Sobers, who has the attention span of a rather annoying child, played the car-d for the umpteenth time. He refuses to address the difference between how cars come into existence and how land comes into existence and then waffles on endlessly about 'ownership', having stared out of the window and picked his nose while teacher was explaining it the last umpteen times, but for those who weren't paying attention, the Homey or Faux Lib typically re-opens the debate as follows:
"Everything only has value because others can be excluding from having/possessing it. If I cannot enforce ownership of my car what use is it to me, or anyone else?"
The patient Georgist then has to remind the Homey or Faux Lib of how things work in the real world:
"We have covered cars a dozen times, and I do wonder sometimes whether you don't understand or simply don't want to - to recap briefly.
1. A car has to be manufactured, individuals have to invest their own skills, time and money into making it. If demand increases, the price does not go up - all that happens is that more cars are made.
2. They exchange the car for the equivalent value of somebody else's output.
3. A car depreciates over time. Its value does not depend on where it is parked. I cannot increase the value of a car by buying one in Newcastle and parking it in Sandbanks, Poole, Dorset.
4. A car is not created 'by the community', title is not created by fencing off a pre-existing car and getting the force of the government on my side.
5. Possession of a car is largely a physical thing. A car with good security, locks etc is worth more than one which can be easily stolen. If your car gets nicked, there is little that the police can do to recover it.
6. And yes, there are areas where the police is quite good at recovering stolen cars and deterring car crime - land values in these areas are higher.
7. As a matter of fact, car owners/users pay full whack £55 billion a year in taxes on depreciating assets worth £350 billion - what they are really paying for is the right to use UK roads. If you take your car abroad, its value is unchanged (barring the LHD RHD debacle) and you pay a commensurate amount of tax elsewhere.
8. If taxes were levied on land and buildings at the same rate as taxes on cars, that'd be enough to replace all other taxes.
"The idea that land is somehow uniquely guaranteed by the existence of society is nonsense."
Try telling that to an olive grower in the West Bank when the Israeli Defence Force marches in, turfs him out and builds a new Jewish settlement. If he sees them coming, he can flee and take his goats, car, TV, steel ingots, whatever, with him. It is now up to the Israelis to decide who 'owns' the land."
The bored child having stared out of the window while teacher was explaining it then re-sets the clock to where they were five or ten minutes earlier and starts again...
I'm not talking about the in and outs of how cars are made, whether they appreciate or depreciate in value etc etc ...Ownership of land is EXACTLY the same in this way, as ownership of anything. If you can't admit as much there's no point even continuing to reason with you.
Jesus wept.
If we want to drag legal concepts or man-made law into this, there is a certain hierarchy of 'ownership'. If somebody has just created something with his own hands and somebody else grabs it and runs away with it, then by the standards of a young child, an animal or the most primitive society, the first person 'owns' it and the other person is 'a thief'. If that somebody else comes along with a lot of his big and tough mates and they grab it, they are still thieves.
But if people bumble around doing their best, creating stuff with their own efforts, and then somebody else comes along and grabs half of it because he has the bigger and tougher mates (which is how income tax works, or how rents are collected), claiming that he has the law on his side, then to whom does that 'stuff' belong? The people who made it or the people who took it? Who's the 'owner' and who's the 'thief' in this scenario?
Nope - it was ridicule
1 hour ago
35 comments:
You are not the "owner" of the car you bought, look again at the registration document, you are the registered "keeper".
The document used to be titled the "Owners Log Book", as you are called and by your silence you accept that you are the registered keeper,your car can be confiscated by the "authorities" without the need to involve a judge nor courtroom.
The lowest of the lowly Police Constable can take your car.
There is what I would term 'Moral law' and there is practical reality.
Moral law says that you own your own labour and the fruits thereof. Thus if you work for someone and get paid in kind (lets say with some wood) and with that wood you fashion a table and chair, then you 'own' that table and chair.
But in reality you only own that table and chair to the extent you can prevent someone else from taking it from you. In the absence of a State or organised society, that means to the extent you can secure your own house, and defend yourself against people who wish to take your table and chair.
