We need a land and wealth tax to replace income and transaction tax.

antrobus

robmatic wrote: »

...Also an ideal target for taxing the middle classes. People who own houses in the South East of England say. ....

Yes indeed. See above.:)

cepheus

antrobus wrote: »

Because, LVT isn't a tax on acreage, it's a tax on value. As far as the value of land is concerned, it's residential property that matters. A hectare of arable farming land in south-east England apparently goes for around £20k, get permission to put some houses on it and it's £2.5 million. The value of the land that sits under the UK's 26 million households is worth far more than all those acres of pasture and wheat fields.

You also need to appreciate that council tax in England is based on 1991 valuations, unfortunately Land Registry figures don't go back that far, but in the period Jan 1995 to Mar 2013 they show property values in the South-East increasing by 290.67; the comparative figure for the North is 177.29. So replacing CT with LVT (or indeed any kind of broadly similar revaluation) would involve a substantial shift in the burden of tax from places like the North to London and the South-east.

So if you happen to own a house somewhere in theSouth-east you will get well and truly clobbered under LVT.

I don't agree with this, since my house is only worth the median value, and even if I owned a mansion perhaps I should be taxed on it, what's wrong with that? Houses are overpriced in the SE anyway, and it would be healthy for them to take a haircut. Nothing you say distracts from this inequitable distribution and only those on the far right will lose out

antrobus wrote: »

That is complete and utter economic nonsense. If you take money from one person in the form of tax, and then give it to someone else, the sum total of money available for spending does not change.

P.S. If you decide to use LVT to raise sufficient money to cut the "overall tax bill of the average median citizen", (as opposed to just covering the CT take) you're going to get clobbered even more.

This is untrue the less affluent spend a greater proportion of their disposable income, exactly what the chancellor is trying to make us do, spend not save, to stimulate the economy. In addition, the world's super-rich siphon off money from their home countries and hide it abroad in secrecy jurisdictions.Whilst I have a different attitude to growth than most people, it is difficult to deny that the best way to stimulate the economy is to redistribute wealth.

It's interesting that the right try to make out how the average person would be hit by property taxes. The real facts are that even if the value of all property were removed overnight, 50% of the population wouldn't be affected, why?

The bottom 50% of households had no net property wealth and just £4,000 in pension savings.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/dec/03/richest-10-uk-households-40-per-cent-wealth-ons

CLAPTON

cepheus wrote: »

I don't agree with this, since my house is only worth the median value, and even if I owned a mansion perhaps I should be taxed on it, what's wrong with that? Houses are overpriced in the SE anyway, and it would be healthy for them to take a haircut. Nothing you say distracts from this unequitable distribution and only those on the far right will lose out







This is untrue the less affluent spend a greater proportion of their disposable income, exactly what the chancellor is trying to make us do, spend not save, to stimulate the economy. Whilst I have a different attitude to growth than most people, it is difficult to deny that the best way to stimulate the economy is to redistribute wealth.

It is indeed difficult to deny that redistributing money to the poorer people will lead to a larger percentage of the cake being eaten; however the size of the cake may shrink.

grizzly1911

cepheus wrote: »

Nothing you say distracts from this inequitable distribution and only those on the far right will lose out







This is untrue the less affluent spend a greater proportion of their disposable income, exactly what the chancellor is trying to make us do, spend not save, to stimulate the economy. In addition, the world's super-rich siphon off money from their home countries and hide it abroad in secrecy jurisdictions.Whilst I have a different attitude to growth than most people, it is difficult to deny that the best way to stimulate the economy is to redistribute wealth.

There always has and always will be an unequal distribution of wealth. Even under communism there is /was an unequal distribution.

Consumption is not the answer on it's own. If we simply consume more tat as imports and flush the money to the east it will do no good what so ever.

CLAPTON wrote: »

It is indeed difficult to deny that redistributing money to the poorer people will lead to a larger percentage of the cake being eaten; however the size of the cake may shrink.

If we make this an iterative process of attacking the rich the cake will indeed get smaller over time. What do we do when their is no more cake? Allowing locusts into crop fields doesn't lead to long term benefits.

We need top learn how to make cake.

cepheus

CLAPTON wrote: »

It is indeed difficult to deny that redistributing money to the poorer people will lead to a larger percentage of the cake being eaten; however the size of the cake may shrink.

There is no evidence the size of the cake will shrink.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/4048039

Within developed countries there are Richer ones with equality such as the Scandinavian countries, and poor ones with inequality such as Portugal. The main difference is that the non-economic factors which are really important improve in more equal societies. See

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3463475

CEOs usually brag that money doesn't motivate them, only winning, are they lying? Do we want people whose sole purpose is to make money?

They crash the economy and cost us more still as we have seen. Worse still most of the rich are completely useless and parasitic anyway

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/2146243

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky. Such results have been widely replicated.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/07/one-per-cent-wealth-destroyers

CLAPTON

cepheus wrote: »

There is no evidence the size of the cake will shrink.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/4048039

Within developed countries there are Richer ones with equality such as the Scandinavian countries, and poor ones with inequality such as Portugal. The main difference is that the non-economic factors which are really important improve in more equal societies. See

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3463475

CEOs usually brag that money doesn't motivate them, only winning, are they lying? Do we want people whose sole purpose is to make money?

They crash the economy and cost us more still as we have seen. Worse still most of the rich are completely useless and parasitic anyway

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/2146243



http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/07/one-per-cent-wealth-destroyers

There is no evidence which is cause and which is effect.

cepheus

What wealth advisors become useless because they can't return a better than average profit, I think they have to be useless in the first place.

Thrugelmir

cepheus wrote: »

Nothing you say distracts from this inequitable distribution and only those on the far right will lose out

Politics has nothing to do with working 24/7 and being highly successful in a particular field. Redistributing wealth to those who make less effort than others is an outdated notion. That was tried and tested, and failed. For one simple reason. Human nature takes over.

John_Pierpoint

Having waded through this thread, I am worried that after all these years of debating on this forum, there are still so many that refuse to accept some simple economic truths:

The price of land is high when the price of corn is high - not vice versa.

A LVT is very difficult to avoid and it is one of the few taxes that does not distort economic relationships - the land owner simply has to pay it or sell up and do something useful with his capital.

If something is subsidised, that subsidy simply gets capitalised into its value - the worst example is the fortune paid to the agricultural sector in subsidies and protection. Don't stop to think that this helps the struggling tenant farmer, his rent simply goes up to ensure that the landlord keeps the subsidy.

I know someone whose dad bought a plot of land for £1,000, it sold recently some 50 years later for £700,000 tax free. What had the land owner needed to do to earn that increase? Keep breathing !
Mind you if the £700,000 was as a result of buying a lottery ticket, some people would think the winner some sort of celebrity hero - its a funny old world.

Land tax is a useful tax to impose in a society where tax fiddling is endemic - Raffles, the guy commemorated in Singapore is usually credited as one of the first to set up such a tax.

In turn of the century USA the idea very nearly became law.

Will it ever happen here? Don't hold your breath!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamford_Raffles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George

http://www.openeurope.org.uk/Content/Documents/Pdfs/CAP_2012.pdf

http://farmsubsidy.org/GB/

Unfortunately these subsidies are now secret in most cases.

cepheus

John_Pierpoint wrote: »

Don't stop to think that this helps the struggling tenant farmer, his rent simply goes up to ensure that the landlord keeps the subsidy.

Yes, I was wondering about the claims that most of our land is 'farmland', presumably to obtain the sympathy vote for the poor little farmer. I guess most of this is really owned by big business landlords, just like pubs and it is they who have reaped the benefits.