Tax on wealth suggested

Another_Saver

kinger101 said:

Another_Saver said:

kinger101 said:

Another_Saver said:

Mickey666 said:

kinger101 said:

zagfles said:

kinger101 said:

Another_Saver said:

barnstar2077 said:

A percentage tax on anything over a million etc would just make wealthy people less likely to want to live in the UK, then you get no money from them.  If I ruled the world, I would find a way to stealth tax luxury items instead.  Champagne, expensive clothing, cars that cost more than 40k etc.  I would think of a novel way for each type of product so no one could point to one individual tax or tariff.  Yes, wealthy people would still know it was slightly more expensive to live in the UK, but from a psychological point of view I think it would be more effective. 

Your first point is an unsubstantiated nonsense myth.

It's not particularly constructive to dismiss something as an unsubstantiated nonsense myth without offering anything in the way of evidence to counter it.  Barnstar didn't make any specific claims about x % of people leaving the country leaving to £y loss in revenue - just that more people want want to leave and if they did, you'd get no money from them.  Your point on UK assets is true, but we know tax exiles and tax havens exist, and even people on this forum have discussed moving to IOM.  

Indeed - it's blatently obvious that there do exist people who move country due to taxes, there are enough celebrity examples. So the idea that no-one does it is definitely a myth. The question is the extent.

But the other point is that it only takes a small minority of the rich to move to make tax increases on them fiscally negative, through the loss of all the taxes they currently pay, income tax, VAT, excise duties plus of course the indirect taxes from their spending such as restaurants, shop profits etc.

More widely, it could potentially discourage inward investment.  

I personally think the UK's biggest problem is that middle earners don't pay enough income taxes. Granted, state pensions are usually better in other countries, but ........

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

Seems we already have a perfectly good mechanism for getting a bit more from millions of people without the need to invent a new tax.  

Hmm.  Think about tax in terms of the working week.
Thus, you work all of Monday (20% of the working week) to pay basic income tax.  ‘Middle earners’ then work all of Tuesday to pay their 40% tax rate.  Wednesday pays for NICs up to around 2pm.  So that’s around half the week gone already just working for the taxman. Next, we need another full day to pay the 20% VAT on pretty much everything we spend, so that takes us up to around Thursday midday-ish and the rest of Thursday (and maybe into Friday) is spent on other taxes such as council tax, car tax, petrol/diesel tax, gas/elec tax, insurance tax, alcohol tax, etc.
So, welcome to Friday, when you are finally working for yourself and out of that you have to pay your rent/mortgage, buy food, pay gas/elec bills etc before you’re finally left with disposable income that you can spend on enjoying yourself - so that’s probably just a few hours on Friday afternoon that you’re actually working for your own enjoyment.
THAT’S the sort of expensive society we’ve built for ourselves, yet many people still argue that taxes should be higher because government needs more money. 

I'd also like to see the main criminalised vice industries made legal, the definition expanded to include sugar, processed food and animal products, and taxed like alcohol, tobacco, gambling etc. That way you can make police/justice system savings, bring probably a few hundred thousand people and maybe a few extra BN a year into the formal, taxed economy, regulate to minimise the risks, and generate revenue to tell offset epidemiological causes of NHS/social costs.

The problem is these are consumption taxes, which disproportionately affect those on lower incomes.  VAT on meat would make a lot of sense from an environmental perspective, but it adds proportionately more to one's tax burden the less they earn.

Re: decriminalisation of vice sectors, I would argue the net benefits of safety both physically and of the product, lack of stress or fear of criminal repurcussions, standard and probably cheaper pricing because of the lower risks and costs of decriminalised operations would offset the taxes. You would also need an amnesty for everyone involved in those sectors, as with the good Friday agreement, unless they had committed a very serious violent crime.

Re: sugar, processed food, I would argue the personal health and financial costs far outweigh making sweets or ready meals say 20% more expensive. You could rebalance to support the high street by exempting eating out or putting eating out on a reduced rate (or only for non-animal meals). There's also potential NHS/private dental savings.

