From The Guardian:
The leading Labour moderate Tristram Hunt moved to reclaim the issue of inequality for his wing of the Labour party, calling for a property wealth tax [and] reversal of cuts to inheritance tax... within 100 days of a Labour government coming to power.
Making the case for a property wealth tax to replace the existing regressive council tax, Hunt pointed out that 14 OECD countries – including the US – raise a recurring tax on the value of residential property. An annual 0.5% tax upon the value of each property – less than most countries – would completely cover the cost of replacing the council tax, he said.
The tax would be raised on owners not occupiers, taking “generation rent” completely out of local taxes altogether.
He might as well just call it "Domestic Rates" and have done with it.
As per usual he is way off piste with Inheritance Tax though. It raises laughably little money, so you could get rid of that as well and bump up the Domestic Rates from 0.5% to 0.55% and keep going from there. SDLT, CGT and the TV licence fee are the next obvious candidates to be replaced, which would require a total rate of 0.65% or something like that.
My wife will be wondering why I am rejoicing at the fact that our Council Tax bill just went up by £1,700 a year, but needs must.
Tuesday, 8 December 2015
That's a start, I suppose...
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13 comments:
@MW I don't know whether you remember the issue of the New Statesman which was taken up with land reform: 20th Sept 2004.Tristram Hunt wrote a really favourable piece on Henry George entitled "A revolutionary who won over Victorian rebels"(on net) which got George right in his own context and was interesting about his relevance now.The point is that THunt always keeps on about the Labour Party needing to keep to the centre ground but he is a long way adrift from the Homownwerist centre where his deep-seated Georgist tendencies would be considered dangerously radical/ interesting/ relevant and not sufficiently boring.
DBC, yes you have mentioned it.
Would be quite useful if THunt re-branded Property Wealth Taxes and Henry George as "moderate".(In fact his ideas on property taxes are not so different from the LVT leanings of Corbyn, McDonell and Andy Burhnam.)
If only those idiotic lefty councils in London in the early 80s had not decided to "soak the rich", thus incentivising Thatcher to centralise taxation. They could have made a fact-based-claim for local tax and backed it up with evidence for how they used their powers wisely. instead we got the Idiot tendency in Liverpool and the scammers in Newcastle. And now we have to reclaim local rights from the greedy centre. The 70s and 80s were wasted decades.
Although this is not a LVT it is a property tax which discourages people from doing up their property etc.
@G
Rather a strange reading of the 70's and 80's.Things actually went downhill when in the Nixon Shock, Nixon stopped dollar conversion to gold (through the gold window) in '71 creating the present "system" of free floating fiat currencies. We had to apply for an IMF zone as inflation kicked in and groups like the British Unions and OPEC did not want to be paid in devaluing currencies.Margaret Thatcher won an election by patriotically declaring she would enforce the cuts demanded by the IMF as loan conditions.She then chickened out of making cuts in services under her own control and passed the cuts parcel to Heseltine to make cuts in local government.Hence the resistance.
@MW how much has yr income tax and NI bill gone up? Mine was £20k higher in the last year of the coalition than the first. Set to go up another £10k this year, for the crime of being of great value to the market...
LF, depends.
The stupid way of doing it is to value each home, and revalue it regularly. That is expensive, prone to arguments and discourages improvements.
The sensible way of doing it is to average out local values and charge the same for every home/plot graded by size of building or width of plot or whatever. So all semis in one street pay the same, whether they are extended or derelict.
That is cheap, can't be argues against and rewards improvements/penalises dereliction.
M, has your income gone up as well?
MW, yes it has, but more than half of the increase went to HMRC (would have been just 49% if it weren't for the High Income Child Benefit charge...) A significant amount of it also went to higher rents and eventually a higher mortgage when we bought but now I'm on the ladder! Pity the rungs are already too far apart for us to move, and don't look to be getting any closer together for the foreseeable future. Maybe I'll win the lottery or something.
However, if I'd managed to dress up my income as an increase in the price of my house... Now there's one for the accountants! What if you got an option to sell your house to your company for x in lieu of a salary?
@"Mark Wadsworth said...
LF, depends.
The stupid way of doing it is to value each home, and revalue it regularly. That is expensive, prone to arguments and discourages improvements.
The sensible way of doing it is to average out local values and charge the same for every home/plot graded by size of building or width of plot or whatever. So all semis in one street pay the same, whether they are extended or derelict." Good point.
Sadly I think that they will do the stupid way but hopefully the easy way will win out.
M, excellent plan. Instead of salary, you do MEW on your house. No tax on that!
LF, they wouldn't do it anyway.
"We had to apply for an IMF zone as inflation kicked in and groups like the British Unions and OPEC did not want to be paid in devaluing currencies."
That's a myth.
http://www.3spoken.co.uk/2013/03/uk-borrowed-foreign-currency-from-imf.html
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