Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (495)

Sobers came up with a corker recently. My thinking is that trying to establish pseudo-accurate valuations for each individual home is pointless, and we should do averaging and banding of similar homes (by size or type, or plot size or plot frontage/width etc) in each area and have same the LVT bill for all homes in the same band. We are used to Council Tax banding, and ATED (mansion tax lite) is by very wide bands. SDLT operates in bands etc. To me this makes sense.

Sobers pointed out - rather too gleefully IMHO - that in some small areas (one postcode sector or local council ward or whatever), there can be a wide range of values between similar homes. He referred to an unnamed town near him and said that semi-detached ex-council homes on a 'scuzzy' estate there sell for £300,000-ish while semi-detached homes in the nicer parts sell for £400,000-ish.

I'll take his word for it that this is all true (I am sure that there are such places), that they are all in one postcode sector or local council ward, and that valuers wouldn't pick this up and split that area into two separate valuation areas, or the valuers wouldn't discreetly classify the ex-council homes as small semi-detached in Band C and put the nicer ones into the default Band for normal semi's, Band D.

Therefore *drumroll* LVT would act like a Poll Tax where 'the poor' have to pay as much as 'the rich'! Game over for LVT!

On closer inspection this is of course nonsense on stilts, LVT is the polar opposite of a Poll Tax (it has all its advantages with none of the downsides). How can LVT be simultaneously 'an attack on wealth' and a poll tax? But we have seen The Powers That Be do such fear mongering on an industrial scale, expecially with the Cameron referenda (alternative vote, Scotland, EU) and I wouldn't put it past the Mailexpressgraph to come up with this sort of shite.

I haven't thought of a punchy slogan to rebut this yet, but credit where credit's due.
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Another one came up in conversation with Henry Law. We agreed that local taxes are inherently regressive (which we, like most people, think is A Bad Thing, opinions differ) and so LVT would have to be a national tax at a national rate, the same as most other taxes. So instead of local councils getting central govt funding for 80% - 90% of their expenditure and topping up with a bit of Council Tax, they all get grants to cover 100% of a reasonable level of expenditure, end of.

Whether that is flat-rate, per capita funding, or with loads of extras for 'deprived' areas or 'rural areas' or wherever the government of the day wants to buy votes, like the current system is a separate debate. I always prefer flat-rate, per capita of course.

The weak argument FOR local taxes is that it encourages fiscal responsibility by local councils and/or some democratic safeguards against high spending councils. So a national LVT that is divvied up equally everywhere, same as income tax or VAT receipts that pass through central government, is undemocratic..?

How exactly are fully-funded councils undemocratic? Is a fully funded police service undemocratic? Should the police meet their finance needs with on-the spot fines? The local/national distinction is in itself nonsense, if you think about it - nearly all spending is 'local' to somewhere. So your democratic safeguard is being able to vote for a low-spending government (if that were possible, you can choose between high spending Labour and tax-raising, black hole spending, fiscally irresponsible Tories).

The next layer of democracy is that local councils would still be elected, and you would judge them on results. Their job is to keep as many people as possible happy within a limited budget, so they have to choose fixing potholes vs having more cycle lanes; better old age care vs more daytime nursery places; longer library opening hours vs better upkeep of parks and playgrounds. Judging them by how high (or low) Council Tax is, is idiotic anyway, the level of your Council Tax depends largely on how 'generous' the central government is when it comes to funding your council.

(Which is why we pay twice as much Council Tax as people a few hundred yards away who are in Greater London, not Essex. So what? We paid accordingly less for the house and would be able to sell it for accordingly less. We could halve our Council tax bill by moving, but that would cost us £100,000s, so what's the point?)

Oh really?

This will not help.

Instead of getting a criminal record for refusing to pay the telly tax you'll get a CCJ.  Which can be very damaging to your credit history and ability to obtain a mortgage.

Your handy cut-out and keep guide: Poll tax, land value tax, income tax

Here's a summary of my longer article at KAALVTN:

I just don't get it.

How can LVT-opponents simultaneously claim that both poll tax and income tax are preferable to LVT? That's like you saying that 20 degrees is an uncomfortable temperature and that you'd prefer a mixture of 10 degrees and 30 degrees.