Currently animal agriculture is heavily subsidised. My personal opinion disagrees with that but regardless, plant-based is cheaper and uses less land/labour/capital/regulation/health externalities for the nutrients produced, not to mention saving on the trade costs and risks of potential food self-sufficiency. 
I'm for UBI anyway which nullifies the "what about low income households" argument, but that's another whole other debate.

I think it would be hard to move to a system in the UK which subsidizes only plant-based agriculture.  For one, most of the plants grown are to feed animals rather than for human consumption.  Many grains can be used for human consumption or animal consumption.  If you remove subsidies for UK barley growers, then animals will be fed imported grain.  Or UK consumers will eat more imported meat (probably grown to a lower welfare standard).  There's also an issue that some land isn't suitable for crop production, particularly in upland farms.

If you're trying to tax consumption of meat, VAT is much easier as it covers the whole production chain and imports in one fell swoop.

Good point, as that would cover imported equally. I'd still like to see the existing subsidies for animal based agriculture removed, and to mitigate foreign competition the gov could implement tariffs to raise the wholesale price of imported products to at least the level of UK produce.

zagfles

Mickey666 said:

zagfles said:

Mickey666 said:

kinger101 said:

Mickey666 said:

kinger101 said:

zagfles said:

kinger101 said:

Another_Saver said:

barnstar2077 said:

A percentage tax on anything over a million etc would just make wealthy people less likely to want to live in the UK, then you get no money from them.  If I ruled the world, I would find a way to stealth tax luxury items instead.  Champagne, expensive clothing, cars that cost more than 40k etc.  I would think of a novel way for each type of product so no one could point to one individual tax or tariff.  Yes, wealthy people would still know it was slightly more expensive to live in the UK, but from a psychological point of view I think it would be more effective. 

Your first point is an unsubstantiated nonsense myth.

It's not particularly constructive to dismiss something as an unsubstantiated nonsense myth without offering anything in the way of evidence to counter it.  Barnstar didn't make any specific claims about x % of people leaving the country leaving to £y loss in revenue - just that more people want want to leave and if they did, you'd get no money from them.  Your point on UK assets is true, but we know tax exiles and tax havens exist, and even people on this forum have discussed moving to IOM.  

Indeed - it's blatently obvious that there do exist people who move country due to taxes, there are enough celebrity examples. So the idea that no-one does it is definitely a myth. The question is the extent.

But the other point is that it only takes a small minority of the rich to move to make tax increases on them fiscally negative, through the loss of all the taxes they currently pay, income tax, VAT, excise duties plus of course the indirect taxes from their spending such as restaurants, shop profits etc.

More widely, it could potentially discourage inward investment.  

I personally think the UK's biggest problem is that middle earners don't pay enough income taxes. Granted, state pensions are usually better in other countries, but ........

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

Seems we already have a perfectly good mechanism for getting a bit more from millions of people without the need to invent a new tax.  

Hmm.  Think about tax in terms of the working week.
Thus, you work all of Monday (20% of the working week) to pay basic income tax.  ‘Middle earners’ then work all of Tuesday to pay their 40% tax rate.  Wednesday pays for NICs up to around 2pm.  So that’s around half the week gone already just working for the taxman. Next, we need another full day to pay the 20% VAT on pretty much everything we spend, so that takes us up to around Thursday midday-ish and the rest of Thursday (and maybe into Friday) is spent on other taxes such as council tax, car tax, petrol/diesel tax, gas/elec tax, insurance tax, alcohol tax, etc.
So, welcome to Friday, when you are finally working for yourself and out of that you have to pay your rent/mortgage, buy food, pay gas/elec bills etc before you’re finally left with disposable income that you can spend on enjoying yourself - so that’s probably just a few hours on Friday afternoon that you’re actually working for your own enjoyment.
THAT’S the sort of expensive society we’ve built for ourselves, yet many people still argue that taxes should be higher because government needs more money. 

I think the median UK salary is around £32K.  So middle earners don't pay 40% income tax.  I don't thing higher rate should be touched without a more progressive banding system between £12.5 K and £50 K.

