Saturday 26 November 2011

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (179)

Physiocrat invited me to join the fray over at The Guardian yesterday (the actual article is by landowner and Socialist Richard Murphy who is obsessed with collect more and more taxes from people's earned income, so can be cheerfully ignored) after he donated the LVT bomb yet again.

Here's some of the rubbish we find in the rubble:
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Bricktopguy The problem is Tax havens. While even one exists, it is impossible to stop tax evasion.

Physiocrat: Not true. Tax due from the Business Rate is not evaded through the use of tax havens. The solution is to collect more money from property taxes, preferably on land value. The tax havens would never get a look in.
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Existenzangst: If our friend [Sir Philip] Green [owner of lots of high street clothes shops] owned no land in the UK and earned £6 million in the UK, he would pay no tax. Both sorts of taxes are needed.

Green is infamous for having paid a large dividend out of post-tax profits to his wife, who is not UK domiciled for tax purposes and hence had to pay no higher rate income tax, which allegedly saved him/her £285 million in tax. That's tax law as it stands, and good luck to them, say I.

But his businesses need to occupy land on UK high streets in order to earn money in the UK, whether as tenants or as owners. From today's Soaraway Sun: And then there is business rates. These are expected to rise by another five per cent in April next year. Sir Philip said: "On Oxford Street I pay £6million a year in rates — yes, £6million! — and now they want to charge people to park on weekends!"

The chances are that the total VAT, PAYE and corporation tax that his companies/employees pay are ten or twenty times as much as the Business Rates he pays. Business Rates (similar to LVT) is the one tax that he has to pay and cannot avoid; in the absence of those other taxes, his companies could be charged, and would be willing to pay, ten or twenty times as much in Business Rates (or LVT) as they do now and it wouldn't matter whether or not he owned land in the UK or whether or not he or his wife live in the UK.
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UncleHarrie: I don't know what this LVT is, but if it effects ordinary little landlords like me then forget it, there is enough of us to make a big difference to the amount of seats any government can win. if it affects us we won't vote for it.

Jolly good. He doesn't know what it is but argues against it anyway. Fair enough, shifting from income tax to LVT would, by and large, benefit tenants at the expense of landlords. But his electoral maths is shit. By definition there are three or four times as many tenants as there are 'ordinary little landlords'. I suppose this is why the hardcore Home-Owner-Ists would like to see a return to the old days when only landowners had the vote.
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Brouillard: Oh, and I half agree with Physiocrat on taxes... I don't agree with LVT though. It over taxes useful activities and makes knowledge economies far more lucrative than they should be. It penalises industry over services.

*Sigh*.

Land ownership is not an activity, useful nor otherwise. There are a lot of politicians who say (rightly or wrongly) that we should encourage 'knowledge economies' so how come that's A Bad Thing all of a sudden? As per usual, he fails to see that there will always be a balance between different types of industry. For sure, we need cutting edge computer programmers but they are merely a means to an end - better stock control, better telecoms, more accurate medical diagnoses, online banking, whatever. But there is a natural upper limit on the number of programmers we need, all the stock control in the world is no good if there's nobody on a farm or in a factory making stuff, for example.

Neither does LVT penalise 'industry' (I assume he means manufacturing), it's the tax system and all this carbon pricing that does that. Modern factories need a lot of space, but these can be, and usually are sited at the edges of towns and cities where land is plentiful and hence cheap. 'Services' on the other hand are usually provided from much smaller units in the middle of towns and cities, but where land values are much higher. It all evens out in the end; Honda would not wish to use retail units in the middle of Swindon to make cars, and hairdresser in the middle of Swindon would not shut up his shop and rent a cheap industrial unit on the edge of town instead.

*/sigh*
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Nick Greeny: So where does the [LVT] come from? Many people who currently pay tax would not, and you cannot assume that the value of land in Regent Street would remain as it is. If the tax paid was more than now, then the owner would go bust or move to a field in Norfolk. Where are your tax revenues then?

Oh dear oh dear. If you think that Apple or Hamlyns or Austin Reed are all going to shut up shop in a prime shopping area and open up in a field in Norfolk with only a few tractors and sheep passing by every day, you are very much mistaken.

Further, as a matter of fact, most of Regent St actually belongs to Crown Estates and most shops on there are rented. So whether a tenant pays rent to Crown Estates (part of the government, nothing to do with the Queen), pays Business Rates to Westminster Council (part of the government), and pays a shed load of VAT, PAYE, corporation tax to HM Revenue & Customs (part of the government) or just pays a single tax LVT (i.e. ground rent) to the government makes ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE.

