Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (146)

From The Daily Telegraph:

Mr Padoan argues he should scrap many VAT exemptions – including food, passenger transport and domestic fuel – and abolish council tax and stamp duty in favour of “a property tax based on market values.”

... Instead of HM Revenue & Customs taxing property via stamp duty land tax (SDLT); inheritance tax (IHT); and – in the case of second homes – capital gains tax (CGT); annual liabilities would be calculated, based on estimations of house prices. But Mr Padoan argues that his reforms would “dampen fluctuations in house prices” and are essential to put the British economy on a more stable long-term footing.

I can't find the actual OECD report, but there's a brief summary of it here.

Jolly good, that list of taxes to be replaced will look familiar to regular readers. And then the Home-Owner-Ist shit storm is unleashed; in quick succession we get "would hit house prices", "unpopular", "tenants would face higher costs", "the need to value every property", the "Poor Widow Bogey" ("Any plans to increase the bands for council tax or introduce wealth tax are always accompanied by an outcry about elderly ladies living in large houses on limited incomes").

Yawn, been there, dealt with those.

Then the Homeys shift up a gear and start gibbering "... the more you tax something, the less you get of it. Taxing people’s homes would discourage home ownership and all the benefits that go with that", merrily ignoring the fact that the Home-Owner-Ist policies (heavy subsidies to and light taxation of owner-occupation or rental income) pursued by the UK government over the last ten years has led to a dramatic fall in the number of owner-occupiers (down from 72% to 69% if my memory serves correctly). The flipside is more buy-to-let landlords, more second homes and more vacant homes - homes which would become owner-occupied again if we had such a tax.

But the fun part is the very first comment, it appears that Homeys suffer from a terrible variant of dyslexia which prevents them from being able to take in the list of Bad Taxes which the OECD said should be replaced, and they launch straight into this:

For F**KS sake! More taxes? We're already massively over taxed. We pay tax from the second we're born to the moment till after we're dead. It's utterly disgusting. I'm sick of this endless BS form the state. It costs a f***ing fortune, provides bugger all and is next to incompetent in the dictionary.

I wonder, do these people go into a shop to buy something, do they just accept the goods and then start effing and blinding when the shopkeeper demands payment? Are their short term memories so bad that they forgot that they have just been given something which they wanted and are now being asked to provide something of equal value in return?