Your analogy doesn't seem to work.  I pay 40% tax, and I can assure you I'm not digging coppers out the back of my sofa on Friday night to cover the grocery shop and my disposable income is considerable higher than what I earn after 2 pm on Friday.

Of course it’s a crude analogy and there will be many exceptions.  My basic point is that everyone pays a great deal more tax than they typically think.  Government is ‘clever’ in that respect - keep the headline figures low but add loads of ‘stealth’ taxes that people don’t really notice.  Thus income tax isn’t really 20% at all because it’s actually income tax + NI, so there’s a 33% (ish) deduction straight away.  Similarly, VAT isn’t really 20% because it is typically paid out of taxed income.  It’s an interesting exercise to calculate how much you really pay in tax if you account for absolutely everything and then apply it to the working week to see when you are working for yourself.

And all that doesn’t take into account all the ‘double taxation’ inherent in the system.  Thus, you work, pay tax on your income, then spend what’s left (which is typically taxed as you spend) and that money goes to someone else as income, which then gets taxed again, plus when they spend what’s left it is also taxed again.  Basically, pretty much all economic activity ends up going through the government books as revenue!  But as we all know, government spending is a bottomless pit so it will always be able to spend more regardless of high tax revenues might be.

You're double counting tax but not income. If you want to count the tax paid by people you buy stuff off, then you also need to count their income. So looking at tax paid by other people due to your spending is flawed in terms of the total % tax you pay.

I wasn’t trying to suggest that MY tax% is affected by the fact that the plumber (or whoever) I pay my taxed money to is further taxed, more to point out that government get tax revenues from pretty much every transaction.  Thus money I earn has already been previously taxed by my employer’s tax, as was the money paid to my employer in the first place.  That’s the ‘upward chain’ and there’s also the downward chain from my spending.   It’s a long chain of transactions and government gets a tax take at every stage.

But the point was you were representing your tax as a proportion of your income, eg you earn £40k and pay £20k in tax as completely invented figures.

If your plumber also earns £40k and pays £20k tax, the percentages don't change. So the fact you contributed towards the plumbers income and taxes is neutral as far as % tax paid goes.

Money cycles round the economy so of course almost every £1 you spend will eventually be taken as tax, then back out into the economy in govt spending eg nurses wages, benefits etc. Every £1 will also get spent eventually on virtually everything as it cycles round the economy, although at a much slower rate as tax is a greater % than most things.

Mickey666

zagfles said:

Mickey666 said:

zagfles said:

Mickey666 said:

kinger101 said:

Mickey666 said:

kinger101 said:

zagfles said:

kinger101 said:

Another_Saver said:

barnstar2077 said:

A percentage tax on anything over a million etc would just make wealthy people less likely to want to live in the UK, then you get no money from them.  If I ruled the world, I would find a way to stealth tax luxury items instead.  Champagne, expensive clothing, cars that cost more than 40k etc.  I would think of a novel way for each type of product so no one could point to one individual tax or tariff.  Yes, wealthy people would still know it was slightly more expensive to live in the UK, but from a psychological point of view I think it would be more effective. 

Your first point is an unsubstantiated nonsense myth.

It's not particularly constructive to dismiss something as an unsubstantiated nonsense myth without offering anything in the way of evidence to counter it.  Barnstar didn't make any specific claims about x % of people leaving the country leaving to £y loss in revenue - just that more people want want to leave and if they did, you'd get no money from them.  Your point on UK assets is true, but we know tax exiles and tax havens exist, and even people on this forum have discussed moving to IOM.  

Indeed - it's blatently obvious that there do exist people who move country due to taxes, there are enough celebrity examples. So the idea that no-one does it is definitely a myth. The question is the extent.

But the other point is that it only takes a small minority of the rich to move to make tax increases on them fiscally negative, through the loss of all the taxes they currently pay, income tax, VAT, excise duties plus of course the indirect taxes from their spending such as restaurants, shop profits etc.

More widely, it could potentially discourage inward investment.  

