got some rough numbers together, but bear in mind the amount of revenue is probably underestimated - some episodes get millions of views and listens. Also I haven’t included affiliate marketing or the sneaky, look at this t-shirt I’ve probably been paid to mention stuff, which happens on other celebrity podcasts.

The dodgy and no doubt error ridden spreadsheet below shows that if we allow top-end podcast costs of £5,000 per episode (which seems a bit steep for recording a zoom call if you ask me), the production company still gets nearly half a million quid a year - so Gary Lineker won’t be short of crisps. Each presenter would still be clearing over 12 grand a month, not bad for freestyling into a webcam for a couple of hours a week. Meanwhile the tax revenue generated each month could pay the wages of 143 nurses, or 138 coppers, or even (prick your ears up Wes Streeting) 152 soldiers. Multiply that out across the increasing universe of celebrity podcasts and we might not have to sell the NHS to one of Trump’s sons in ten years time.

Seems like a win-win no-brainer for the government to me. But I imagine they’ll probably just cut welfare for disabled people instead.

podcast tax