Time to change Stamp Duty Levels?

wotsthat

grizzly1911 wrote: »

And replace the lost revenue how?

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Scrap it and increase capital gains on investment properties to make up some of the loss in revenue.

If my income falls I can try and earn more or spend less or a mix of the two.

Politicians have convinced you that there's only one side to this equation. i.e. the only solution to lost income is to raise it somewhere else. It's called brainwashing.

Generali

wotsthat wrote: »

If my income falls I can try and earn more or spend less or a mix of the two.

Politicians have convinced you that there's only one side to this equation. i.e. the only solution to lost income is to raise it somewhere else. It's called brainwashing.

I'm not sure whether it's just here or a general malaise of the British mind but there seems to be a sort of delusion that part of the Government's job is to raise the maximum possible amount of tax. It isn't.

N1AK

Deleted_User wrote: »

With the budget coming up in March, hopefully the Chancellor will change the Stamp Duty levels to allow FTB and others to actually buy a house and not pay this ridiculous tax or reduce the levels at the lower bands.

And what tax should they increase to pay for this? Or are you just as useless as the Labour front bench and think we should not tax anything, pay for everything, and hope the money fairy bails us out?

The only reason the government doesn't reform stamp duty is that leaving it as it is is a less unpopular political decision than raising another tax, adding a new tax, and cutting government spending further.

The "spare room subsidy"/"Bedroom Tax" was estimated to save £0.5 billion a year and look at all the negative press that has given the government. Stamp duty raises ~£7 billion a year, imagine how popular they'd be if they made another 14 cuts like that!



*All the above is said as someone who thinks that stamp duty is a particularly bad tax as it discourages labour flexibility and uses an especially poor stepping mechanism.

Graham_Devon

wotsthat wrote: »

If my income falls I can try and earn more or spend less or a mix of the two.

Politicians have convinced you that there's only one side to this equation. i.e. the only solution to lost income is to raise it somewhere else. It's called brainwashing.

You confuse my opinion with being brainwashed and you and generali can be as patronising as you like.

My opinion is that should we scrap stamp duty the money should be made up elsewhere. I don't think less should be spent in order to remove a tax from the property market.

Ultimately spending less means libraries, respite centres, youth clubs closed down as known examples. I'd rather move the tax to property investment (where the tax is very much a choice) and continue spending on stuff like fixing our roads, looking at flood prevention etc.

Generali

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Ultimately spending less means libraries, respite centres, youth clubs closed down.

Or perhaps less waste on countless layers of management and feather bedded incompetent administrators.

Graham_Devon

Generali wrote: »

Or perhaps less waste on countless layers of management and feather bedded incompetent administrators.

Far more likely to shut down a youth centre though.

What you say would be nice, sure, but it's simply not what is done currently. All youth clubs in Devon have just had funding removed in order to stop council tax increasing. Same for council run care homes. The very likely scenario is now closure for these places or venues. Unless community funding takes place.

Looking at Cornwall county council, they have halted all planned road resurfacing for the next 6 months in order to fund pothole filling. Basically a quick fix to a road surfacing problem. Were going backwards.

We need extra revenue, we can't keep holding back on spending in the community while pumping more and more taxpayer cash into the housing market and reducing the taxes raised from it. I'd like to know how much the national TV, Radio and mobile Banner advertising are costing for help to buy, for example.

Generali

Graham_Devon wrote: »

We need extra revenue, we can't keep holding back on spending in the community while pumping more and more taxpayer cash into the housing market and reducing the taxes raised from it. I'd like to know how much the national TV, Radio and mobile Banner advertising are costing for help to buy, for example.

There is no extra revenue. The UK is spending at a level which is holding back GDP as it is, IMHO. The more the UK Government taxes her businesses and people, the worse the situation will become.

Graham_Devon

Generali wrote: »

There is no extra revenue. The UK is spending at a level which is holding back GDP as it is, IMHO. The more the UK Government taxes her businesses and people, the worse the situation will become.

I didn't say there was.

I said that's what was needed.

Removing stamp duty and not replacing it anywhere else in the system is hardly going to help matters for anyone bar property owners and those looking to buy property.

I don't mind it being removed at all. I just wouldn't want to see that tax revenue removed entirely, so it would have to be raised elsewhere.

The A and B roads down here are particularly bad at the moment, as they are up and down the country. I realise we have had a bad winter and I realise resources are having to go to areas worst hit by the storms. But the roads were bad before the storms. They were crumbling and melting in the summer and were never repaired due to lack of money.

No word of a lie, but a colleague has to go a different route home now as the main road is so bad with litterally metres of the road crumbling away, her classic mini (not lowered) scrapes the remaining tarmac that hasn't crumbled and juts up in the road. This isn't a back road, it's a main A route and it's been deteriorating for months. She can get over speed humps out of here fine. The roads are that bad in places due to serious underinvestment over the past 2-3 years.

Reducing the tax is great. But if it comes at this cost I can't agree.

michaels

Strangely I will sound like Graham and suggest that housing is the root cause of the current budgetary problems. Restrictions on house building results in the incredibly expensive housing benefit bill, the requirement for incoem top ups for those on low wages and a strong disincentive for many benefits claimants to find employment. All this leads to the situation Generali mentions where the tax burden discourages (crowds out) the private sector.

Stamp duty is a carp tax but sadly the whole tax system is carp and with any changes the winners don't really care and the losers moan for England.

(My stamp duty replacement? Remove CGT exemption for PPR but indexed linked to the rpi/allowance for improvement and only payable on death/reduction of housing equity, with a refundable 'credit' for temporary withdrawals when renting between properties for example)

N1AK

Generali wrote: »

Or perhaps less waste on countless layers of management and feather bedded incompetent administrators.

You know enough to know how naive it is to think that just slashing government spending will magically result in vast efficiency savings and waste reduction so I really don't know why you're making it pithy, vacuous, comments like that.