I personally think the UK's biggest problem is that middle earners don't pay enough income taxes. Granted, state pensions are usually better in other countries, but ........

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

Seems we already have a perfectly good mechanism for getting a bit more from millions of people without the need to invent a new tax.  

Hmm.  Think about tax in terms of the working week.
Thus, you work all of Monday (20% of the working week) to pay basic income tax.  ‘Middle earners’ then work all of Tuesday to pay their 40% tax rate.  Wednesday pays for NICs up to around 2pm.  So that’s around half the week gone already just working for the taxman. Next, we need another full day to pay the 20% VAT on pretty much everything we spend, so that takes us up to around Thursday midday-ish and the rest of Thursday (and maybe into Friday) is spent on other taxes such as council tax, car tax, petrol/diesel tax, gas/elec tax, insurance tax, alcohol tax, etc.
So, welcome to Friday, when you are finally working for yourself and out of that you have to pay your rent/mortgage, buy food, pay gas/elec bills etc before you’re finally left with disposable income that you can spend on enjoying yourself - so that’s probably just a few hours on Friday afternoon that you’re actually working for your own enjoyment.
THAT’S the sort of expensive society we’ve built for ourselves, yet many people still argue that taxes should be higher because government needs more money. 

I think the median UK salary is around £32K.  So middle earners don't pay 40% income tax.  I don't thing higher rate should be touched without a more progressive banding system between £12.5 K and £50 K.

Your analogy doesn't seem to work.  I pay 40% tax, and I can assure you I'm not digging coppers out the back of my sofa on Friday night to cover the grocery shop and my disposable income is considerable higher than what I earn after 2 pm on Friday.

Of course it’s a crude analogy and there will be many exceptions.  My basic point is that everyone pays a great deal more tax than they typically think.  Government is ‘clever’ in that respect - keep the headline figures low but add loads of ‘stealth’ taxes that people don’t really notice.  Thus income tax isn’t really 20% at all because it’s actually income tax + NI, so there’s a 33% (ish) deduction straight away.  Similarly, VAT isn’t really 20% because it is typically paid out of taxed income.  It’s an interesting exercise to calculate how much you really pay in tax if you account for absolutely everything and then apply it to the working week to see when you are working for yourself.

And all that doesn’t take into account all the ‘double taxation’ inherent in the system.  Thus, you work, pay tax on your income, then spend what’s left (which is typically taxed as you spend) and that money goes to someone else as income, which then gets taxed again, plus when they spend what’s left it is also taxed again.  Basically, pretty much all economic activity ends up going through the government books as revenue!  But as we all know, government spending is a bottomless pit so it will always be able to spend more regardless of high tax revenues might be.

You're double counting tax but not income. If you want to count the tax paid by people you buy stuff off, then you also need to count their income. So looking at tax paid by other people due to your spending is flawed in terms of the total % tax you pay.

I wasn’t trying to suggest that MY tax% is affected by the fact that the plumber (or whoever) I pay my taxed money to is further taxed, more to point out that government get tax revenues from pretty much every transaction.  Thus money I earn has already been previously taxed by my employer’s tax, as was the money paid to my employer in the first place.  That’s the ‘upward chain’ and there’s also the downward chain from my spending.   It’s a long chain of transactions and government gets a tax take at every stage.

But the point was you were representing your tax as a proportion of your income, eg you earn £40k and pay £20k in tax as completely invented figures.

If your plumber also earns £40k and pays £20k tax, the percentages don't change. So the fact you contributed towards the plumbers income and taxes is neutral as far as % tax paid goes.

Money cycles round the economy so of course almost every £1 you spend will eventually be taken as tax, then back out into the economy in govt spending eg nurses wages, benefits etc. Every £1 will also get spent eventually on virtually everything as it cycles round the economy, although at a much slower rate as tax is a greater % than most things.