AFAICS, LVT has all the advantages of Income Tax (with none of the disadvantages); all the advantages of a Poll Tax (with none of the disadvantages); and beats both hands down in other respects. LVT is the Goldilocks tax which sits comfortably in the middle.

If you want, you can make LVT a bit more like a Poll Tax* or you can make LVT more like Income Tax**. Or indeed you could do both at the same time, although I'm not really sure what the point of that would be, unless you really want the base the entire tax system on the narrow interests of a tiny minority of Poor Widows In Mansions.

* Under Domestic Rates, the tax payable for the most expensive homes was a hundred times as much as for the cheapest; with Council Tax the ratio is only four-to-one, in other words Council Tax has a large Poll Tax element and a small ad valorem element.

** By having discounts or exemptions for lower earners in high value housing, capping a household's LVT bill at a certain percentage of total income and/or by having a deferment/roll-up option for pensioners.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (182)

The Home-Owner-Ists love using false comparisons. They refuse to look at the LVT/Citizen's Income system in the round, which enables them to convince themselves that somehow everybody would be worse off, despite it being abundantly clear that nearly everybody would be better off, if nothing else, there would be the huge boost to the economy by shifting taxation from personal incomes and output to consumption of public goods (i.e. land rents).

So they say things like this: "LVT is unfair to small households and single people, because they would have to pay as much as a larger household or a family [in the same sized house] even though they consume less public services. Not only that, the larger household or family would receive much more in Citizen's Income payments."

And with the next breath they say things like this: "LVT is anti-family, because families need bigger houses and so would have to pay more in LVT."

i. So it'd be helpful if they could make up their minds whether they are going to portray LVT/CI as pro-family or anti-family, even though in truth it is neither, the system is completely indifferent between the two, it's up to individuals to organise their own lives as they see fit. As it happens, by and large, the current system is very anti-family, so compared to that, LVT/CI is pro-family, but only in relative terms.

With the first statement, they jumble up taxation and spending, which are two separate issues.

ii. For example, let's agree that some tax receipts are spent on children's education (preferably via education vouchers). Every child benefits equally; adults will have benefited from it in the past and parents will benefit from the ongoing subsidy; the economy and society as a whole benefit if people are properly educated (certainly up to GSCE or A level - beyond that stage, the private benefits to the student far outweigh the benefit to society as a whole). The same logic applies to any universal benefit, such as taxpayer funded health care or even the Citizen's Income.

iii. The taxation is the other side, under LVT/CI households are not expected to pay for 'public services' as such (it would be madness to try and finance a Citizen's Income with a Poll Tax, for example), they are merely expected to honour their half of the agreement by which the state excludes 'everybody else' from their randomly assigned plot of land.

It's the same as paying for petrol for your car, it costs the same per litre whether you travel in a small car or a big car; whether you travel alone or with four other people - how much petrol you want to use and how many people you want to share your car with is up to you. What the state does with those tax receipts or what the oil industry does with its profits is a separate issue.

iv. The first statement assumes that the size or value of each household's plot of land is entirely independent of its income or needs; the second statement assumes that families always occupy larger or more valuable plots. The irony is that while the first assumption is probably true under our Home-Owner-Ist system, it is exactly young people and families who are being clobbered anyway - they are the ones who have to pay top whack for housing as well as paying a disproportionate share of taxation, so the second statement is pure crocodile tears.

v. The first statement correctly takes CI into account (which would benefit larger households and families relative to smaller ones) and the second statement just completely ignores it. There is some truth to the second claim that in the long run under LVT/CI, families would tend to occupy the larger/more valuable plots, but then this solves the first dilemma, doesn't it? The larger households are occupying larger plots, receiving more in benefits and paying more in tax - problem solved.

vi. And so on. The Homeys jump back and forth from half-truth to half-lie and only ever highlight the down sides for Worthy People and highlight the upsides for The Undeserving, so they will only ever compare a Hard Working And Responsible Pensioner* with the group of investment bankers sharing the house next door and ask why the former should be clobbered and the latter should benefit; they will never, ever compare the Retired Civil Service Fat Cat with the group of school teachers or nurses sharing the house next door, oh no, that just won't do, will it?