If, as Physicocrat and I keep suggesting, we got rid of VAT, income tax, corp tax, NIC etc, then the rental value of shops on Regent Street would increase by an amount similar to the tax cut, so overall revenues would not change much.

I suppose it is possible that every single shop in London and every person living in London would move to the same fields in Norfolk, build a new Tube network etc, in which case, the rental value of that field would rise to whatever the rental value of central London is now and the rental value of London would fall. But this is a) unlikely to happen and b) irrelevant and c) illustrates that land rents will always arise, they merely shift from area to area.
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Nick Greeny couldn't think of a come back to that, so he hit back with something completely left field, incorrect and irrelevant:

So after 10 years our 'free' green and haphazardly pleasant land would look like Azerbaijan with strip mining, fracking plants and land fill up and down the country. Hurrah for LVT!

FFS.

We were trying to discuss reforming the tax system, and did not in any way suggest abandoning all planning laws or environmental protection laws. As we well know, the amount of land needed for landfill is amazingly small, but if LVT applied to landfill sites, they would be used more efficiently and more waste would be recycled or used as fuel.
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... and then this:

And on a bad year when the farmer or other business makes no money? Instant bankruptcy. Well done... Also, what if you're a hedge or investment fund operating from a 800sqft office. You're making millions and paying the same tax as the pound shop across the road.

Severe lack of imagination, let alone any knowledge of the real world.

Can you envisage a country in which farmers and farm workers are exempt from income tax and NIC? Yes. Would there be farmland? Yes. Would some farmers wish to buy land, possibly with a mortgage? Yes. So such a farmer has committed himself to regular monthly payments for the foreseeable future. If he knows that the bank will foreclose for a single missed payment, the farmer would put a bit of money aside in the good years to the extent it can't be invested in improving his capital and machinery, and so in the bad years he has something to fall back on. Are there idiot farmers who would over-mortgage themselves and have the farm foreclosed? Yes. Can you legislate against stupidity? No. What happens to the foreclosed land? The bank sells it or rents it to another farmer, so what is the impact on agricultural output? None. If most farmers can cope with a future regular stream of interest payments, why would they not be able to cope with a regular stream of future LVT payments instead, knowing that if there is a long term depression in food prices, that their LVT payments will be reduced or even waived? No reason.

As to the hedge fund and the pound shop, we know that most hedge funds in the UK rent swanky offices in the most expensive part of London and pound shops run from yer average high street. If the hedge funds wanted to reduce their rental expense, they could easily do so, but they don't, presumably for status reasons. Neither can we assume that pound shops would rent incredibly expensive office space in central London.

So there's no reason to assume that a pound shop and a hedge fund would ever be competing for the same retail space, and even if they did, so what? There are rich people who like giving their spare cash to hedge funds and there are poor people who like spending their money in pound shops and so we will always have some mix of the two, there will always be demand for stuff that costs a pound and there will always be people who would rather run a pound shop than run a hedge fund.

These Home-Owner-Ists just don't know anything about real life, let alone economics.

34 comments:

Lola said...

"If, as Physicocrat and I keep suggesting, we got rid of VAT, income tax, corp tax, NIC etc, then the rental value of shops on Regent Street would increase by an amount similar to the tax cut, so overall revenues would not change much" Perhaps they are worrying that if, as we know it would, the revenue hopefully profitability of all these businesses released from the crippling burden of VAT, corp tax etc etc went up, they, the gummint, wouldn't be able to collect their 'fair share' of it.

Sobers said...

Thinking about the Philip Green scenario - he currently pays vastly more in tax in the UK than he would under LVT. Under LVT there would be no VAT, no employers NI, no corporation tax. All that extra profit would leave the country. As would all the profit of any foreign owned business. They would be remitting all their UK profits home and we would get none of it. Zero. Zilch. Nada. They might have to pay tax once it arrived back wherever, but that would be a nice little bonus for the foreign tax man. We would lose the lot. And as we are one of the most open economies in the world, thats a LOT of tax revenue.

The Banks and the City would be making out like bandits too, their LVT bill would be miniscule compared to their profits. Thats going to go down like a bucket of cold sick right now.