. . . Which was the point I was making.
Two different points: 1) that people pay a lot more tax than they typically think, because they rarely calculate it and 2) that almost all money is taxed in the end.

zagfles

kinger101 said:

zagfles said:

kinger101 said:

Another_Saver said:

Mickey666 said:

kinger101 said:

zagfles said:

kinger101 said:

Another_Saver said:

barnstar2077 said:

A percentage tax on anything over a million etc would just make wealthy people less likely to want to live in the UK, then you get no money from them.  If I ruled the world, I would find a way to stealth tax luxury items instead.  Champagne, expensive clothing, cars that cost more than 40k etc.  I would think of a novel way for each type of product so no one could point to one individual tax or tariff.  Yes, wealthy people would still know it was slightly more expensive to live in the UK, but from a psychological point of view I think it would be more effective. 

Your first point is an unsubstantiated nonsense myth.

It's not particularly constructive to dismiss something as an unsubstantiated nonsense myth without offering anything in the way of evidence to counter it.  Barnstar didn't make any specific claims about x % of people leaving the country leaving to £y loss in revenue - just that more people want want to leave and if they did, you'd get no money from them.  Your point on UK assets is true, but we know tax exiles and tax havens exist, and even people on this forum have discussed moving to IOM.  

Indeed - it's blatently obvious that there do exist people who move country due to taxes, there are enough celebrity examples. So the idea that no-one does it is definitely a myth. The question is the extent.

But the other point is that it only takes a small minority of the rich to move to make tax increases on them fiscally negative, through the loss of all the taxes they currently pay, income tax, VAT, excise duties plus of course the indirect taxes from their spending such as restaurants, shop profits etc.

More widely, it could potentially discourage inward investment.  

I personally think the UK's biggest problem is that middle earners don't pay enough income taxes. Granted, state pensions are usually better in other countries, but ........

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

Seems we already have a perfectly good mechanism for getting a bit more from millions of people without the need to invent a new tax.  

Hmm.  Think about tax in terms of the working week.
Thus, you work all of Monday (20% of the working week) to pay basic income tax.  ‘Middle earners’ then work all of Tuesday to pay their 40% tax rate.  Wednesday pays for NICs up to around 2pm.  So that’s around half the week gone already just working for the taxman. Next, we need another full day to pay the 20% VAT on pretty much everything we spend, so that takes us up to around Thursday midday-ish and the rest of Thursday (and maybe into Friday) is spent on other taxes such as council tax, car tax, petrol/diesel tax, gas/elec tax, insurance tax, alcohol tax, etc.
So, welcome to Friday, when you are finally working for yourself and out of that you have to pay your rent/mortgage, buy food, pay gas/elec bills etc before you’re finally left with disposable income that you can spend on enjoying yourself - so that’s probably just a few hours on Friday afternoon that you’re actually working for your own enjoyment.
THAT’S the sort of expensive society we’ve built for ourselves, yet many people still argue that taxes should be higher because government needs more money. 

I'd also like to see the main criminalised vice industries made legal, the definition expanded to include sugar, processed food and animal products, and taxed like alcohol, tobacco, gambling etc. That way you can make police/justice system savings, bring probably a few hundred thousand people and maybe a few extra BN a year into the formal, taxed economy, regulate to minimise the risks, and generate revenue to tell offset epidemiological causes of NHS/social costs.

The problem is these are consumption taxes, which disproportionately affect those on lower incomes.  VAT on meat would make a lot of sense from an environmental perspective, but it adds proportionately more to one's tax burden the less they earn.

As does tobacco tax - significantly more so as poorer people are more likely to smoke. Also alcohol tax. But these taxes are designed to be regressive because there's a correlation between poverty and bad health outcomes. Same with things like the min alcohol price in Scotland.

Basically regressive taxation on "bad" choices is already being used to try to modify the behaviour of the "poor", so extending it to other stuff like red meat, sugar etc isn't a big step.

I don't disagree, but I thinks it's dangerous to assume the extrapolating this to processed foods in general will necessarily lower consumption.  Poor families are still likely to rely heavily on processed foods.  The convenience element is an important factor for working families, particularly those working on multiple minimal wage jobs.  