* Clearly, to make the system fly politically, pensioners would have to be exempted or given huge discounts for the time being, in the long run, they'd pay full whack but with relieving provisions such as much higher state pensions, deferments etc.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (178)

Mr G, over at HousePriceCrash:

Out of interest, are you saying that the domestic rate system was a land value tax? [Yes I was] If so, I'm afraid that puts me off LVT even more.

Under the rating system you had situations where say, the rateable value of a house was £200, 4 working adults living in this house would still only pay the £200 that 2 working adults would pay.*

Ah, I hear you say, but there are 4 people in the house instead of 2. Under a fairer tax system which I believe we both would like to see, shouldn't each individual pay the same amount if they are working or have the means to pay?

Perhaps the poll tax was fairer than it was perceived to be?

I gave the stock answers over there, but we can look at the respective merits of LVT and Poll Tax by contrasting two diametrically opposed possibilities.

As a matter of fact, the cash cost of the core functions of the state is negligible, five per cent of GDP or so, which we could easily pay for with duties on fuel, booze, fags and gambling. All other tax revenues are either redistributed (in particular old age pensions) or wasted/stolen. There is a big overlap; health and education are a mix of redistribution, waste and theft.

So let's imagine our minimal state, with no taxation at all (apart from the duties mentioned above), no redistribution (so no old age pensions) and no waste/theft - there'd still be massive privatised tax collection by landowners who rely on the government to protect their interests, but hey - and consider two options, both involving the collection of £60 billion with the sole aim of redistribution and decide which one we prefer:

Possibility One

We introduce a Land Value Tax (which would be about 1.2% of current values) and give everybody a Citizen's Dividend (which is like negative Poll Tax) of £1,000 a year. Administratively it would be a doddle.

This would dampen house prices slightly, dampen credit bubbles, make houses a tad more affordable for future generations, encourage more efficient use of land and housing, alleviate absolute poverty at the lower end, and the average household in the average house would end up a few hundred pounds a year better off.

Possibility Two

We introduce a Poll Tax of £1,000 per person (which is like a negative Citizen's Dividend) and pay it out as an annual Land Value Subsidy, so if you own a house, you'd receive 1.2% of its current value. Valuing the houses is not difficult, but collecting a Poll Tax is, as we well know.

This would push up house prices slightly, fuel credit bubbles, make houses less affordable for future generations, encourage inefficient use of land and housing, worsen absolute poverty at the lower end, and the average household in the average house would end up a few hundred pounds worse off.

* This is all arrant nonsense of course. When we had Domestic Rates, there was still income tax and so on, so the four working adults were paying £40,200 a year in income tax and Domestic Rates; and the two working adults were paying £20,200.

Council Tax, Poll Tax, Local Income Tax and Land Value Tax

I've posted this crude sketch before: there appears to be some sort of uneasy truce over Council Tax, but opponents thereof split into three groups who argue in favour of one of three obvious alternatives*: Out of naked self-interest, low earners like to argue in favour of 'local income tax' and high earners and one-person households like to argue in favour of a poll tax, fair enough, but let's look at how these would work in practice and the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Council Tax, and other taxes vaguely related to personal wealth or housing raise approx. £42 billion a year**, and the core, core functions of the state (Foreign Office, defence, immigration control, police, prisons, road maintenance, refuse collection and the fire brigade, maybe air traffic control and not much else) cost ball-park £80 billion a year (about five per cent of GDP).

So let's start by imagining we run a small-state government - that means no old-age pensions, NHS, no state education, and certainly no cash welfare etc - which costs £80 billion a year and half of that is raised with either a Poll Tax, Local Income Tax or Land Value Tax.

1) A Poll Tax works out at £1,000 per adult, and as we know full well, it's politically unpopular and there would be massive evasion by people simply not registering their addresses. The other downsides are that people are forced to contribute towards the costs of running the state without there being any correlation between the amount paid and the value of any benefits received - and if you imagine that somebody who owns a house in a run down area derives the same benefits from simply owning that patch of land as somebody else who owns a house in a genteel area overlooking the park, you are seriously deluded. Neither does it take into account 'ability to pay'. The upsides of a Poll Tax are that it is not a tax on income and therefore does not have dead weight costs.