Once you introduce society, and a codified system of law, and enforcement of that law, then your moral ownership of your table and chair are backed by the collective force of society.
But the basic premise is that practical ownership of anything is ultimately only backed by force, either your own, or society's on your behalf. Society's laws can back up moral law, or it can substitute its own concepts - taxation for example is contrary to moral law.
There may be (indeed are) many differences between the natures of land and other things one can own. But that the existence of a State allows us practical ownership of ALL assets (land/goods/property/resources) cannot be denied, and thus to claim that ownership of land is uniquely guaranteed by the State is totally wrong.
You own your own labour and the fruits thereof. Land cannot be made, and can therefore only be made by state/comunity guarantee, or exchanged with someone who has got the state/community's guarantee. I think you confuse the fact that since you can use labour to produce the means to exchange for land, that land is somehow the same as a chair or a car. But what you are in fact exchanging for is a continued legal service.
Anon1, why are you dragging cars into a a debate about Land Value Tax? Cars are too highly taxed if anything.
S: "There may be (indeed are) many differences between the natures of land and other things one can own." I'd stop right there if I were you. Another of the points which you repeatedly fail to address is who or what creates land values. The answer is of course 'the community'. I'd say as a general rule, things belong to the people who create them.
Anon2: "what you are in fact exchanging for is a continued legal service."
Thanks, exactly. The seller or landlord is getting money for something which the state provided him for free. The land owner banks nearly all the money, the state does all the work.
@Sobers
If you make a table and chair you can,of course,stay in all day and defend them,but you can't do much else.Owners of 50's American cars in Cuba sit all day in them after taking their families down the beach ,because they don't want people leaning against them and having photos taken.
Although you say taxation is contary to moral law, most people see it as payment for services they can't be arsed to provide themselves: schooling for the kids,an inter-connected police force over the entire country;somebody who mends the road not only outside your gaff but everywhere; a library for books you are only going to read once .Seems like a bargain really especially as your payments are reduced by colossal economies of scale and are also proportional to how much you can afford to pay ,(the problem with user fees being that,say with a toll bridge,the rich guy in his Bugatti Veron pays the same toll as the working class stiff in his Ford Fiesta).
It's the 'arguing with an idiot' problem. All they do is drag you down to their level. The technique is standard; as they start lose they shift the basis for their argument. You have then to keep dragging them back to the point. It what that well know prat Wedgie benn did - when losing the argument just shout 'balls'.
Sobers. This is an error. Moral law is universal. It's know as justice. Society can adopt laws that either conform to it or oppose it. Conform and be rewarded. Oppose and be punished. There is no escaping this natural law. The bible has been mentioned in this post. This is what it says in 1000s of pages. Its time we all woke up.
MW You have an aversion to defining terms clearly and agreeing on them before proceeding into economic dialogue.
I cannot sympathise with you with this guy because you flat refuse to do what must be done if certainty is to be attained.
If you were to start out by defining terms like:
Wealth
Private property
Common property
That may help because one has to ask the real moral question of what by natural right belongs to whom.
Alas you "do not do morals". You will be providing infinite evidence for ever. All the best of good luck with that.
DBC, your first example reminds me of another high tide mark of Libertarian looniness, that we can save money by scrapping the police and prisons and everybody buying himself a shotgun.
L, Home-Owner-Ism is inherently contradictory, so they'll make completely contradictory arguments against LVT, for example "It's an attack on success" and "What about the low income family who bought in the right area?", usually within teh same rant.
RS, you try agreeing those terms with the HO-FL movement, as far as they are concerned...
Wealth = land
Private property = land
Common property = there to be sold off by the government.
What's the point in "doing morals"? The HO-FL morals go as far as "It's moi laarnd and Oi've paid for it!" and there endeth the discussion.