It depends how you do it - as long as you leave options for people. Multiple min wage jobs probably doesn't equate to poverty - there's a lot of talk of in-work poverty but it's generally part timers. Full time min wage is £18k, couple £36k, a single parent would get lots of benefits on top.

zagfles

Mickey666 said:

zagfles said:

Mickey666 said:

zagfles said:

Mickey666 said:

kinger101 said:

Mickey666 said:

kinger101 said:

zagfles said:

kinger101 said:

Another_Saver said:

barnstar2077 said:

A percentage tax on anything over a million etc would just make wealthy people less likely to want to live in the UK, then you get no money from them.  If I ruled the world, I would find a way to stealth tax luxury items instead.  Champagne, expensive clothing, cars that cost more than 40k etc.  I would think of a novel way for each type of product so no one could point to one individual tax or tariff.  Yes, wealthy people would still know it was slightly more expensive to live in the UK, but from a psychological point of view I think it would be more effective. 

Your first point is an unsubstantiated nonsense myth.

It's not particularly constructive to dismiss something as an unsubstantiated nonsense myth without offering anything in the way of evidence to counter it.  Barnstar didn't make any specific claims about x % of people leaving the country leaving to £y loss in revenue - just that more people want want to leave and if they did, you'd get no money from them.  Your point on UK assets is true, but we know tax exiles and tax havens exist, and even people on this forum have discussed moving to IOM.  

Indeed - it's blatently obvious that there do exist people who move country due to taxes, there are enough celebrity examples. So the idea that no-one does it is definitely a myth. The question is the extent.

But the other point is that it only takes a small minority of the rich to move to make tax increases on them fiscally negative, through the loss of all the taxes they currently pay, income tax, VAT, excise duties plus of course the indirect taxes from their spending such as restaurants, shop profits etc.

More widely, it could potentially discourage inward investment.  

I personally think the UK's biggest problem is that middle earners don't pay enough income taxes. Granted, state pensions are usually better in other countries, but ........

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

Seems we already have a perfectly good mechanism for getting a bit more from millions of people without the need to invent a new tax.  

Hmm.  Think about tax in terms of the working week.
Thus, you work all of Monday (20% of the working week) to pay basic income tax.  ‘Middle earners’ then work all of Tuesday to pay their 40% tax rate.  Wednesday pays for NICs up to around 2pm.  So that’s around half the week gone already just working for the taxman. Next, we need another full day to pay the 20% VAT on pretty much everything we spend, so that takes us up to around Thursday midday-ish and the rest of Thursday (and maybe into Friday) is spent on other taxes such as council tax, car tax, petrol/diesel tax, gas/elec tax, insurance tax, alcohol tax, etc.
So, welcome to Friday, when you are finally working for yourself and out of that you have to pay your rent/mortgage, buy food, pay gas/elec bills etc before you’re finally left with disposable income that you can spend on enjoying yourself - so that’s probably just a few hours on Friday afternoon that you’re actually working for your own enjoyment.
THAT’S the sort of expensive society we’ve built for ourselves, yet many people still argue that taxes should be higher because government needs more money. 

I think the median UK salary is around £32K.  So middle earners don't pay 40% income tax.  I don't thing higher rate should be touched without a more progressive banding system between £12.5 K and £50 K.

Your analogy doesn't seem to work.  I pay 40% tax, and I can assure you I'm not digging coppers out the back of my sofa on Friday night to cover the grocery shop and my disposable income is considerable higher than what I earn after 2 pm on Friday.

Of course it’s a crude analogy and there will be many exceptions.  My basic point is that everyone pays a great deal more tax than they typically think.  Government is ‘clever’ in that respect - keep the headline figures low but add loads of ‘stealth’ taxes that people don’t really notice.  Thus income tax isn’t really 20% at all because it’s actually income tax + NI, so there’s a 33% (ish) deduction straight away.  Similarly, VAT isn’t really 20% because it is typically paid out of taxed income.  It’s an interesting exercise to calculate how much you really pay in tax if you account for absolutely everything and then apply it to the working week to see when you are working for yourself.