2) A Local Income Tax on earned incomes would amount to a tax of about six or seven per per cent on earned incomes (wages or profits), this still requires a lot of admin and surveillance. The upsides are that it vaguely relates to 'ability to pay' and the dead weight cost of such a low income tax is probably less than one per cent of GDP.

3) A Land Value Tax raising £42 billion a year amounts to a tax of one per cent on the current market value of residential land and buildings at current market values, or about 40% of that part of the current rental value of UK housing which relates to the location value rather than the bricks and mortar (at such low rates, there is little practical difference between taxes on capital values or on rental values).

To my mind, an LVT has all the advantages of a Poll Tax or Local Income Tax without any of the disadvantages:
- there is far less hassle with collection, as the tax in on a fixed and immovable plot of land as registered with HM Land Registry (some houses are not registered, but we can operate on a 'use it or lose it' principle).
- the amount payable on any plot is independent of the number of people living there, so those who want to live in an area but have a low income can share a house or live in a small flat.
- the amount payable is proportional to the value of local services received rather than their cash cost. If your local council wants to waste money on [insert your pet hate here], then you don't pay for it.
- the amount payable is broadly proportional to your 'ability to pay', in the same way as the price you paid for your last car or your last [insert whatever you last spent money on here] related to your 'ability to pay'. if you think the tax demanded where you live is too high, you can move elsewhere (a smaller home round the corner, if you so wish) or take in a lodger etc.
- LVT has absolutely no dead weight costs whatsoever, and what little costs it imposes (cost of valuations and collection, the hassle faced by those who choose to down size) are more than outweighed by the benefits, i.e. more efficient use of land and buildings in urban areas (so less need for 'urban sprawl' etc).
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Clearly, we are not going to move to minimal government any time soon, I imagine at the very least that pensioners are very happy with getting £100 billion a year in pensions and probably as much again in the value of NHS treatment, social care etc. And today's earners who are chipping in to pay for this will in turn demand similar benefits when they are old and tired (I'll be grateful for every penny I get!), so let's up that £80 billion figure to £280 billion a year and look out how the three taxes would work if we had to raise the entire amount with any of them (in the real world, we will also have petrol, fags and booze duty plus other bits and pieces):

1) A poll tax raising £280 billion a year from working age adults works out at about £12,000 each a year, clearly unaffordable for many and a gift to the highest earners and largest land-owners, thus a political or administrative non-starter.

2) An income tax raising £280 billion a year works out at (let's say) a flat 40% income tax, the dead weight costs of which are about 16% of potential GDP, using my fag packet estimate that dead weight costs are the tax rate squared). So that means high collection costs, unemployment etc, so we then need more welfare spending, more policing, which bumps up the required revenues even further and so on. This seems to be the option favoured by most western governments, it's bad for the highest earners but good for land-owners.

3) A Land Value Tax of about 7% on the current market value of all land and buildings (residential or commercial), which we can bump up to 8% if we wish to exempt the primary residences of pensioners entirely. It's difficult to express this as a percentage of site-only rental values as the calculation is highly circular (LVT depresses selling prices but scrapping income tax pushes up rental values).

To me that seems perfectly workable, if you can only afford £500 a year, then buy a house in a cheap area and share it with a couple of other adults, like people do when they leave home for the first time, if you want to live in a grand house, you'll pay tens of thousands a year, but at least you are getting something for your money (unlike with income tax, local or otherwise).

Clearly I've missed something important, because most people seem to vastly prefer option 2) with a shed load of stealth taxes on top) to option 3). So what have I missed?
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* There are of course two other proposals, a wealth tax (usually proposed by people arguing against it or by more deluded left wingers) and a local sales tax as proposed by my own party, which are so left-field as not to warrant further discussion.