Any business that uses little land but makes large profits (finance, computing, law, any knowledge based industry) would pay virtually no tax. Whereas manufacturing would pay much larger bills, for considerably less profit. Honda's car plant (which I can see from my window) covers several hundred acres, and they are struggling to break even right now. Their LVT bill would be big, even when loss making. Whereas a Hedge Fund can operate out of a single office and make hundreds of millions and pay vitually nothing.

You need to realise that there is little correlation nowadays between corporate profits and land. The knowledge economy does not need land to operate and under LVT would be virtually untaxed, while physical activity - manufacturing, mining, farming, retailing etc would pay large sums.

LVT would seem to be a spivs charter to me. The best business to be in would be one that involved no land, and you just take a cut off someone else's production. Under LVT the best thing you could be would be an estate agent. Little office, website, 2% cut, no tax.

Not the best vision for our economic future really, is it?

Anonymous said...

> Not the best vision for our economic future really, is it?

It actually is. Business is struggling because the current tax system destroys comparative advantage, freed from this most business, and especially employment will grow.
AC1

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, indeed.

S, "All that extra profit would leave the country"

All that profit would be invested in the country with the lowest tax rates and hence the best return on investment, which would be, er, the UK.

Please don't start this Honda wailing again and look at FACTS.

I've told you what the LVT rate for Swindon would be, £25 a sq yard a year or something, their site is NOT several hundred acres, it is 370 acres, so that would work out at a tax bill of £45 million a year.

Their capacity is (at least) 200,000 cars a year, £45 million divided by 200,000 = £225 per car. That's a small fraction of the VAT they currently pay per car (let alone PAYE, corp tax etc etc).

Even if their output fell to 10,000 cars a year, they'd still pay less per car than they do now.

And half of their Swindon site is car park, i.e. storage for finished and unsold cars, they can cut down on this by doing just-in-time or building a multi-storey.

So it's all well and good 'having a vision' but I prefer to actually understand numbers and tax incidence and so on.

The simple fact is, under LVT, a much larger share of the tax burden would be borne by RESIDENTIAL LAND and by and large, 'businesses' including employees would pay VERY LITTLE TAX ON THE LAND THEY USE IN THEIR BUSINESS, whether that's 'knowledge economy' or 'Honda. Swindon'.

Mark Wadsworth said...

AC1, ta for back up.

Anonymous said...

S: why the h... would capital leave the country if it wasn't taxed, and into the hands of foreign tax-men at that? For the fun of it?

-Kj

Sobers said...

@Anon: I never said capital would leave the country but we would lose 100% of all profits remitted abroad, whereas now we keep 28% of them, via corporation tax.

@MW: I didn't say that Honda wouldn't be better off, but that others would be vastly better off. Given that capital tends to try and find the most profitable home, it seems to me that LVT would accentuate the non-land based businesses over ones that require a physical presence. And given that our current woes are partly down to an over reliance on the finance and service sectors, it seems rather illogical to introduce a system that makes those sectors even more attractive over others.

"The simple fact is, under LVT, a much larger share of the tax burden would be borne by RESIDENTIAL LAND and by and large, 'businesses' including employees would pay VERY LITTLE TAX ON THE LAND THEY USE IN THEIR BUSINESS"

Which is why people will never vote for it. Running a campaign against LVT would be like shooting fish in a barrel. All I'd need to do is list everyone in the Times Rich list, show how much tax they and their businesses pay now, and how much they'd pay under LVT. I'd win by 3 to 1 at least.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Kj, ta for back up.

B: "@Anon: I never said capital would leave the country "

Oh yes you did, that's exactly what you said, and I quote:

"Under LVT there would be no VAT, no employers NI, no corporation tax. All that extra profit would leave the country. "

Well that's a pretty Socialist argument isn't it, if you think that all profit or income which is not taxed 'would leave the country' then you might as well argue for higher VAT, higher income tax, higher corporation tax, higher everything tax.

B: "@MW: I didn't say that Honda wouldn't be better off, but that others would be vastly better off. "

Oh yes you did, that's exactly what you said, and I quote:

Honda's car plant (which I can see from my window) covers several hundred acres, and they are struggling to break even right now. Their LVT bill would be big, even when loss making. "

If you could be bothered to stick to actual facts, you'd know that they currently have to pay the VAT of £4,000 per car whether they are making a profit or not; that is vastly hugely more than £225 LVT per car, is it not?

"All I'd need to do is list everyone in the Times Rich list, show how much tax they and their businesses pay now, and how much they'd pay under LVT."

