What should be most heavily taxed? Poll discussion.

rifalda

Aliss wrote: »

Alcohol (and I buy a lot!) definitely.

It is ridiculously cheap. Wine and upmarket spirits are fairly reasonably priced but you can get three litres of 7% cider for about £3 where I live. Similarly with value spirits, a litre of vodka for £10. I'd rather pay an extra £1 per bottle of wine or spirit and not have inheritance tax or VAT! Though I suspect we'll end up with both!

Alcohol should be the one since the consume is so large and please let the poor smokers alone, I think the have just suffer the worst by now!

candy_xyz

i have voted to tax alcohol, not only will it have a big impact on the NHS if people drink less; but i feel it is one of the few taxes that tax people in all social brackets, whether you enjoy a sherry in the evening or a pint at lunch time!!

I also feel tax should be more evenly distrubted so those that earn mega bucks (i'm talking the 200k plus per year brackets) pay a LOT more than those earning 15k a year!!!

:money:

willcalibra

Why should we be taxed more??
OUR government tax us enough as it is, and waste just as much if not more.
Its all very well saying tax ciggs or tax fuel more but where is the money going to be spent?? not on us I am sure.
With news reports every day saying the uk are giving money and writing off debts to foreign countries, then reports saying councils and police forces are struggling to fund basic items, I wonder who my tax money (and its is supposed to be mine) is going to.
If a thrifty person (such as martin) or anyone with a bit of sense, took a step back and looked at the uk tax and expenditure and had a hand in improving the situation I am sure we would all be better off, rich or poor.
Correct me if I am wrong. But if a company ran like this country it would go out of business within a year.

HugoSP

I don't think we need to be taxed more. The current levels are about right.

However, if I had to choose 1, I would choose Tobacco, purely to put more financial pressure on smokers to stop. Smoking is a killer, if you had known someone who was diagnosed with lung cancer out of the blue some 5 months before they died then you would agree. It was a friend of the MiL's. She smoked some 20 a day, but stopped suddenly when she heard the news of her friend being diagnosed.

Taxes on fuel just make those who need a car poorer, which is around 70% of the population as the public transport in this country is hopeless. I refuse to take the train as it is so under invested in that I used to get caught with a major delay around 50% of the times I used it in the past. Public transport in Cornwall is just a joke. My wife has had to have taxis home at the bus company's expence because they simply cancel buses at a whim. We now drive everywhere and as such control our own destiny.

I find the UKs attitiude towards public transport a national embarresment. When you come back from the US you know you are home as the trains are a mess, the damn trolleys at the airport are well past it, the airport is a tip, you spend ages trying to find a toilet that is not out of order. We even spend 40 mins on the tarmac whist the airport staff were running around trying to find a staircase that fitted.

Al-Aaraaf

Right off the top, the core problem is that there's pretty much no relationship between what you pay into the system and what you get back.

Ok, don't misinterpret that. I don't mean a direct relationship like an investment upon whch a return is expected. This part of it gets weirder as you pay more tax, but it's not what I mean. (Healthcare and education are the obvious examples of this, since these are things you're more likely to provision yourself, the more you earn.)

There are things that I believe most people would willingly contribute to. Even if they don't benefit personally. And again, the best examples are healthcare and education. Though most of the big earners benefit from a workforce, so there is a indirect beneft to things like this.

There's a scale of things, though opinions will vary on an individual level... But there're things that most people will pay for fairly willingly. (Mostly because there are people who contribute nothing, given the opportunity.) At the other end of the scale there're things that very few people are especially keen on contributing towards. And along the way there're all sorts of things, some of which are highly contraversial.

halia wrote: »

It confuses me that people think it is morally 'right' to tax people at a higher rate just because they earn more.

Setting aside envy...

1. The rich can afford to pay more without feeling it so much.
2. In general (though I'm open to suggestions otherwise) people with very high income profit from the labours of less rewarded peoples, rather than from their own labours.
3. The wealthy benefit more from the economic advantages of the economy in which they accumulate their income.
4. On the whole, even despite having a greater amount of income potentially assessable to tax at a higher rate, on the whole the wealthy pay a lesser fraction of thier income in tax than the middle and working classes!

halia wrote: »

I'm also convinced that a simpler system would save millions in terms of admin at the inland revenue! Can you imagine how many people thay have to emplor to manage a 3 tier tax system, with all the associated letters etc every time it changes.

