Scary stuff.... Milliband starts talking about 10p tax bands!

Graham_Devon

Some number crunching has since happened.

I'm not sure labour have done their sums. Either they haven't and there will be some red faces, or they have and they are not stating the whole picture.

Apparently a masion tax would raise £1.7bn (based on current lib dem proposals). A 10p tax rate would cost £6bn.

So are they going to raise masion tax from the 1% proposal of the lib dems to 4%?

Or is this 10p tax not going to be quite as far reaching as is being made out? I.e. "we'll lower it to 10p, but the personal allowance has already been raised, therefore we don't have to do the whole 10p"?

As an indication, if they raised the value of mansion tax, it would cost £40,000 each year in tax for a house worth £3m.. That's a bit insane.

Apparently "low income" pensioners would also be ring fenced. Dunno what low income is, but it's gotta be anything under what, 60-80k a year (bearing in mind a £2.5m house will cost them £20k of their yearly income!) So that's a good few pensioners with houses worth > £2m NOT paying the tax, reducing amounts further.

Fella

Lolol just listened to the first few words of Milliband's speech on TV:

"we would put right the mistakes made by Gordon Brown & the Labour Party".

Does he really think people are so stupid they don't remember his role in it?

Graham_Devon

I think labour party advisors are, quite rightly, stating that labour has to admit to past mistakes.

However, that's difficult to do when you are not a fresh face, and it was only a couple of years ago.

Ed Balls was right next to Brown in the 10p tax thing. Now he's decided he wasn't and was always against it.

Labour could, and should reference mistakes of the past, but you need fresh faces to do so, not the same faces who were on TV saying how good it was, now stating they were always against it. Just makes it look worse.

Sort of says "OK, well, you shouldn't have believed me then, but you can believe me now....honest".

With Brown, at least he knew his time was up and he went. Alistair knew before he went, he just wasn't allowed to go. Instead he had to make apologies through public broadcasts for stating the truth.

the_flying_pig

purch wrote: »

When will these numpties realise that the more complicated you make the Tax system, the less tax you collect and the easier you make it to legally reduce the tax you pay

Fatty Lawson promised a far more simple tax system with the last few words of what turned out to be his last budget speech

We are still waiting !!!

yeah, i dunno.

in many ways a tax on pwoperdee is the hardest type to evade, because the very rich can't say, as they do with income tax, 'no, this isn't income, it's dividends' or some such nonsense. a house is a house. easy to spot someone dishonestly arguing that it's a phone box or a library instead.

there'd be problems with valuations, i daresay.

excluding oldies with low incomes seems like a nonsense. who 'deserves' to pay tax more, a retired [say] schoolteacher who paid tuppence ha'penny for her West London house in the 1960s [paying for it by working 0830 to 1530 for a few months a year] & through sheer good fortune has seen its value balloon to a hundred times what she paid for it, or the very successful & hard working 30-something couple who have a £1m+ mortgage to service every month? taxing people on unearned wealth seems obviously very fair to me, taxing people on debt, well,...

Fella

the_flying_pig wrote: »

who 'deserves' to pay tax more, a retired [say] schoolteacher who paid tuppence ha'penny for her West London house in the 1960s [paying for it by working 0830 to 1530 for a few months a year] & through sheer good fortune has seen its value balloon to a hundred times what she paid for it, or the very successful & hard working 30-something couple who have a £1m+ mortgage to service every month?

The answer is, it's ridiculously unfair to tax either. Both paid their fair share of tax via income tax, NI, VAT, etc (and will eventually pay plenty more via Inheritance Tax).

A wealth tax like Miliband is suggesting is truly a foul, hate-filled suggestion. It is, literally, "they've got X, I want X, let's take X off them". The same attitude a burglar or a mugger has. With exactly the same justification.

And they call the Tories the Nasty Party. You couldn't make it up.

the_flying_pig

Fella wrote: »

The answer is, it's ridiculously unfair to tax either. Both paid their fair share of tax via income tax, NI, VAT, etc (and will eventually pay plenty more via Inheritance Tax).

A wealth tax like Miliband is suggesting is truly a foul, hate-filled suggestion. It is, literally, "they've got X, I want X, let's take X off them". The same attitude a burglar or a mugger has. With exactly the same justification.

And they call the Tories the Nasty Party. You couldn't make it up.

disagree strongly.

we have to raise tax revenue somehow.

if it falls down to a choice between taxing income or assets, assets is fairer & creates better incentives every time.

N1AK

Fella wrote: »

The answer is, it's ridiculously unfair to tax either. Both paid their fair share of tax via income tax, NI, VAT, etc (and will eventually pay plenty more via Inheritance Tax).

A wealth tax like Miliband is suggesting is truly a foul, hate-filled suggestion. It is, literally, "they've got X, I want X, let's take X off them". The same attitude a burglar or a mugger has. With exactly the same justification.

I'm not generally in favour of 'mansion' taxes or other such measures. It seems odd that I could live in a £1.9m house with £5m in other assets and pay less in tax than someone with a £2m house and nothing else.

However that doesn't mean your general premise that everyone rich has paid their fair share is automatically true. Fair isn't a scientific term and what people believe is fair can be everything from those who can afford it paying for those who can't to everyone paying exactly the same amount.

I would however prefer that the government focused on simplifying taxation and getting everyone paying the intended amount of taxation (rather than the mega-wealthy often paying less than middle earners) before following Labour's ideas of imagining up new ways to make it more complex and expensive.

N1AK

the_flying_pig wrote: »

we have to raise tax revenue somehow.

if it falls down to a choice between taxing income or assets, assets is fairer & creates better incentives every time.

Taxing assets is much more intrusive and also open to abuse in a whole raft of new ways. If inheritance tax works correctly then we effectively have a tax on assets not earned by the individual which can be redistributive; other than that I'd be very dubious about attempting to define assets and tax them.

Also, as is shown by the fact Labour immediately went to pains to point out they wouldn't affect old people it is clear that we as society are not in favour of targeting those with the most assets anyway.

the_flying_pig

N1AK wrote: »

Taxing assets is much more intrusive [don't know what you mean. the way that my paypacket gets scalped every month feels fairly intrusive from where i'm sat] and also open to abuse in a whole raft of new ways [such as? more so than income?]. If inheritance tax works correctly then we effectively have a tax on assets not earned by the individual which can be redistributive [kind of but it doesn't raise that much money]; other than that I'd be very dubious about attempting to define assets and tax them.

Also, as is shown by the fact Labour immediately went to pains to point out they wouldn't affect old people it is clear that we as society are not in favour of targeting those with the most assets anyway [er, i think the fact that they're proposing it suggests that they think it'll appeal to a fair number of people].

see highlighted comments above

the_flying_pig

N1AK wrote: »

...However that doesn't mean your general premise that everyone rich has paid their fair share is automatically true. Fair isn't a scientific term and what people believe is fair can be everything from those who can afford it paying for those who can't to everyone paying exactly the same amount..

'fair' was mostly shorthand for 'equal' - assets are held much more unequally than income.

but also i don't see how they could possibly be more closely correlated to 'merit' - people pretty much earn what they deserve to earn, unless their employer views them as some kind of charitable concern. houses, on the other hand...