Lying Home-Owner-Ist Shit Of The Day

From The Daily Mail:

What Vince said... and his real message

By Edward Heathcoat Amory

What he said: '(I want) to shift the tax base to property and land which cannot run away and represent, in Britain, an extreme concentration of wealth. I personally regret that Mansion Tax did not make it into the Coalition Agreement.'

What he meant: When I proposed the deeply unpopular Mansion Tax plan (which would hurt pensioners more than City speculators) before the election, I was forced to water it down. Now I can mention it without getting into trouble, because everyone knows that the Tories would never let me do it.

Vince is a politician like any other. Why would he deliberately propose something that would be 'unpopular'? It was Home-Owner-Ist propaganda like this that made it unpopular, not the underlying logic.

And why would it "hurt" pensioners? Commonsense tells us that if we are to replace income tax, VAT with Land Value Tax or a Progressive Property Tax, we'd have to exempt pensioners (or give them massive discounts or deferment or something or other) to have the faintest hope of making it stick. But City speculators, the whipping boys du jour, would lose out three fold:

1. They probably live in million pound houses. And I suspect that there are a lot more City speculators (and Russian oligarchs, Arab oil barons, Chinese Party functionaries etc) in million pound houses in the UK than there are pensioners.

2. They make money from lending other people money to buy million pound houses. Or they are estate agents who make money by selling people million pound houses.

3. They can't avoid the tax in any meaningful way.

What's not to like?

As an aside, if these 'City speculators' are thinking of buggering off to Switzerland, don't forget that Switzerland also has a number of different property taxes, which amount to something vaguely similar to Vince's proposed Mansion Tax. It's the stupid 50% super tax that's the killer (which raises £3 billion a year, allegedly) and swapping this for a Mansion Tax (which Vince expected would raise a paltry £1 billion or something) seems like a no-brainer to me.