Since Self Assessment, the bulk of the administrative cost of assessing Income Tax has moved from the state, to employers and the self-employed. (Incidentally, the Inland Revenue dissapeared two years ago, when it and HM Customs & Excise were merged to form HM Revenue & Customs.) Even the cost of collecting taxes doesn't mostly fall on HMRC, but is collected by employers before employee wages are paid. So, no, there aren't big gains to be had on the administrative angle.

An awful lot of HMRC's efforts are in trying to get people to pay the right amount of tax. This is right across the board from Carousel fraud on a scale that costs the country billions of pounds each year to sole traders who forget about a chunk of their income, when filling out their annual self-assessment returns. Trust me, none of that will go away, because income is taxed at a flat rate. The official line is that the majority of taxpayers are honest and want to pay the right tax at the right time. The majority of people do pay the right tax at the right time, but that's because their employer takes it, before they ever get near it! (An interesting element in this is that recently the government were accused of failing terribly in their commitment to raise children out of poverty. The official response to this was as much to say that this was a side-effect of the under-declaration of income by the self-employed.)

It is, however, an indisputable fact that the absolutely worst examples of avoiding a fair share of the tax burden are invariably found among the wealthy. Yes, in part because they have more motivation to do so and certainly more opportunity to seek professional advice to facilitate this.

Some exciting examples of this:
1. Company directors who take a wage not, or barely exceding their tax-free allowance, but enough to meet the minimum National Insurance threshhold and withdrawing their income as dividends to avoid the additional NI. (This is completely legal.)
2. Claiming non-resident or non-domiciled status to side-step income tax liabilities on dividends. This was the issue with the recently reported treasury select committee regarding priate equity firms. (Again, completely legal.)

The legal justification for this comes from the case of CIR v Duke of Westminster, in which one of the Lord Tomlin sagely told us, "Every man is entitled if he can to order his affairs so as that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise would be."

But morally...

I rather like the following quote:
"If I were in the Inland Revenue, I would fret about the moment when the little people who stupidly still pay taxes realise that the state is treating them like fools. It insists that they must hand over their earnings on pain of punishment by the courts, while inviting Philip Green to Buckingham Palace to be honoured by the Queen.”

SteveR

wiganshale wrote: »

VAT and other customer based taxes hit the poorest more than the richest.

Wiganshale has missed the point about Vat. Vat is actually the fairest tax because it can be set to only tax non essentials like basic food,children's clothes "tampons" Etc. It is not easy to fiddle, it taxes the scroungers and visitors to the country. The rich pay more because they spend more, the poor whose main expenditure should be food and housing (rent is free of VAT) will pay very little, just on any luxuries they buy. All other taxes should be scrapped and VAT increased to about 60% then if all you want to do is eat, sleep and take long walks in the country you will pay no tax. As soon as you start buying non essentials then you pay tax. The businesses are set up for collecting and paying it to the government so we can get rid of most of the civil servants. Job Done!!!!
:j :beer:

Pazuzu

Someone once explained to me ( 20 years ago)that it would be in the interest of the state to encourage smokers as they typically died without costing the state much retirement pension !
Taxing income - equitably, not allowing all the various cop outs available to those able to afford clever avoidance or even the services of an accountant - seems the only real way to generate the revenue needed to provide services that benefit us all by encouraging social cohesion. I thought the discussion on BBC R4 "any questions" Friday 6 July 2007 was interesting.I agree with the person who said that they thought anyone earning more than the Prime Minister could afford to pay %50 !!

oldhaggis

Al-Aaraaf wrote: »

Right off the top, the core problem is that there's pretty much no relationship between what you pay into the system and what you get back.