And all that doesn’t take into account all the ‘double taxation’ inherent in the system.  Thus, you work, pay tax on your income, then spend what’s left (which is typically taxed as you spend) and that money goes to someone else as income, which then gets taxed again, plus when they spend what’s left it is also taxed again.  Basically, pretty much all economic activity ends up going through the government books as revenue!  But as we all know, government spending is a bottomless pit so it will always be able to spend more regardless of high tax revenues might be.

You're double counting tax but not income. If you want to count the tax paid by people you buy stuff off, then you also need to count their income. So looking at tax paid by other people due to your spending is flawed in terms of the total % tax you pay.

I wasn’t trying to suggest that MY tax% is affected by the fact that the plumber (or whoever) I pay my taxed money to is further taxed, more to point out that government get tax revenues from pretty much every transaction.  Thus money I earn has already been previously taxed by my employer’s tax, as was the money paid to my employer in the first place.  That’s the ‘upward chain’ and there’s also the downward chain from my spending.   It’s a long chain of transactions and government gets a tax take at every stage.

But the point was you were representing your tax as a proportion of your income, eg you earn £40k and pay £20k in tax as completely invented figures.

If your plumber also earns £40k and pays £20k tax, the percentages don't change. So the fact you contributed towards the plumbers income and taxes is neutral as far as % tax paid goes.

Money cycles round the economy so of course almost every £1 you spend will eventually be taken as tax, then back out into the economy in govt spending eg nurses wages, benefits etc. Every £1 will also get spent eventually on virtually everything as it cycles round the economy, although at a much slower rate as tax is a greater % than most things.

. . . Which was the point I was making.
Two different points: 1) that people pay a lot more tax than they typically think, because they rarely calculate it and 2) that almost all money is taxed in the end.

2) is a meaningless point. Almost all money is spent on almost everything in the end. Maybe after 2 or 3 transactions with tax, maybe after 200 or 300 on drugs, maybe after 10,000 on <something obscure>

Mickey666

Correct though

Apodemus

Another_Saver said:

Currently animal agriculture is heavily subsidised.

I'd be grateful if you could list any subsidies that are directly related to animal agriculture in England. Scotland has a minimum stocking density for the Less Favoured Area Support Scheme and headage links for the Suckler Beef and Upland Sheep schemes, but these are essentially retained for social-support and environmental reasons in fragile areas. Apart from these I'm not aware of any subsidies that are targetted at livestock farming enterprises rather than as general farming support.

TC56_803_9

All through my lifetime my experience is that the fraction has risen of those  people who believe in the delusion that making governments responsible for redistribution of monies within the population is a near zero cost affair.  Few understand how inefficient Govts are at collecting taxes and getting it to the target receipients.  Keeping it simple is the best way of reducing costs at the collection end.  This Wealth Tax smacks of inefficiency with so many factors to put in the mix it will allow the unscrupulous and wealthy to wriggle away and will hurt the moderately wealthy honest citizen the most. 

I looked in the report Wealth Tax Commission wealth tax for the UK - which is the advising document,  to see what they said.  At the opening paragraph I was well impressed with Healey and that they quoted him.

"4.3.4 Administrative costs  The administrative costs of collecting a wealth tax are an important issue. In 1989, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, reflected on the position in 1974: ‘We had committed ourselves to a Wealth Tax; but in five years I found it impossible to draft one which would yield enough revenue to be worth the administrative cost and the political hassle’. The Irish wealth tax, introduced around the same time and abolished in 1979, was criticised for having excessive administrative costs for taxpayers and the tax authority, with operating costs equal to one-quarter of the revenue (Sandford and Morrissey, 1985). Are these concerns still justified? Costs to tax authority Advani, Hughson and Tarrant (2020)"

So there I was thinking there would be some sense to follow that but oh no we quickly go off into fairy-land. This is just a false flag to put the wary off their guard.  Costs are detailed - here is a taster...Fixed set up costs to get the whole lot rolling out.