Sobers,
You spend months arguing with Wandsworth that LVT is unfair and give examples such as the granny in the big house etc. After these empirical possibilities have been met by W you change track. Now LVT lacks analytical power you triumph: there is no substantive difference between any individuals possessions in society, be they land or goods and services (so no job for LVT). To and observer like myself,if W means that Sobers constantly invents larger cirles of argument in which to hide his starting point, then I think W is correct and Sobers and his motives starts to become suspect. Is this analysis unfair old chap?
Best,
MikeW
MW Am in complete agreement with you. What you are doing is a noble cause. Evangelising about how daft the current set up is. Keep going. Do not give up.
My point is to ask them how they can proceed if they have not agreed yet on what property belongs to whom? They are just making a claim.
There IS one thing that DEFINITELY belongs to you as private property. Can you guess what that thing is? That is where you start from. I still get folks denying even this, but they are Slaves and they keep voting for more slavery. There is little hope for them. We are the Free! Do not give up.
Moral law is not something we can change. It is nature. One either complies or objects to it as a free choice. And faces the consequences. Good or bad. It applies to economics and social organisation with the same force as it does gravity.
If the discussion does indeed end there, how come they keep coming back? A la Richard Murphy. They know deep down they are in error and are essentially confessing. Else they would just ignore you.
Keep it up.
Mike, ta for back-up. To be fair, Sobers has never made a secret of the fact that he owns lots of land near Swindon and makes a load of money every year by getting planning permission and selling off bits of it.
RS: "how they can proceed if they have not agreed yet on what property belongs to whom?"
I'm afraid they have agreed. The very word 'property' is incorrectly used as being synonymous with 'land and buildings'. And this belongs to whoever 'owns' it.
Stuff like your earned income or the value of what you produce (unless it's buildings) isn't really regarded as property at all, and so it is perfectly acceptable to tax this at savage rates.
MW thats correct. They are agreeing that:
EVEN THEIR OWN BODIES
can be owned by someone else.
"SLAVES"
Your blog is identifying this to them. That is a very painful thing for them to accept. You must be crucified.
Hmm, slavery. Bondage or wage, who gives a shit, it's still slavery.
You are not the "owner" of the car you bought, look again at the registration document, you are the registered "keeper".
Anon, Just because the registration document for your car says you are the registered keeper, doesn't mean to say that you are not also the owner. The state doesn't give a stuff about who owns a car, all they are interested in is who is the registered keeper, i.e. the personal responsible for it. I used to share an office with a man who was the registered keeper of a car that belonged to his mother.
"3. A car depreciates over time. Its value does not depend on where it is parked. I cannot increase the value of a car by buying one in Newcastle and parking it in Sandbanks, Poole, Dorset."
You can buy a car in Newcastle and sell it for more than you paid for it in London (or you certainly used to be able to). Isn't that increasing its value?
B: "You can buy a car in Newcastle and sell it for more than you paid for it in London"
Honest? But what's the spread on that - five or ten per cent of the buying/selling price? It can't be huge.
Buying a car in Newcastle and selling it for more in London is fair enough but you can't do it without the labour and cost of moving it. Basically you are "improving it" by changing its location, moving it closer to the London buyer. Thus saving the London buyer the effort (and possibly lost wages) involved in travelling to Newcastle to get the car.
You can buy cars even more cheaply if you get them from the ROI but then you need to do more work re-registering them, etc. So the profit is about the same. It all balances out.
Look MW constantly makes statements that I pick up on and point out are wrong.
Land values are NOT the only values created by 'the community'. They are one of a range of values that the community creates, from the price of various types of labour, to the prices of goods, and raw materials.
Land ownership is NOT uniquely guaranteed by 'the community' or the State, as I have repeatedly pointed out, the very concept of practical ownership of anything is community created.
As for 'no one creates land', well unless you are some sort of cosmic god, no-one creates anything. One can convert raw materials from one state to another, or change their shape to manufacture items, but creation ex nihilo is out of our realm.
The growing of wood is not done by human effort, iron ore, oil and coal exist in the earth's crust, created by whoever or whatever created the universe. Man had nothing to do with it.