** HM Treasury forecast for 2011-12:

Council Tax - £26.1 billion
Council Tax Benefit - £(4.8) billion
Stamp duty land tax - £5.8 billion
Capital gains tax - £3.4 billion
Stamp duty on shares - £3.3 billion
TV Licence fee £3.1 billion
Insurance premium tax - £2.9 billion
Inheritance tax - £2.7 billion

Killer Arguments against LVT, not (93)

Killer Arguments Against LVT, not (92)

When discussions turn to Council Tax (a feeble and distant cousin of proper LVT), the Home-Owner-Ist instinct really comes to the fore. All logic and coherence is abandoned and most people's knee-jerk response is that it should be replaced with either Poll Tax or with Local Income Tax, or sometimes both (notwithstanding that these are more or less opposite, at least they are not taxes on the Holy of Holies), see typical reader's letters here:

Council tax is unjust and unfair and is not based upon the ability to pay. Apart from the difficulties in collection, the poll tax was inherently much fairer.

People who are responsible, self-sufficient and hardworking, often pensioners, are in the group who are clobbered and the feckless and many others are now free riders.

C Lloyd, Exeter.

Of course, the bulk of pensioners are neither self-sufficient nor hardworking, by definition, but he hasn't got as far as bothering to calculate that replacing Council Tax with a Poll Tax would equate to a tax of £625 per adult.

I fail to see how a flat tax of £625 per adult relates to 'ability to pay' any more than an average Council Tax of £1,000 per home (assuming 25 million homes and 40 million adults). While this would clearly benefit single people in large houses, i.e. widowed pensioners, it would be worse for couples (whether working age or pensioners!) in anything but the top three Council Tax bands.

And in the grander scheme of things it would relate even less to 'ability to pay' than Council Tax. Nobody is forced to live in a big house, but most people who live in small ones do so because they are 'forced' to, for example.

Having attempted to ride the coat tails of the "responsible, self-sufficient and hardworking", at least C Lloyd didn't have the temerity to suggest Local Income Tax, unlike the writer of the next letter...

Council tax is the most unfair tax. It has no relation to income and for retired people it's a substantial bill... The police bill, and possibly education*, should be removed from local authority costs and added to income tax.

Which brave political party will have the courage to change a system which is far worse than the poll tax?

K Martinez, Exeter.

It's a 'substantial bill' compared to what? The biggest chunk of pensioners' income is the State Pension (heavily subsidised private pensions and public sector pensions are second and third on the list). And these pensions are paid or subsidised by current taxpayers, so to state that "Council Tax costs me x per cent of my pension" is a meaningless calculation - all that is relevant is how much of that pension is left over after Council Tax is paid.

In the grander scheme of things, it does not make any difference whether you get a State pension of £7,000 (from the taxpayer) and pay £1,000 Council Tax back into the pot, or whether you get a State pension of £14,000 (from the taxpayer) and pay £8,000 Council Tax back into the pot; only with the latter system there is an incentive to trade down into a smaller home, thus vastly improving your disposable income as well as freeing up a larger home for a younger couple (who may well be your children or grandchildren anyway).

* K Martinez deserves an extra kicking for suggesting that the cost of education (about £80 billion a year) is paid out of Council tax (receipts about £25 billion a year).

Killer Arguments Against LVT, not (90)

I've heard this argument a dozen times if I've heard it once, the first time here, when I was still arguing for a very modest reform (to replace Council tax, Council tax benefit, Stamp Duty, Inheritance tax, Capital gains tax and the TV licence fee with a flat tax of approx. 1% on the value of residential land and buildings):

Bill: This idea... has IMO all the the electoral attractiveness of the poll tax (and that is being unfair to the poll tax).

The sheer stupidity of that comment baffles me to this day.

1. He overlooks that the (admittedly deeply unpopular) step of replacing the old Domestic Rates with a flat Poll Tax (aka Community Charge) was a step in completely opposite direction; it was a regressive move, and the people who went on the riots were the people and households right at the bottom who were suddenly several hundred of pounds a year worse off. The large majority of homeowners were a couple of hundred pounds better off, and those in the biggest and nicest houses were presumably significantly better off (good contemporaneous account here).