"These are estimated to be £579 million. This comes from two elements. First, a £245 million cost of revaluing the entire housing stock, which is based on the costs from the 2001–05 aborted revaluation of council tax (uprated for wage inflation). Second, a£334 million cost of building a new administrative system, based on the costs of designing and developing the new Customs Declaration Service" 

So we can get it up and running for under £1bn in fact lets not be imprecise - £579m + £334m = .£0.910bn  Errrrr how is that track and trace system doing ?  In November they had to throw another £7bn at it to take it up to £22bn. This week there were statements that those employed on pay rates carers, who have worked throuhghout lockdown  could only dream of were being active for only 1% of their time !  Way to go !  In the land of fairies these experts predict the costs would come in at around 1.4% of revenue generated. 

 

We live in crazy times.  These are snake oil salesmen. But they have seen other snake oil salesmen get away with it so why not ?

 

I don't know how many of you read the original paper that changed the strategy of the UK & USA Govts in March - the Imperial paper published by Ferguson and his mates - you know the guy whose fancy bit broke lockdown to visit him for cup of tea and a biscuit or some such.  Well at least she was not wanting to test her eyes.  It was the paper that said we would have 450,000 dead within weeks if we did not lock down and 250,000 dead even if we did a full lockdown.  ie of the order of the total dead from the near 6 years of WW2, all within about 12 weeks. 

I wanted to see their base assumptions and there it was in black and white - they assumed the lethality of Covid was identical to Spanish flu at around 3%.  Even by when I looked at it, at the start of lockdown, it was obvious that the lethality profile of Covid 19 was nothing like that of Spanish flu.  The demograph of data from Italy was completely different and diet had a huge impact on Spanish flu.  Now,  no-one can row back.  The costs have been enormous by so many measures that they must be justified.  No one will get a counter narrative out there.  Nobody is going to say “oopps we scared the !!!!!! out of you, if you are under 50 with no underlying health conditions the threat is minimal, we just have to go banzai to protect the elderly,  The rest of you keep working.” 

This tax will be popular because there are way more people below the threshold than above and once it has momentum there will be no stopping it. 

For myself I have little interest in it.  Depending on how it is measured, as somebody wrote upthread his assets had moved around £80,000 since March 2020,  I might just be in or just be over so I might pay a little.  But why go for something so complicated and that the unscrupulous will escape from. I find their figure of 10% losses for lack of compliance fanciful.

 

Be honest and use tools for which the infrastructure is in place.  Raise income tax and VAT. Earning up to £12.500 with no tax is a good starting point. Our carers get to keep more of their salary unlike the track and trace operatives.   Reduce higher thresholds and increase rates.  Increase VAT on a range of things you want to surpress consumption of.  Purchase tax on cars used to be up at 50% and came down to 25% in 1963.  We have a crisis - whack it up to 50%.  And don't allow business users to offset it.  Nobody on benefits is buying a new car nor any carers who are major breadwinners and with registration Govt controlled compliance will be way better than 90%. or perhaps a more realistic 75%. 

I would much prefer to pay purchase tax – then the choice is mine.  If I don’t want to be taxed I should not buy the stuff.  I would even prefer income tax.  But this welath tax is so "after the event" and encourages even more fecklessness.  Why bother saving for your old age, make sure you have blown everything by state pension age ?

pip895

Do you think the Corvid crisis gives the government carte blanche to ditch previous promises on taxation?  Simply upping Income tax to 25%/45% + bringing CGT, Tax on Dividends & NI into line would be simpler.  Adding a few more bands to council tax system and closing a few loopholes (owning property through a company etc.) will make sure property owners pay something to.  

TC56_803_9

pip895 said:

Do you think the Corvid crisis gives the government carte blanche to ditch previous promises on taxation?  Simply upping Income tax to 25%/45% + bringing CGT, Tax on Dividends & NI into line would be simpler.  Adding a few more bands to council tax system and closing a few loopholes (owning property through a company etc.) will make sure property owners pay something to.  

 I agree with this and yes I think the costs of COVID have totally changed the taxation landscape.