"... is something I feel very strongly about and something we will definitely do in the next parliament. We will set out exactly how in due course," said David Cameron.
Pathetic. Does he not have a calculator or something? If he's worried about the 'cost' (ha!), then the cheap and cheerful way of doing this would simply be to say that in the tax year 2009-10, 30 million working age people will use up their personal allowance of £6,475 (up from £6,035 this tax year). So the total personal allowances claimed will be = £194 billion.
If you want three million non-working spouses to have a transferable personal allowance (which is what most other countries have - in fact we used to have it until the Tories scrapped it) without changing total tax revenues, you just divide £194 billion by 33 million, so next year's personal allowance would be £5,900 or thereabouts.
Simples.
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14 comments:
For goodness sake Mark, Camoron is an Eton product.
Eton's tradition of turning out the Nation's best dressed liars, cheats and Machiavellian artists is inseperable from the duty of all alumni to renege upon promises to non-toffs.
Therefore no calculator is required.
He's also missing the point entirely. The breakdown of marriage is caused primarily by legal and cultural changes - not tax. To whit:
http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html
"The Four Sirens : Four unrelated forces simultaneously combined to entirely distort the balance of civilization built on the biological realities of men and women:
1) Easy contraception: In the past, extremely few women ever had more than one or two sexual partners in their lives, as being an unwed mother led to poverty and social ostracization. Contraception made it possible for female to conduct campaigns of hypergamy.
2) 'No fault' divorce, asset division, and alimony : In the past, a woman who wanted to leave her husband needed to prove misconduct on his part. Now, the law has changed to such a degree that a woman can leave her husband for no stated reason, yet is still entitled to payments from him for years to come. This enables women to transfer the costs of their behavior onto men and children.
3) Female economic freedom: Despite 'feminists' claiming that this is the fruit of their hard work, inventions like the vacuum cleaner, washing machine, and oven were the primary drivers behind liberating women from household chores and freeing them up to enter the workforce. These inventions compressed the chores that took a full day into just an hour or less. One of the main reasons that women married - financial support - was no longer a necessity.
4) Pro-female social engineering : Above and beyond the pro-woman divorce laws, further state interventions include the subsidization of single motherhood, laws that criminalize violence against women (but offer no protection to men who are the victims of violence by women), and 'sexual harassment' laws with definitions so nebulous that women have the power to accuse men of anything without the man having any rights of his own.
These four forces in tandem handed an unprecedented level of power to women. The technology gave them freedom to pursue careers and the freedom to be promiscuous. Feminist laws have done a remarkable job in shielding women from the consequences of their own actions. Women now have as close to a hypergamous utopia as has ever existed, where they can pursue alpha males while extracting subsidization from beta males. Despite all the new freedoms available to women, men were still expected to adhere to their traditional responsibilities."
Good luck trying to unravel that, Dave
MTG, true.
K, good list, however 1 and 3 just put them on par with men (so I have no problem with that) what stinks of course is all the items in 2 and 4.
K, I'll think you'll find that there are still fewer working women than there were 100 years ago. The major change caused by the introduction of domestic appliances was the rise in the number of middle class working women along with a corresponding decline in the number of working class women the same middle class women used to employ as domestic servants.
MW - true, but here's the rub: men and women are not the same. Female economic equality = male dating inequality. Marriage only worked because certain factors existed to take male/female relations out of their natural polygamous state. Remove those factors and marriage dies. When marriage dies, Western civilisation dies with it.
Sounds like an exaggeration, but the linked article makes a case.
K, "When marriage dies, Western civilisation dies with it."
Woah! Since time immemorial, most civilisations have been based on monogamous family units (apart from autocracies like Islam or Mormons, which are self-destructing for this and many other reasons), there is a subtle natural advantage to that state of affairs. Marriage will always 'work', whether you are Stone Age hunter-gatherer or hi-tech geek in Manhattan.
Surely that's not recognising marriage so much as recognising a 'family unit with two married adults but only one who wants to work'.
A more direct approach would be to increase any married person's personal allowance by £200/year and reduce everyone elses by whatever makes it balance.
M, this wasn't a serious policy proposal, I was just saying what he could do.
Your idea fails as The Holy Grail of the Paternalist Tories is a transferable personal allowance for non-working spouses. Stay at home mums have exalted status in their world view.
We could up the ante by adding your idea to mine to really f*** over single, working people (who are the collateral damage in all of this), because as you may have spotted, married couple where both partners work anyway would be worse off under my suggestion.
Yes, that's exactly why I was so offended by it.
Let's just tax non-married people £5,000 each? That would incentivise them.
M, that's even less clear, so in the spirit of thrashing out a non-serious policy, let's say that next year you have £194 bn in personal allowances to play with, 30 million adults in work, 20 million of whom are married and 3 million non-working spouses (in round figures).
a) What do you propose as the basic personal allowance; b) would it be transferable between spouses; c) what do you propose as the extra personal allowance for people with the right bit of paper; and d) would your answer from (c) be transferable as well?
I can see some case for taxing income at the 'family' level, which is what we mean here. I think I'd restrict it to families, ie those with children. That's about as far as I get.
Actually I've changed my mind. It's all far too complicated (I was about to suggest giving everyone with a child another £1,000 of personal allowance and limiting it to the lower-rate band and then realised it was absurd complexity). So in answer to your first question
a) £8,000
b)C)d) NO
Monogamy is unnatural. The state of nature is 80% of women fighting over a share of the top 10% of men. In these societies the high status men (alphas) sire most of the children and relations are polygamous because although the hypergamous cavewoman would prefer to pair-bond with the alpha he's too much in demand so she has to accept a part share. A part-share of an alpha is still preferable to a pair-bond to a beta.
The problem is civilisation can never exist when polygamy is the main structure. It leaves up to 80% of the male population uninvested in society and therefore unwilling to put all their surplus productive energy into the economy. With so many uninvested males, law & order is impossible.
Pre-modern societies just about stayed stable because death rates were so high. Hunter-gatherers in particular had an astoundingly high murder / war-death rate.
Any society that enforces monogamy sees a massive boost to its productiveness and it's social order. They dominate the polygamous hellholes. Civilisation ensures.
As indeed pretty much every advance in western civilisation came from a beta male.
In crude terms, just look at polygamous societies: West Africa, black inner city ghettos, white UK sink estates. All are violent stagnant hellholes which are only one level above mud huts because of subsidisation from monogamous economic producers.
Marriage always works when it is protected by society. When the barriers to human nature are removed (the four sirens I noted above) it unleashes the sheanderthal spirits of the 80% of women. Civilisation loses it's central pillar.
It only seems outlandish because we are only 40 years into the process of decline and we have other things to blame too (principally, socialism). I suspect the Babylonians and Romans thought it was outlandish when they introduced no fault divorce shortly before collapsing.
M, I accept your answers to b) c) and d) but your answer to a) doesn't stack up. 30 million x p.a. £8k = £240 billion, I said you have (for the purposes of this exercise) only £194 billion to play with.
K, a couple of good points there, but society does not "enforce" monogamy. Whichever way you cut it, there is a subtle advantage to monogamy which balances out the other stuff (even most gays or lesbians are monogamous).
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