Man uses the gifts of Nature in order to survive and prosper, be they land, raw materials or food. Ultimately he is dependent on a limited amount of resources (both land and raw materials), and sunlight (which is limited in the very very very long term, but for practical purposes we can say is infinite).
I am NOT necessarily arguing against LVT, but I am fed up with it being promoted by statements that are demonstrably nonsense.
(Anon2)
Sobers, you are right, raw materials, especially non-renewable ones, are prime candidates for taxation. Sure the market/community decides the prices for all labour and commodities, and it does indeed establish the right of any ownership. But you have to be quite daft not to recognise any difference between labour/goods and land/raw material in regards to both aspects. Price affects the production of the former, and not at all the latter. Imagine hunter-gatherer society. You made a bow, and you carry it around, it's not at all hard to accept for the other tribesmen that you do own it, and it does not take away the other tribesmen their opportunity to make their own bows. Try explaining you own the woods.
S: "Land values are NOT the only values created by 'the community'."
Maybe so, maybe not.
But even if we accept your ownership point (which is an irrelevance), land values in the absence of 'a community' (people, businesses, shops, roads and rail, police, whatever) are negligible, so conversely it is quite true to say that "land/location values are created entirely by the community" (subtle distinction for farmland - the farmer who looks after his fields has created that value with his own efforts, but this is not location value, this is improvement value and not a suitable subject for taxation).
Other examples of community-created values are radio spectrum, landing slots at airports, cherished number plates, taxi driver licences and any other state-protected or natural monopoly (of which there are very few - copyrights and patents, fishing rights, for example). All of these are suitable subjects for taxation.
And as Anon2 says, raw materials are also suitable subjects for taxation, and in practice most countries charge people money for extraction rights. But the cost/value of raw materials used in a modern economy is negligible - most of the cost is extraction, smelting, packaging etc.
I'm also puzzled that you use the phrase 'gifts of nature' and remind us that they are finite in order to justify an anti-LVT stance. Those are arguments in favour of LVT, if anything.
Things like cars, TVs, haircuts, heart operations are at the other end of the scale, they are created nigh-on 100% by the individuals involved in creating them (by definition), communities do not magically create cars or increase the value of cars. The amount of these things is barely limited by the amount of raw materials available and is 99% down to human effort and ingenuity etc.
So no, it is not black and white, but it's certainly very, very very, dark grey versus very, very, very pale grey and it is perfectly easy to distinguish between the two.
Thank you Anon2 for picking up on the nub of my point. There may indeed be cogent reasons for LVT based on the differences between the values the community creates for raw materials and manufactures vs the values it creates for land. But MW constantly repeats that land is the only thing that the community creates value for, and that it is the only thing the community creates ownership of. Which is nonsense.
LVT is promoted as some sort of moral tax, a tax that has only good effects, that is somehow more ethical than other taxes.
Which is wrong. All taxes run contrary to moral law IMO. The basis of taxation is theft, and any tax is ultimately stealing someones labour with the threat of violence underpinning it. LVT is no better than any other tax in that respect.
And I don't know why MW constantly points out that fact that I am a landowner who hopes to make money from gaining planning permission for housing, as if my opposition to LVT was some sort of vested interest. If you care to read my posts as to alternatives to LVT, I repeatedly suggest radical relaxation of planning rules to reduce the price of land for housing. This would lose me (potentially) millions, but I can see it would be good for the nation. Under LVT I suspect I would be considerably better off - no CGT, no IHT, no income tax/NI etc etc, but the same restrictions on planning.
S: "But MW constantly repeats that land is the only thing that the community creates value for, and that it is the only thing the community creates ownership of. Which is nonsense."
No I never said that, there is a long list of other stuff like radio spectrum etc but the value of those things pales into insignifiance compared to land/location values, so is a minor topic.
"LVT is promoted as some sort of moral tax, a tax that has only good effects, that is somehow more ethical than other taxes. Which is wrong."
No, which is right. If your roof is leaking and a man comes round and charges you £1,000 to fix it, then you are happy to pay if this increases the value of your house by at least £1,000. There is nothing immoral or unethical about him expecting to be paid or you having to pay him.