2. What I was suggesting was neither 'progressive' nor 'regressive' and was about simplification as much as anything; some of those at the bottom would lose their housing benefit, but for eighty or ninety per cent of households, LVT would be much the same as their Council tax (less Council tax benefit, where relevant) plus TV licence fee is now, plus or minus a couple of hundred pounds a year even at the margin (bearing in mind that most Council tax benefit claimants are in the lowest Council tax bands A and B, and so instead, they'd get a lower LVT bill which would be payable in full).

3. In a world where the Lib-Cons think it's OK to take away Child Benefit from a random selection of higher earning households and the EMA from a random selection of low-to-middle income households (a loss of a couple of thousand quid a year each),or where the Lib-Cons can merrily hike VAT by 2.5% and National Insurance by 2% (making working households several hundred pounds a year worse off) I don't think the LVT idea was particularly radical.

4. Those who would gain most would be those with proper wealth besides the inflated value of their house which brings them over the Inheritance tax threshold; those who are thinking of buying or selling a house (who would save the Stamp Duty and/or capital gains tax, where relevant). And bearing in mind that I explained the roll-up option for pensioners, not even they (or their heirs) would be materially worse off in the long run (no Inheritance tax, and the resale value of houses would go up by the amount of the Stamp Duty cut).

5. So even if you could identify people who on closer inspection genuinely ended up paying more in the long run (and there would be some, obviously, e.g. no more 'single adult' discounts as there is for Council tax and many of those in the top decile housing-wise whose house is worth £300,000-plus), these are exactly the people who would not be going on riots, and on a crude political level, I don't see why they would be so much more deserving of public sympathy than e.g. people clobbered by the 50% income tax rate (not that I support the 50% rate, I'm just giving an example).

6. And on an administrative level, LVT beats the Poll Tax (or TV licence fee) hands down: there's no need to track down every adult, you just do the rough and ready valuations and send out the bills. A house can't just disappear, can it?

7. Finally, I'm an enthusiast of universal benefits (like a higher tax-free personal allowance, a Citizen's Income/Pension, health and education vouchers etc). If there really were items of public expenditure which cost a similar amount for each person and benefit each person equally (without flowing straight through into higher house prices, and I struggle to think of any apart from perhaps the cost of running elections), then the way forward is to reduce the personal allowance (or other universal benefits) accordingly, rather than dishing out £x per person universally with one hand and clawing back £x per person universally with the other.

Go figure.

Why you should vote Lib Dem

From page 10 of their pocket manifesto:

Fairer local taxes: Scrap the unfair Council Tax – The Council Tax is an unfair tax which bears no relationship to the ability to pay*. Liberal Democrats believe that it should be scrapped and replaced with a fair local tax, based on people’s ability to pay. We will pilot a fair local income tax in areas that choose to try it out.

I am perfectly aware that the readership of any 'blog is largely self-selecting, and I do not imagine for one second that all my diatribes about taxes on land values being the least-bad taxes have had any impact whatsoever on the overall consensus that it is perfectly acceptable to tax wealth creation in order to subsidise home-ownership or ultimately land-ownership.

But this particular policy must be music to the ears of the vast economically illiterate majority, such as Ian B, who (to his credit) put up a good fight yesterday, and actually came out with the time-honoured classic:

Income tax has its own severe problems, but is at least only paid once, when you have earned some money to pay the tax. An asset tax is a state rent on simply owning something, paid every year in perpetuity... If I earn £10, I might pay £2 tax on it, but then I'm done with the state**.

An asset tax takes the £2 every year, even though the asset isn't earning any money... With an income tax or a profits tax, the State taxes you once. With an assets tax it taxes you again and again and again until you are forced to part with the asset because you can't afford the taxes, since any non-earning asset (e.g. the land of an owner occupier) generates no income.

So that's one happy customer at least. Heck knows what economic damage replacing Council Tax with an extra 3.5% on income tax or National Insurance will do, but right now, who cares? Heck knows what economic damage the ensuing boost to the house price bubble would cause, but as we are under the mass delusion that high house prices = wealth, this must be political gold. And just to try and maximise their share of the Home-Owner-Ist vote, they precede the Local Income Tax idea with these noble words:

Control over what is built in your area – Residents should have the power to appeal planning applications where an authority has said 'yes', just as developers presently have the right to appeal applications to which a Council has said 'no'.

