Saturday 8 September 2007

Lib Dems' tax policies (1)

Theyve unveiled some more tax policies.

The Lib Dems consist partly of sincere, economically clued up people, who recommend replacing Business Rates (a property tax) with Site Value Rating (a land value tax), because ...
"By being based on the value of land, Site Value Rating (SVR) captures increases in land value which result from transport and other infrastructure improvements (eg. London’s Crossrail) and provides an ongoing enhanced revenue stream for the local authority. It provides the owners of sites with an incentive to build on them rather than leave them vacant or underdeveloped."

Fine so far.

But the Lib Dems also consist partly of populist, vote-grabbing idiots. So ...
"For domestic properties, whilst retaining a long term commitment to a system of
land value taxation, we believe [in scrapping Council Tax and] the introduction of a Local Income Tax."

So, all-in-all, a classic piece of wishy washy Lib Dem'ism.

2 comments:

Joshua Vincent said...

It IS strange, coupled with the tax on the 'super-rich.' It sounds as if the party is afraid they can't explain the idea of LVT easily.

Cheers, Josh

Mark Wadsworth said...

LVT is easy to explain. It's an annual tax of a small percentage of the site-only market value of each plot of privately owned land.

What's tricky is when the crackheads come along bleating 'ability to pay! ability to pay!' like lepers in a horror film.