The value of land is created to 99% by the actions of the community, so why is it unethical or immoral for the community to be paid for this?
"All taxes run contrary to moral law IMO. The basis of taxation is theft, and any tax is ultimately stealing someones labour with the threat of violence underpinning it."
Maybe, maybe not, but I can just as well say:
"All rent payments run contrary to moral law IMO. The basis of rent collection is force, and all rents are ultimately stealing someones labour with the threat of violence underpinning it."
So let's make the punishment fit the crime :-)
"I don't know why MW constantly points out that fact that I am a landowner who hopes to make money from gaining planning permission for housing,"
I don't 'constantly' point it out. You volunteered this information yourself I was merely explaining to Mike W that you have no hidden agenda, you are quite open about your agenda.
"I repeatedly suggest radical relaxation of planning rules to reduce the price of land for housing."
Red herring, separate topic. I agree with you on that but LVT has the same good effects with or without planning restrictions and cancels out the downsides of either system.
"Under LVT I suspect I would be considerably better off - no CGT, no IHT, no income tax/NI etc etc."
Thank you - most people would be better off with LVT/CI system. That is the whole point. Whether you consider 'most people being better off' a desirable goal or not is a separate issue, but it sounds good to me.
"If your roof is leaking and a man comes round and charges you £1,000 to fix it, then you are happy to pay if this increases the value of your house by at least £1,000."
No. You are happy to pay if you cannot find anyone to do it for less and you want to fix the leak in your roof.
No one assesses the need to execute a repair by asking what it will add to the value of his house, to suggest otherwise indicates a somewhat warped view of human nature.
Or, perhaps, it indicates an obsession about certain aspects of land ownership.
"most people would be better off with LVT/CI system"
I've read this argument before but cannot see how it can be so in any meaningful sense. All sorts of twiddles can be made to the taxation system that render a numerical majority a tiny bit better off than before but that is no reason to implement them.
For so long as the overall tax-take remains the same, every winner benefits only because someone else loses. That might or might not be desireable, but to argue that "most people would be better off with LVT/CI system" suggests LVT possesses magical powers to produce wealth out of nothing. The economically illiterate Gordon Brown tried doing that, and look where we are now.
On the definition of economic value TFB comes closest to the cigar. The value of anything in exchange is:
The least amount of work you are prepared to give for that thing
This is how ALL value is measured for anything.
This is not off topic. It is essential before proceeding with any economic reasoning.
Nice one guys. Now then, do we understand what the term 'value' means in terms of exchanges of wealth?
TFB, your first comment is pure Home-Owner-Ism. So you believe in a constant and deliberate transfer of wealth from non-land owners to land-owners. Well that's your point of view not mine.
Your second comment is also quite inane: "All sorts of twiddles can be made to the taxation system that render a numerical majority a tiny bit better off than before but that is no reason to implement them."
I'm not suggesting "twiddles" but replacing ten thousand pages of twiddles with one simple flat tax on land value.
"For so long as the overall tax-take remains the same, every winner benefits only because someone else loses."
Nope. Laffer Curve says the amount of tax you raise at a rate of 25% is much the same as the amount you raise with an 80% tax rate. With an 80% tax rate the economy would be a lot smaller than with a 25% tax rate. Most people are better off with a 25% tax rate.
Similarly. everybody is better off with a zero per cent tax rate and just paying tax on the value of land they own. If you don't like paying tax, then trade down and let somebody else live in the nice house and pay the tax.
"... suggests LVT possesses magical powers to produce wealth out of nothing."
And income tax and VAT are so magical, because..?
Of course the tax system doesn't produce wealth out of nothing, people do that BUT what is clear to everybody except a moron, a Home-Owner-Ist or a Faux Lib is that the current tax system discourages economic activity, i.e. discourages wealth from being created in the first place.
LVT has no such impact. Why would it? Will anybody say "My LVT bill is so high, I'm going to stop going to work or start working cash in hand"? Nope.