So you'll quickly switch your David Cameron 'taxing land is attack on wealth' hat for your Ed Miliband 'if we tax land values not income then wealthy people would become even wealthier' hat.

I mean, in a way I'm grateful to you for pointing out the depths to which the Home-Owner-Ists (dave C and Ed M alike) will stoop to maintain their stranglehold on the economy, but on the other hand, I trust that you realise there is absolutely no substance to any of these arguments?

Anonymous said...

It's true now, and will be true if all taxes were lifted: the same "tax" as LVT is and will be collected by private landowners/banks. So are you saying that private landownership discourages "physical activity"?

-Kj

Anonymous said...

That last wane was directed at Sobers btw.

-Kj

Sobers said...

@MW: if you don't know the difference between profit and capital, I certainly wouldn't be using you as my accountant.

And as for the 'substance' of the issue - the only thing that matters is what the people think, and vote for. And I don't think they would ever vote for a system that allows Philip Green to send all the profits from his retail empire back to Monaco, and pay little or no tax on them. And to be perfectly honest, I would agree with them.

Or are you presuming to impose your LVT system without bothering with any democracy?

@Anon: no I'm not saying private landownership discourages physical activity, I'm saying the precise opposite. Under LVT the best business to be in will be one that has little or no physical presence. Ergo the sectors of the economy that operate under those conditions will be prioritised over those that do use land.

Anonymous said...

S: Ok, if you disagree that LVT can be applied without increasing rents and the cost of land (it can), that's one thing. But if you accept this fact, the cost of land use is the exact same with or without LVT. How then is LVT able to discourage "physical business"? It doesn't make any sense.

-Kj

PJH said...

"the actual article is by landowner and Socialist Richard Murphy who is obsessed with collect more and more taxes from people's earned income, so can be cheerfully ignored"

Would that be everyone's favourite retired accuntant(;) from Wandsworth? I'm sure you could find more reasons to ignore him - where's Timmy?

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, I am the second best accountant in the world. And at least I can times 370 acres by £25 per square yard and divide it by the number of cars produced at Honda's factory!

It's difficult for me to guess what you mean by 'capital' and 'profit' unless you actually define these terms

Do you seriously suggest that foreign companies will be happy to invest lots of 'capital' in the UK to earn the tax free 'profits', but will then promptly repatriate all their 'profits'?

Is it not more likely that they will reinvest UK-source profits in the tax-free UK, thus turning it back into capital, without the tax office in Japan or wherever taking a slice?

Your answer to Kj makes no sense and is entirely self-contradictory:

Let's assume that private landownership does not discourage productive economic activity.

So a business approaches a land owner and asks whether he can use the land for creating wealth.

Does the land owner say "Yes that's a great business idea, I'll let you occupy my land for free" or does he say "You have offered to pay more rent/higher price than anybody else, so I'll rent you/sell you my land"?

I suspect the latter. This is a cash cost to the business.

All LVT does is take that rent or purchase price which the active wealth creator would have been forced to pay to the passive land owner and divert it back into the economy.

Let's not bugger about with the fact that shifting to LVT will benefit some businesses more than others, quite simply, it will benefit all businesses. All of them.

And even with private land ownership, those businesses that need the least land benefit from needing less land, in the same way as businesses which use less electricity are at an advantage to businesses which use more electricity, and so on.

Kj, no it doesn't, but Sobers is far more slippery than that, he'd rather go off on a tangent than answer a question directly.

PJH, yes that's exactly him, who cares, it's just that Physiocrat chose this article as our battle ground for the day.

Mark Wadsworth said...

S; "I don't think they would ever vote for a system that allows Philip Green to send all the profits from his retail empire back to Monaco, and pay little or no tax on them. And to be perfectly honest, I would agree with them."

Yes, but he only paid that dividend to his wife who is officially resident in Monaco to avoid UK income tax.

What earthly reason do you have to assume that he would have done this if there were no UK income tax in the first place?

He wouldn't have, of course, he would have reinvested that money in his UK businesses, or otherwise spent it in the UK, perhaps on the large LVT on the posh house he lives in (I assume he lives in a posh house, I don't know).

PJH said...

"PJH, yes that's exactly him, who cares"

On a serious note: Erm - the gubmint advisors who actually pay him to give his opinion?

Yes, I know there are too many of them, but he does have the ear of those who would tax us.

Sobers said...

"So a business approaches a land owner and asks whether he can use the land for creating wealth.