Ok, don't misinterpret that. I don't mean a direct relationship like an investment upon whch a return is expected. This part of it gets weirder as you pay more tax, but it's not what I mean. (Healthcare and education are the obvious examples of this, since these are things you're more likely to provision yourself, the more you earn.)

There are things that I believe most people would willingly contribute to. Even if they don't benefit personally. And again, the best examples are healthcare and education. Though most of the big earners benefit from a workforce, so there is a indirect beneft to things like this.

There's a scale of things, though opinions will vary on an individual level... But there're things that most people will pay for fairly willingly. (Mostly because there are people who contribute nothing, given the opportunity.) At the other end of the scale there're things that very few people are especially keen on contributing towards. And along the way there're all sorts of things, some of which are highly contraversial.



Setting aside envy...

1. The rich can afford to pay more without feeling it so much.
2. In general (though I'm open to suggestions otherwise) people with very high income profit from the labours of less rewarded peoples, rather than from their own labours.
3. The wealthy benefit more from the economic advantages of the economy in which they accumulate their income.
4. On the whole, even despite having a greater amount of income potentially assessable to tax at a higher rate, on the whole the wealthy pay a lesser fraction of thier income in tax than the middle and working classes!



Since Self Assessment, the bulk of the administrative cost of assessing Income Tax has moved from the state, to employers and the self-employed. (Incidentally, the Inland Revenue dissapeared two years ago, when it and HM Customs & Excise were merged to form HM Revenue & Customs.) Even the cost of collecting taxes doesn't mostly fall on HMRC, but is collected by employers before employee wages are paid. So, no, there aren't big gains to be had on the administrative angle.

An awful lot of HMRC's efforts are in trying to get people to pay the right amount of tax. This is right across the board from Carousel fraud on a scale that costs the country billions of pounds each year to sole traders who forget about a chunk of their income, when filling out their annual self-assessment returns. Trust me, none of that will go away, because income is taxed at a flat rate. The official line is that the majority of taxpayers are honest and want to pay the right tax at the right time. The majority of people do pay the right tax at the right time, but that's because their employer takes it, before they ever get near it! (An interesting element in this is that recently the government were accused of failing terribly in their commitment to raise children out of poverty. The official response to this was as much to say that this was a side-effect of the under-declaration of income by the self-employed.)

It is, however, an indisputable fact that the absolutely worst examples of avoiding a fair share of the tax burden are invariably found among the wealthy. Yes, in part because they have more motivation to do so and certainly more opportunity to seek professional advice to facilitate this.

Some exciting examples of this:
1. Company directors who take a wage not, or barely exceding their tax-free allowance, but enough to meet the minimum National Insurance threshhold and withdrawing their income as dividends to avoid the additional NI. (This is completely legal.)
2. Claiming non-resident or non-domiciled status to side-step income tax liabilities on dividends. This was the issue with the recently reported treasury select committee regarding priate equity firms. (Again, completely legal.)

The legal justification for this comes from the case of CIR v Duke of Westminster, in which one of the Lord Tomlin sagely told us, "Every man is entitled if he can to order his affairs so as that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise would be."

But morally...

I rather like the following quote:
"If I were in the Inland Revenue, I would fret about the moment when the little people who stupidly still pay taxes realise that the state is treating them like fools. It insists that they must hand over their earnings on pain of punishment by the courts, while inviting Philip Green to Buckingham Palace to be honoured by the Queen.”

Company directors who pay themselves minimum wages in order to legally avoid tax also benefit in other ways. These days their offspring can claim full EMA while they and spouses drive around in flash company cars and live in big houses.

When I was young and we got proper student grants, their offspring got full grants, while my parents (one unable to work due to illness and the other in low paid job ) still had to contribute a small amount towards my upkeep.

Kit1

I too voted cigarettes because I dislike them so much (grow up in a house of 2 smoking parents).

I really don't think it matters what tax is increased because the only people who will end up paying it as usual is the likes of us who work.:mad:

hippobottomus

I don't think any taxes should rise. If anything, they should fall. We are over-taxed!

I believe tax should fall on all categories mentioned. Education and culture is probably the best way to get people to cut smoking and drinking. Family culture in the UK is weak - this needs to change.