Criticising developers for what little new housing is built about as stupid as criticising car manufacturers for all the cars on the road, IMHO. Supply, demand? Anybody remember these terms? Remind me to do a post on what a Car-Owner-Ist economic policy would look like.

* Of course, Council Tax is, taken in isolation, a bad tax because it is to a large extent a Poll Tax and so cannot possibly relate to 'ability to pay', but that is not an argument against property taxes as such, that is an argument against Poll Taxes.

** So 'having done with the state' he is no doubt happy to relinquish right to vote, to call the fire brigade or the police, to use the NHS, to lobby the local council to ban new construction, to have his bins emptied or to take people to court.
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The rest of their manifesto appears to be a right old magpie job. Bits of it have been nicked from UKIP (again, to be fair, we did read the Lib Dem output before we wrote ours) but, remembering that the Lib Dems are the most rabidly EU-phile party of all, I did like this one, lifted straight from The Tories on page 5 of the pocket guide:

Cut regulation and create a fair playing field for business – We will properly assess the cost and effectiveness of regulations before and after they are introduced, reforming Impact Assessments. We will move towards a ‘one in one out’ system so that for every rule introduced, another one is scrapped. And we will change the culture of regulators to help, not hinder, business.

One-in-one-out? What sort of stupid rule is that? Chuck out the bad ones or pointless ones (most of them) and keep the sensible ones (a tiny minority), end of.

And then, as a final flourish, to roars of approval from the crowd, in Part 4 of this:

We will end ‘gold plating’ of regulations originating from Europe, ensuring that they are not extended beyond their original intention.

"Britain is a crowded island"

As we know, the key elements of the Home-Owner-Ist Manifesto is to oppose a) property taxes and b) liberalising planning laws. One of their favourite mantras is that Britain is a crowded island, which they miraculously use to support both a) and b).

Let's assume, for sake of argument, that Britain really were a crowded island (and let's assume zero net immigration to simplify matters). It's not of course, it's just that urban and sub-urban areas, where most of us live, appear to be crowded because we have restricted the amount of land we can develop down to one-tenth of the surface area of the UK (for purely political reasons without any economic justification), but hey.

Seeing as taxes have to be raised to pay for public expenditure (however high or low, separate topic), wouldn't the use of the "crowded island" mantra to justify restrictive planning laws actually support the argument in favour of more property taxes (and less taxes on income etc).
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To use an analogy: five students have clubbed together and signed up to rent a house with five bedrooms for £200 a week all-in. When they inspect the property, they realise that two of the bedrooms are big and light and three are small and poky.

Which is the best way for them to decide who gets which room and how to divvy up the rent?

a) They could agree (via some sort of auction process) that the two big rooms are worth £55 a week each, and the three small ones are worth £30. Everybody then gets what they pay for, problem solved.

b) First come first served. As soon as the front door is opened, they all burst in and each occupies the best room he or she can find, but they still split the rent equally five ways.

c) As the students parents are too wealthy for them to qualify for grants but not wealthy enough to pay for their upkeep, all the students do part-time jobs at evenings, weekends and holidays. They could allocate the rooms on a first-come-first-served basis and agree that the £200 will be shared proportionally to the amount that each of them earns each week.

If we take the way the rent is shared as a form of taxation, it strikes me that:

a) is the free-market solution and is akin to Land Value Tax;

b) is more like Home-Owner-Ism ("I was here first and it's moi laarnd" funded by a Poll Tax; and

c) is even worse than b) because it's like income tax, which would reduce everybody's net hourly wages by about half, meaning that there is actually little point in working and/or a huge incentive to lie about how much you've earned.
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So, in the analogy, as in real life, there is common expenditure that has to be shared somehow and a limited amount of living space (with some locations being far more attractive than others). If there was an unlimited amount of space, it would have little or no market value, of course, but that house is like our "crowded island".

I fail to see why the tax system of a country, whereby we share common expenditure according to some formula - should be designed any differently.

Just sayin', is all.