A column in today's SocietyGuardian asks how we can encourage poor people to save - 'promote savings among poor communities'. Well, I'm no economist but I'll stick my neck out anyway and suggest that one obvious method of doing this is to make the poor less poor. The way it works is that people who have very little money find it more difficult to save than those with more money, because their expenditure on the necessities of life takes a very big bite out of their incomes. If they had more they could save more. One obvious way of making the poor less poor is to give them money.
I should probably stop there, but I feel obliged to answer the questions that will almost certainly now be put: (1) Who should give them money? And (2) where should they get it from? My answers are, in turn: governments should; and from redistributive taxation. I am well aware that, to do this, governments need a mandate, the support of enough voters to go ahead with it. So this is what reforming governments should seek, a supporting mandate.