Plenty of countries have tried replacing income taxes with LVT in one form or another and unsurprisingly, all that wealth that previously wasn't being produced started being produced.
"The economically illiterate Gordon Brown tried doing that, and look where we are now."
So you agree with me that G Brown's Home-Owner-Ist policies, of persuading people that they became richer when house prices went up was a load of nonsense? Good. That's a first step towards understanding.
PS, in future, can you stop these stupid childish comments? I've been perfectly polite with you so far but if you continue in this vein, I'll just delete them.
"That might or might not be desireable, but to argue that "most people would be better off with LVT/CI system" suggests LVT possesses magical powers to produce wealth out of nothing".
What were you doing when they tried to teach you maths? If there are nine people with £1 and one with £91 and the person with £91 gives each of the other nine £1, then "most (90% of the) people are better off", they have twice as much money, but the sum total of wealth is still £100.
B, yes, in the short term that is what will happen (no harm in that).
More importantly, our current marginal average income tax rate is about fifty per per cent and the deadweight costs depress the size of the economy to (say) a fifth lower than what it would be.
So get rid of all taxes on income, output and profits and hey presto! There's now £125 on the table. The £91 guy will probably end up with £100, but the others will now have £2.50 each so everybody wins (apart from bankers, politicians and other rent seekers).
Again the old canards come out.
LTV is NOT redistributing from 'the rich' to 'the poor'. The £91 guy most likely will better off under LVT.
LVT redistributes from those who have more property wealth relative to their income to those who have less property wealth relative to their income.
This relative property wealth will occur at ALL levels of income in society. So you will get people with low incomes who happen to own a house outright losing out, and people with millions in the bank gaining. In this respect LVT is highly regressive.
If you add in MWs citizens income concept at the same time, people at the bottom of the pile will lose out also, as there are many benefit claimants who get more than £3.5k per person per year currently. We know this because of the current hoo-hah over capping benefits at £26K. At MWs CI values (£3.5k per adult £1.5k per child) you would need to have 13 children before you could get over £26k for a couple plus their kids). So many (possibly 50%+) current benefits claimants would get less under CI than now.
People hear about LVT and assume that it is going to unlock some magical pot of gold that will allow everyone to be better off. That the 'the rich' will have their pips squeaked, and of course, I'm not rich so I'll be better off.
The truth is rather different. There will indeed be more winners than losers, but those losers will be distributed across the entire income scale, and concentrated on the middle income ones. The super rich will be massive winners.
Try explaining to the electorate that under your new scheme Lakshmi Mittal is tens of millions better off, and Granny is going to lose out. Not going to go down well I suspect.
S, what 'old canards'? Indisputably there will be more INCOME to go around (Laffer effects and all that).
B was referred to UK land ownership. At the moment it is very concentrated (a small group owns 91% of it), in future it will be less concentrated (in fact, everybody's share of land values will be exactly equal, because everybody gets the same Citizen's Dividend).
So again, you are mixing half-truths with politics, i.e. lies.
"LTV is NOT redistributing from 'the rich' to 'the poor'. The £91 guy most likely will better off under LVT."
In terms of earned income, clearly LVT redistributes much less than income tax. I would have thought that to be blindingly obvious.
In terms of concentration of land wealth, it very much re-distributes, or actually it PRE-distributes, it prevents the concentration of ownership arising in the first place.
"The truth is rather different. There will indeed be more winners than losers, but those losers will be distributed across the entire income scale, and concentrated on the middle income ones. The super rich will be massive winners."
YOu are Ed Miliband and I claim my £5!!
"Lakshmi Mittal is tens of millions better off, and Granny is going to lose out."
Hooray! The Poor F-ing Widow Bogey gets a quadzillionth outing!
FFS, exemptions, discounts, deferment, bigger state pension, trade down, take in a lodger, get your heirs to pay, equity release, we've done this plenty of times.
S, you clearly don't understand the UK welfare system either, do you?
