What taxes on other people would you support?

westernpromise

horse riders, you want to !!!! all over the road you can pay for it. Tax on chewing gum

Yep, love it. I don't use horses or gum so there should definitely be more tax on those.

smokers cost the NHS money

I'm fairly sure the opposite is true: smokers are charged far more than they cost. We need more smokers, not fewer.

I don't do Facebook or Twitter either so they need to be taxed more.

Definitely - good one.

legalizing & taxing cannabis would raise c £1bn a year. Seems a no-brainer to me.

I'm not so sure. I suspect that the billion would be offset by things not bought instead, and also let's not forget that when Prohibition ended the Mob did not disband itself; it did other things. What other things would drug dealers do if dealing were legal?

Already a tax on stste sector final salary in pensions.

There's already a tax on my salary but plenty of people want me to pay more. In the same spirit, I'd like people on final salary pensions (that my taxs pay for) to pay more, because it's a tax that I wouldn't have to pay. Say an extra 15% income tax on state sector final salary pensions - something like that.

capital gains tax being levied on your main house

Inflation is not capital gain. You need the inflation you've "gained" to fund the purchase price of the next one you buyk, whose price will also be higher.

I don't agree with taxing cyclists - it's something we want to encourage and they don't do any real damage to the roads or generate much traffic.

No "we" don't. Cyclists pay nothing for the use of the roads and have no insurance, MOT, protective equipment or minimum standard of road competence, and because they're not registered they can and do flout the law with impunity. They support a huge criminal industry (theft of and from bikes is at epidemic levels, and the customers for stolen bikes are, of course, other cyclists, happily buying stolen property from fences). They also take up as much road width as a car. They should taxed at whatever level funds correcting all this, plus another few hundred to teach the error of their anti-social ways.

Upping the cost of flights to try to cut down the use of fossil fuels.

I'd tax all "green" initiatives out of existence. More of than not they are hugely damaging and kill millions (see DDT). A 95% levy on donations to Greenpeace would be a good start.

My answer to the cyclist tax is that I'm quite happy to pay a proportion of "road tax" in line with that of the wear and tear / space I occupy / pollution generated - I mean paying 20% of the rate of a Toyota Prius seems about right .

..

£2,000 to £3,000 a year sounds about right - every cyclist causing a traffic jam increases the emissions of everyone behind them, which cyclists are of course keen to ignore. I'm not a cyclist so this tax is fair, morally correct and actually considers the children.

I'd also like tattoos taxed. Tax, tax and tax them again. Maybe classify ink as alcohol or petrol and add a few hundred per cent tax to it? It's for the kids.

westernpromise

Norman_Castle wrote: »

If we pretend motorists VED is a payment to use or fund the roads, which it isn't. Its levied by the government at varying rates to support cleaner cars with the revenues raised added to general taxation income, and because of this cyclists who use the same piece of tarmac should pay VED. Apart from the £0 VED band cyclists would be in, surely pedestrians should pay much more than cyclists to fund pavements and crossing. These vast areas along many highways aren't cheap.
When I'm cycling my £230 VED per year car is not being used. Cycling motorists should get a tax rebate.

The funny thing is that we've had VED for many years before we started panicking about the sky. So constructively, whatever pretext it's levied on, it's a fee to use the roads. What you use you should pay for. I like your idea that "When I'm cycling my £230 VED per year car is not being used" though - when I'm driving my Mercedes my Honda's not being used so I should get a discount too.

Another good tax would be on TV. We already have a tax to use a television. As the BBC keeps telling is what a great way this is to fund TV programmes, let's have a whacking great tax on Sky TV as well.

And foopbaw. I hate foopbaw and they make too money (i.e. more than I do). There should be a special income tax rate of 99% on foopbawers. They'll expect the same take-home but that's fine, Sky can just pay more to show it. Sky subs are going up anyway so it'll just get lost in that.

This is fun. What else don't I do or use that can be taxed? Scotland. The north. Big, big taxes needed on both of those.

mrginge

I would give gingers a rebate as compensation for the years of abuse.

JP08

Kim_13 wrote: »

Insurance for cyclists. Totally wrong that the burden of proof is always on the motorist and never the cyclist.

Bet you can't find anything that actually states that about burden of proof (in the UK at least) - because there's no such thing.


Also cycling third party liability insurance is ridiculously cheap - for £70 a year you can get Cycling UK family membership ("unlimited children") - which throws in £10M 3rd party cover for all. Simply because the likelihood of cyclists causing serious and expensive damage and injuries is just so much less than car drivers - they just can't hit with anything like as much energy.

zagubov

I would suggest a tax on sound pollution by mobiles. They'd all have to have a volume sensor before they can connect to the network and all the quiet talkers should be subsidised by the thoughtless chumps who seem to have taken a vow of loudness and screech into their handsets.

I'd also tax TV programme producers for dead time especially the long pauses in the phrases "and the winner is".

More seriously, I'm baffled why we have simple tax bands in a computer-riddled world where we park machines in space to broadcast entertainment to our tellies, and programme our cars to defy pollution testing equipment.

We could all pay tax on a sliding scale worked out by computers. Sales taxes like VAT could be focussed on the utility of goods or their environmental costs. We could find ways to make tax more difficult to avoid.

I suggest we use negative income tax as a universal guaranteed income for citizens, the best argument for having it, is the sheer entertainment value of watching it annoy the rather predictable people it would annoy.

JP08

westernpromise wrote: »

£2,000 to £3,000 a year sounds about right - every cyclist causing a traffic jam increases the emissions of everyone behind them, which cyclists are of course keen to ignore. I'm not a cyclist so this tax is fair, morally correct and actually considers the children.

:O) Funnily enough - when trying to get through my local town, it's the traffic queues of cars that slow me up on the bike !

martinthebandit

JP08 wrote: »

Bet you can't find anything that actually states that about burden of proof (in the UK at least) - because there's no such thing.


Also cycling third party liability insurance is ridiculously cheap - for £70 a year you can get Cycling UK family membership ("unlimited children") - which throws in £10M 3rd party cover for all. Simply because the likelihood of cyclists causing serious and expensive damage and injuries is just so much less than car drivers - they just can't hit with anything like as much energy.

Pish! You can go away with your logic, there's no place for that on this thread.

Herzlos

kabayiri wrote: »

Or, the example covered in Top Gear, where a handful of Ferrari and other sports car vehicles had been registered as taxis to avoid the congestion charge.

In this last example, they should either have a 5000% tax levy to pay, unless they can prove they regularly pick up fares at the black cab rate

Why should they pick up at the black cab rate? Private taxi's can charge whatever they want.

Also how would you prove it? All they'd need to do was charge their mates/family a few quid to run them to the shops and back every now and then.

JP08

martinthebandit wrote: »

Pish! You can go away with your logic, there's no place for that on this thread.

I know - "Logic is an organised way of going wrong with confidence" - Charles F Kettering (1944)


Mea Culpa

westernpromise

JP08 wrote: »

Bet you can't find anything that actually states that about burden of proof (in the UK at least) - because there's no such thing.


Also cycling third party liability insurance is ridiculously cheap - for £70 a year you can get Cycling UK family membership ("unlimited children") - which throws in £10M 3rd party cover for all.

Car insurance would also be £70 a year if cars didn't have to have number plates. Like cyclists, after causing an accident a driver without number plates could just leave the scene. Result: no insurance payouts ever!