Council Tax Reform

Guy_Montag

pickles110564 wrote: »

I would opt out of paying for the Police never there when you want them or they bottle out of making any decisions.
If you did it on footprints you would pick on people who from their own hard work/graft keep moving up the ladder and not have any more income than the normal working class citizen

How do you move up the ladder while earning what normal, working-class people do?

However it would discourage the following
1) Investment in property, which is essentially non-productive.
2) Investment in over-populated areas (i.e. it would encourage firms to set up in areas of deprivation)
3) Land-banking would become a thing of the past

It would also target the extremely rich & be impossible to avoid (the russian billionaires that buy a london pad for umteen million; money launderers).

It would also focus minds on what is a fair price for a property.

pickles110564

Renovating, only pay well below market value or property's no one else wants, do the work yourself, buy the stuff you need from yellow ads etc.

pickles110564

Also ahould have said sell property above celing price, last one sold for 130k above

Guy_Montag

pickles110564 wrote: »

Also ahould have said sell property above celing price, last one sold for 130k above

Do you mean as a property developer? Surely it's not a problem if you are buying cheaply? & it's not your problem what it's sold for. However, property development is essentially non-productive, selling houses to each other at ever increasing prices doesn't make us, as a country, rich.

pickles110564

Guy_Montag wrote: »

Do you mean as a property developer? Surely it's not a problem if you are buying cheaply? & it's not your problem what it's sold for. However, property development is essentially non-productive, selling houses to each other at ever increasing prices doesn't make us, as a country, rich.

Guy all we are trying to do is make sure that when we get old we hope will have some money behind us so that we dont have to rely on anyone else.
I dont trust putting money in the stock market as we are not clever enough ourselves or informed enough to invest,we had our fingers burned twice before by so called professionals telling us where to invest.
After we lost all our hard earned savings it came to me that if they were any good they would not be having to work taking money from us working class oiks

pickles110564

By the way finally found out what FIG Jam means, have had plenty of chuckles since

Guy_Montag

pickles110564 wrote: »

Guy all we are trying to do is make sure that when we get old we hope will have some money behind us so that we dont have to rely on anyone else.
I dont trust putting money in the stock market as we are not clever enough ourselves or informed enough to invest,we had our fingers burned twice before by so called professionals telling us where to invest.
After we lost all our hard earned savings it came to me that if they were any good they would not be having to work taking money from us working class oiks

That's entirely a fair statement, it's what we all want, & I too have been taken for a ride by so-called experts; though a Generalli was kind enough to point out - who is the idiot? the guy who can't get my FTSE tracker to perform as well as the FTSE or me for letting him get away with it.

I guess what I'm trying to get across is that renovating houses doesn't really boost the economy in the same was as, say setting up or working for an engineering firm. There's no export of housing - I suppose though, in a way, you're adding value, though HPI on it's own does not.

pickles110564

Sometimes i wish i had studied harder at school then i might understand you guys a bit better, but i think i do get your point

macaque_2

guppy wrote: »

Apparently around 40% of staff in the Office for National Statistics earn less than £15,000 a year in London (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3620837.stm) and more than 20,000 staff in the DWP have to claim the same benefits they administer.

So if anyone's bitter about public sector fatcats, its probably that lot. Moonrakerz is entirely right too...I think Michael O'Leary of Ryanair should be in charge of health. That should cut costs.

Anyway, the orginal question Guy posed was far more interesting...so lets not hijack the thread.

I don't condone low pay but I do question why so many of these people are employed in the first place. Labour have recruited 3/4 million people over past few years and several million more on government contracts. The quality of public services however just gets worse and worse. Bin collection has been moved to every two weeks, public WCs have closed, local police stations are closing, class sizes are getting bigger, we have the highest rail fairs in the world despite huge public subsidies. Passport costs have rocketed, car clamping and swinging parking fines are imposed by councils. NHS dentists have dissapeared, orthondonist treatment for children has been withdrawn. What's going on?

Doozergirl

Bin collection isn't actually every two weeks. It's just alternate weeks for different types of refuse so the bin men are working just as hard as they did. Recycling one week, general waste the other.

You wanna move to where I live. We have public toilets, small class sizes and everything. Council tax goes somewhere, evidently. Unless an idiot of an opposition councillor forces a reprint of a load of postcards because it's racist and might look like a black person was unhappy. SIGH.