Thursday 10 October 2013

Two can play at that game.

From The Daily Mail:

• Highest paid to contribute almost 30% of all income tax in 2013-14
• Up from just 20% a decade ago as richest shoulder more of the burden
• £1million earners pay 12% of tax, up from 6.4% at the last election


So what? The top one per cent collect (at least) 15% of all taxable income and pay income tax at double the rate of basic rate taxpayers, that's your 30% right there.

Income tax is progressive and other taxes are regressive*. You can pick and choose to illustrate your point:

We could also point out that the top one per cent of earners only pay about one-and-a-half per cent of Employee's National Insurance, or one per cent of all Council Tax or TV licence payments. Or that income tax is only about a quarter of all tax revenues - it doesn't sound nearly as dramatic if you say that the income tax paid by the top one per cent of earners (who get 15% or 20% of all taxable income) is only seven or eight per cent of all tax revenues.

And why would it be so terrible if the top one per cent of UK landowners were expected to pay thirty per cent of all Land Value Tax? Why would that suddenly be so destabilising? Nobody's forcing them to own it and by simply owning land they contribute nothing of value to society as a whole.

* As it happens, the two most damaging taxes - VAT and Employer's NIC are fairly flat if expressed as a percentage of incomes; the people who lose out most from those two are the people who don't pay any at all, in other words, the businesses which go out of business and the people who end up unemployed.

5 comments:

DBC Reed said...

Have you read Martin Wolf's latest in FT:" Buyers beware of Britain's absurd property trap."(10.x.13) He sees the situation as hopeless, especially for the young. Since the young have put you in charge perhaps you should write in to FT and say what's what (some useful publicity: you know how popular the FT is among the young!) Seriously Wolf is right: this is a definitive moment when things get definitively terrible.

Anonymous said...

DBC, yes, I read it just now. Nobody cares though, YouGov says that half of people support HTB.

Bayard said...

YouGov says that half of people support HTB.

Yes, but which half? You could quite easily have a half that doesn't include any young people.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, read up at YouGov here.

Rather surprisingly, UKIP voters are least supportive. Maybe there's hope for us yet?

Bayard said...

Well, since the majority of people think (quite rightly, if you only look at past evidence) that house prices can only go up, it is hardly surprising that they want to join the Ponzi scheme, sorry, get a foot on the housing ladder.