The interviewer lady Natalie Graham sums it up nicely* at 3 mins 20 seconds : "You just exempt farmers and the elderly and you've got yourself quite a workable tax here which would solve a lot of economic problems."
* I don't get the obsession with farmers. It can't be impossible to work out how much income tax/NIC they pay and how much agricultural subsidies they receive, net off the two and divide it by the number of acres they farm to arrive at a fair LVT rate - it would work out at about £40/acre/year (+/- large regional variations) and that would be the end of that. And the Poor Widow In A Mansions has been used as a human shield for centuries, even if it would be in her best interests to trade down and free up a wodge of cash for herself. But hey.
Monday, 3 October 2011
Dave Wetzel on the BBC Politics Show yesterday
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11 comments:
Mark - do you see this kind of thing as straws in the wind or is LVT gaining traction?
I think people's justifiable skepticism of supposed "silver bullet" solutions makes it hard to convince them that there actually is a policy with no real downsides.
AKH, the idea is gaining traction. Perhaps it will lose traction again, I do not know.
Problem is that Homeys like Fallon mutter about "all sorts of problems with a new tax" when common sense says that it would be quite sufficient to slap these derelict sites with the same Business Rates as if they were developed and have done with it. Fallon also wittered on about "failed attempts to introduce LVT by former Labour governments" which is just an outright lie, as Dave points out.
RA, it's not scepticism, it's centuries of brainwashing telling them that there are ONLY downsides.
Don't know why it is suggested as a socialist policy. Historically it has been Liberals who have promoted it. History also tells us that socialists just botch it to increase the overall tax burden and conservatives just attempt to reduce the tax burden in favour of landowners.
I'd like to see Farron object to the fundamental concept of LVT to have fewer taxes.
Sorry I meant Fallon, Farron is that social democrat isn't he.
"I don't get the obsession with farmers."
Small farmers are a human shield for the supermarkets. They are also bound up in the Rural Idyll myth. Having said that, there is no need to exempt farmers, just farmland.
QP, I dunno why she said that. I'm compiling a list of LVT supporters in a widget down the side bar, and so far I haven't found that many socialists among them (except Dave W's LLC).
B, we've more or less agreed a policy on farmers, but whatever we do, the rates would be very, very low indeed, and as to "rural idyll" we still have planning laws, don't we?
Yeah but you know where exemptions and compensations end up?
To offer them shows a lack of confidence in the principles and consequences. It also opens the floodgates.
There will be no losers with an LVT.
Farmers would be miles better off when you net off the tax abolished on their enormous capital investments and wages.
The poor widow has been robbing workers and producers for years.
One worry -- even among those who clearly see that land, by right, is common property -- is this: Restoring common rights to land appears to be an injustice to those who have purchased it with their rightful wealth. Land being treated as private property for so long, they have based their calculations upon its permanence. So, it is said, justice requires that we compensate the owners if we abolish it.
The essential defect in this lies in the impossibility of bridging the radical difference between right and wrong. For the interests of landholders to be conserved, the interests and rights of others must be disregarded. If landholders lose nothing of their special privileges, the people at large can gain nothing.
Buying individual property rights would only give landholders a claim of the same kind and amount that their possession of land now gives them, only in another form. Through taxation, it would give them the same proportion of the earnings of labor and capital that they now appropriate in rent. The unjust advantage of landowners would be preserved, while the unjust disadvantage of others would be continued.
Yet even this discussion is a hopeful sign. Cries for justice are timid and humble when first protesting a time-honored wrong. We have been educated to look upon the "vested rights" of landowners with all the superstitious reverence that ancient Egyptians looked upon the crocodile.
But ideas grow when times are ripe, even though their first appearances are insignificant. The antislavery movement in the United States began with talk of compensating owners. But when four million slaves were emancipated, the owners got no compensation. Nor did they clamor for any. One day, the people of England or the United States will be sufficiently aroused to the injustice and disadvantages of individual ownership of land to reclaim it. And they will not trouble themselves about compensating landowners.
Nor should there be any concern. How absurd! If the land of any country belongs to the people of that country, what right -- in morality or justice -- do landowners have to compensation? If the land belongs to the people, why should they pay its value for their own land?
RS, I agree that the more existing taxes that are replaced with LVT with as few exemptions as possible (preferably none) the better, but I'm in two minds about compensation.
This is because landowners would be bought out at current very depressed market values and they would then pay the much higher ground rents in future, so let's say the government pays £2 trillion for all the land, then all it has to do is up the total LVT collected by £100 billion a year (i.e. up it from £300 bn to £400 bn) to amortise that extra £2 trillion debt.
Fallon and his ilk get right up my nose. Sanctimonious and smug.
MW, thats a nice scheme. Which is the simplest and cheapest though. And why not make quick work of it anyway?
They will not lose out either. There are no losers with LVT.
They just wont gain as much as workers and producers of wealth.
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