House prices and taxes

chris_spackman

Well i think this fits in well here. Below is from a previous thread i started.

'With all that is going on we have to look at a few things.

Brown said no more boom and bust. Blair started a spending spree on troops and ammo for a war which very few wanted apart from a redneck in America.

Labour took on good books from the tories and have just ripped all the pages out and replaced it with dribble, debt and numbers people can not work out.

Trade unions have once again caused problems and the membership of these are going up so it won't be the credit crunch thats going to do us, it will be stikes when people are asked to take a pay cut, the same people who will go on strike are the same people who voted these waste of space in.

. A drop in VAT is a joke. The council tax needs to be dropped to a fair price, councils need to save money and stop spending on complete !!!!. My council in Bournemouth spent £2m on adverts, £80k on an outside firm to help them save money when they pay someone £100k in house to do the same bloody thing. This is where money can be saved so we can not pay too much thus we have money to spend. What is going to happen to those who can not afford to pay things such as the TV License, another bloody tax or the council tax in full each month. MP's and those fat !!!!!! in town halls should have their (OUR BLOODY MONEY AGAIN)expenses stopped, i mean poor souls having to travel to and from work, what about me and the train fare increase etc? This country needs a radical sort out, declare it bankrupt, kick out all the waste and start again.

A big problem as far as i am concerned is the general waste of our tax money thats one reason we have no money to spend and may need credit.

How much tax do we pay on our money that has already been taxed?
GET YOUR WAGES, you pay tax
GET IN YOUR CAR TO GO HOME, you pay tax to buy it, tax to fill it up, tax on a repair and tax to insure it and tax to drive it
GET HOME, you pay tax to buY it,tax to insure it,tax to fuel it tax to watch the bloody telly and tax to bloody live there(COUNCIL TAX)
PAY MONEY INTO YOUR BANK and you get taxed on that too.'

neverdespairgirl

carolt wrote: »

Has privatising anything actually made it work cheaper or better?

Yes. Car industry, airlines, BT.

chris_spackman

macaque wrote: »

In some parts of the world, house prices are supressed by high property taxes. Last year, a staggering 1.2 million people in the UK recieved court summons for council tax arrears. Below the water of this ice berg, there are probably 10 million who find council tax very painful. Another 5 to10 million people probably don't care because they are partially or wholly exempt from council tax.

After all the problems of the poll tax, it suprises me that people are so tolerant of the relentless rise in the tax burden. Average Council tax is now more than 5% of average income (for old people, it can be over 20%). To make matters worse, the public are not enjoying the benefits of these higher taxes. Middle ranking adminstrators in local councils now pay themselves salaries of over £150k. More than 20 managers in the NHS are taking salaries over £200k. Millions of 'make busy' jobs have been created and public servants give themselves gold plated pensions that no private employee could hope for.

The UK economic model consists of a dwindling band of wealth creators serving a large and growing public sector elite. It is inevitable that the future of house prices will be heavily influenced by this trend. Runaway public spending has serious implications for the UK economy and demographics.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jan/07/localgovernment-localgovernment

Could not agree more with you

chris_spackman

£34k on postage, £700 per month on a taxi, a TV License put through as an expense. In all the figures for the last tax year work out at an average of £135,600 per MP on top of a basic wage of over £60,000 and a total of over £87m in expenses, nice when we have to face higher tax bills and less money in our pocket. Matthew Elliott, head of pressure group the TaxPayers' Alliance, said while families struggled to pay higher tax bills, MPs were spending "more and more of our money on themselves each year".

So when the public are looking at job cuts, loosing homes etc MP's are fitting theirs out etc with OUR money.

Does that not bother you? Just think what it could do for the NHS,Schools and our pockets!

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mps/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7062525.stm

beingjdc

chris_spackman wrote: »

In all the figures for the last tax year work out at an average of £135,600 per MP on top of a basic wage of over £60,000

Erm, this includes their office staff in Westminster and their constituency. Do you want your MP debating laws, or licking stamps?

beingjdc

chris_spackman wrote: »

How much tax do we pay on our money that has already been taxed?

I can't think of a single economist who believes that only having one tax would be a good idea. We could just have a flat rate income tax, it would be about 50% on all income (no allowances or exemptions), but that would be hugely distorting to the economy.

chris_spackman

Cleaver wrote: »

Have you got any evidence of a 'middle ranking administrator' job at a local council that pays £150k? Most Chief Exec jobs at local councils pay between £70k for smaller organisations and up to around £150k for the larger city councils.

And as for the 20 managers in the NHS earning over £200K, there will be many NHS organisations in the country with budgets of £250 million and upwards so I don't think paying the CEOs of these organisatons in the region of £200k is particulary out of line with the general job market.

I'm not arguing that there isn't wastage of money by local authorities, just addressing your specific figures.

You are one of the few people i have come by who thinks that Councils and Mp's are 'worth' the work they do. My council was on the radio about the council tax and last year 60k people had a visit to the local court for non payment, not due to not wanting too, i am sure very few want to pay it and this year my council expects to take twice that to court this year and the guy said he does not feel any form of sympathy for these people. What a complete !!!!. These people who sit in town halls are just like MP's, they have no idea what we are up against and they don't care. We pay too much in tax and the council are a law in their own right and seem to do what they like with no answer to anyone. How sad that people are loosing jobs and business', wages will not go up, wages may drop yet tax goes up.

Cleaver

chris_spackman wrote: »

You are one of the few people i have come by who thinks that Councils and Mp's are 'worth' the work they do. My council was on the radio about the council tax and last year 60k people had a visit to the local court for non payment, not due to not wanting too, i am sure very few want to pay it and this year my council expects to take twice that to court this year and the guy said he does not feel any form of sympathy for these people. What a complete !!!!. These people who sit in town halls are just like MP's, they have no idea what we are up against and they don't care. We pay too much in tax and the council are a law in their own right and seem to do what they like with no answer to anyone. How sad that people are loosing jobs and business', wages will not go up, wages may drop yet tax goes up.

You've twisted my words to somehow say that I feel MPs are 'worth' the job they do. Whether specific MPs are worth the money is a separate debate that I haven't really commented on. My argument is that large, complex public sector organisations are similar beasts to large private sector organisations (albeit easier in some ways to run but more difficult in others) and that their leaders and senior directors need to be paid a salary that is in line with market prices. Otherwise you'd have a much higher proportion of incompetent people doing very important and difficult jobs.

Your posts are like some of the others on here: they just sound like badly written Daily Mail opinion articles.

Maybe you can answer my question I've asked a few times. Chris Spackman is elevated to a position where he gets to decide how the city of Birmingham is run. So what are your plans as to how to structure a group of senior people to run the city? What would you pay them? Would you have a chief exec? How would you stop the problem you talk about of councils 'not being answerable to anyone'?

Cleaver

chris_spackman wrote: »

Well i think this fits in well here. Below is from a previous thread i started.

'Stuff...

That was even less interesting the second time around.

StevieJ

chris_spackman wrote: »

You are one of the few people i have come by who thinks that Councils and Mp's are 'worth' the work they do. My council was on the radio about the council tax and last year 60k people had a visit to the local court for non payment, not due to not wanting too, i am sure very few want to pay it and this year my council expects to take twice that to court this year and the guy said he does not feel any form of sympathy for these people. What a complete !!!!. These people who sit in town halls are just like MP's, they have no idea what we are up against and they don't care. We pay too much in tax and the council are a law in their own right and seem to do what they like with no answer to anyone. How sad that people are loosing jobs and business', wages will not go up, wages may drop yet tax goes up.

Hey I have an idea! why don't you get a nice easy job with the council, it's lose by the way.