Emailed in by MBK from The Sunday Times:
What aspect of the tax system would you change?
I would scrap inheritance tax. The very rich don’t pay it, anyway. But if your mum and dad own a semi-detached house in south London and get killed in a car crash, the first thing you have to do, even before you finish grieving, is sell your house to pay the tax.
Ahem.
Paying by instalments on a house
If you plan to sell the house, you only need to find 10 per cent of the Inheritance Tax due by the six-month deadline...
If you plan to keep the house and live in it, you may prefer to pay by instalments because you only need to find 10 per cent of the Inheritance Tax each year (plus the interest), rather than having to pay all of it up front in one lump sum.
So there is no pressure to sell and it's still a lot cheaper than renting or paying a mortgage. I'd rather pay up to 4% in IHT each year for ten years than pay a mortgage for 25 years or pay rent for ever.
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19 minutes ago
7 comments:
It's the same canard as "if you can't pay your LVT you will have to sell your house / give your house to the government"
B, superficially, the whole Poor Widow Bogey has a lot of appeal, as countless readers' letters to the Daily Mailexpressgraph will attest.
But campaigning against a tax* for non-existent reasons and of which you have clearly zero practical understanding makes you look stupid.
* IHT is in isolation a shit tax, but that is not the point here.
Or better still - pay nothing. Don't have it.
Don't 90% of people sell the family home in probate anyway? MW I think you might have the figure. So not a sentimental thing, it's all about the money. Scrap IHT for everything and replace with a small increase in council tax by all means but don't pretend that the 'family home' is something that needs special treatment
M, I don't think there is an official statistic, but from personal experience, the answer is "most of them".
Incidentally, I've done a quick analysis of the results so far, and how different it would be under PR.
It can be found here
No government is going to change a system that has just put them in power to make it less likely to produce the same result next time.
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