"If you add in MWs citizens income concept at the same time, people at the bottom of the pile will lose out also, as there are many benefit claimants who get more than £3.5k per person per year currently. We know this because of the current hoo-hah over capping benefits at £26K."
Well over half that £26k is Housing Benefit. So our family on welfare get somewhere to live, and a slumlord collects £15,000 in Housing Benefit.
The actual cash people receive would be much the same with a Citizen's Income as with current system/tax credits etc. And when I'm in charge, the money currently wasted on housing benefit will be spent on building more council houses - everybody will still have somewhere to live, although there will be precious few welfare claimants in Westminster or Chelsea.
FFS!
Lots of Grannies will be worse off, its simple maths. If Granny owns a house more than 7 times her income (by your calculations), which is pretty likely, she's a loser. Simple as that. That's not widows in mansions, but normal Grannies in semis or terraced houses.
"In terms of earned income, clearly LVT redistributes much less than income tax. I would have thought that to be blindingly obvious."
It might be blindingly obvious to you, but to the average person hearing about LVT, they will assume that 'the rich' will be paying more, that the Duke of Westminster will be reduced to penury. Not that their parents will be taxed more while Roman Abramovich gets even more billions.
As for housing benefit - what happens then to all those folk on benefits who get their rent paid now - under CI they get (assuming 2 adult + 2 kids) £10k in CI. How do they pay their rent and live on £10K? Given rents will go up under LVT (you have admitted that too) where do people like this live? Are you planning to move everyone who currently gets housing benefit paid to a private landlord out of their homes and into State provided housing? That'll be popular - given the usual condition of State housing and the neighbourhoods where its located.
S, maybe I ought to repeat that a bit more slowly:
"FFS, exemptions, discounts, deferment, bigger state pension, trade down, take in a lodger, get your heirs to pay, equity release, we've done this plenty of times."
And as I explained, it may well be that pensioners end up with slightly less pension once you minus off the LVT, but by definition, their heirs will end up with more (it's the same tax bill, just shared out differently).
Now, I have no objection to looking after old age pensioners and guaranteeing a certain minimum standard. But if YOU want YOUR parents to have a higher than necessary standard, why don't YOU pay for it out of your higher net income?
"As for housing benefit - what happens then to all those folk on benefits who get their rent paid now - under CI they get (assuming 2 adult + 2 kids) £10k in CI. How do they pay their rent and live on £10K?"
Again, perhaps I'd better repeat what I said except a bit more slowly:
"when I'm in charge, the money currently wasted on housing benefit will be spent on building more council houses - everybody will still have somewhere to live, although there will be precious few welfare claimants in Westminster or Chelsea."
With more supply and an absence of subsidies to rents which push up prices, the market says that marginal rents, i.e. those which the poorest people can afford, will sink to a level which the poorest people can afford. Nobody need be homeless.
And most of today's poorest will have jobs anyway, because of income tax, VAT and so on being scrapped.
Sobers et Al
Read my lips:
EVERYONE WILL BE BETTER OFF WITH AN LVT.
YES I SAID EVERYONE.
E V E R Y O N E
Is this clear?
Proof? Read this.
The Effect on Individuals and Classes
But please do not start reading it until you can find a quiet moment and a quiet spot. It really really needs one to think very very carefully about it. But is is not complex.
I'm not being funny or rude by saying this. I am deadly serious.
"LTV is NOT redistributing from 'the rich' to 'the poor'. The £91 guy most likely will better off under LVT."
WTF is that supposed to mean? I was simply demonstrating that it is possible for "most people to be better off" without having to "produce wealth out of nothing". LVT might or might not achieve this but that doesn't alter the fact that it is possible, contrary to your assertion.
"It might be blindingly obvious to you, but to the average person hearing about LVT, they will assume that 'the rich' will be paying more, that the Duke of Westminster will be reduced to penury. Not that their parents will be taxed more while Roman Abramovich gets even more billions."
The fact that LVT fails to effectively pander to the Envious is not an argument against it. You appear to be one of those who would prefer to be given £1000 and your neighbour the same, rather than being given £2000 and your neighbour £5000.
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