Does the land owner say "Yes that's a great business idea, I'll let you occupy my land for free" or does he say "You have offered to pay more rent/higher price than anybody else, so I'll rent you/sell you my land"?"

And thats where LVT falls down, because the State forbids you from using your land in whichever way you would like, aka planning restrictions.

Lets say you live in a house close to a main shopping street. As such, land values being higher in town centres, your LVT will be fairly high, maybe even higher due to close proximity to retail outlets, which have higher rents than domestic properties.

So you think to yourself - 'I know, I'll open a shop, or a restaurant. This a great location, and shops and food outlets are doing very well nowadays as the abolition of all other taxes has given people more money to spend'. But what's this - the local council won't give you planning permission. It thinks there are too many shops already, or restaurants, or they don't like your face, or you didn't grease the right palms.

So you are left paying the domestic LVT that is largely based on the location, but the State forbids you from exploiting that location in order to pay it.

If planning restrictions were entirely abolished then there would be more sense to LVT. While the State controls what you can do with your land, it should not be able to tax you on it either.

Anonymous said...

Kj, no it doesn't, but Sobers is far more slippery than that, he'd rather go off on a tangent than answer a question directly.

And off he goes...

Anonymous said...

"So you are left paying the domestic LVT that is largely based on the location, but the State forbids you from exploiting that location in order to pay it."

Well, then you could either move house, or you could vote for someone else who will relax planning restrictions. Also, if nobody else wants to occupy that piece of land because they can't open a shop there, and the LVT is too high for someone to live there, then the rental value will drop, which means the LVT will fall as well.

Anonymous said...

@Sobers 17:07

Others have already pointed out that what company would send its money abroad to be taxed if there was no tax for it to stay in the UK. But the rest of comment is a typical statist argument.

We would lose the lot. And as we are one of the most open economies in the world, thats a LOT of tax revenue.

When you say "we" you are referring to HMG, which doesn't necessarily represent "us". What makes you think that "we" deserve to have that tax revenue anyway. If there is a deficit, the answer is to cut spending, not increase tax. All tax is theft, except LVT which is a payment in return for the state declaring that a parcel of land can only be used by a certain entity rather than shared between all citizens of that state.

Snarfangel said...

Sobers said... The Banks and the City would be making out like bandits too, their LVT bill would be miniscule compared to their profits. Thats going to go down like a bucket of cold sick right now.

The banks couldn't possibly make out like bandits. They are the ones currently collecting the equivalent of the LVT from the mortgages they hold. If the state collected the full LVT instead, the land value that could be mortgaged would effectively be zero. In such a situation, banks could only make money from the mortgage interest they could charge to actual improvements.

In other words, taxes to net profit would be reduced, but there would be no mortgage interest -- and hence, no net profit -- to land value.

Ed said...

While the State controls what you can do with your land, it should not be able to tax you on it either.

In a system with planning permission, the land value of any particular plot of land will be based upon what you are allowed to do with it. If you don't get planning permission for the higher value activity (e.g. a restaurant) then you don't have to pay the higher amount of LVT that a restaurant at that location would have to pay. Whether the LVT for a house in the city centre will be higher or lower than a house in the suburbs depends only on the relative desirability of the two locations as places to live.

The reverse situation is more likely to be a problem (at first glance), namely that you are quite happy living in your city centre house but the council decides to re-zone that land for higher value commercial use. Then you would have to pay the higher LVT due on a commercial property. On the other hand, if the change in planning permission increases your LVT it obviously also increases your land value, so you can sell and make a very nice (tax-free) capital gain. In other words, as a land owner, with LVT you automatically get appropriate compensation for planning changes that you don't like.

Note: I'm assuming here that the LVT system does assess each plot individually, rather than average things over say each postcode. The added expense of running a more detailed system would be well worth it IMHO, and still far less than the admin expense of income tax, corporate tax, VAT, NI, etc.

As for Mrs Green, I wonder if she actually likes living in Monaco. Might she spend more time living here if we moved from the current tax system to LVT?

Mark Wadsworth said...

S: "And thats where LVT falls down, because the State forbids you from using your land in whichever way you would like, aka planning restrictions."

What on earth are you talking about? As I mentioned in the post, whether we have LVT or not has absolutely nothing to do with whether we have planning restrictions or not.

And as I may have mentioned a few thousands times, the purist definition of LVT is that it's a tax on the site only rental value of each plot ASSUMING OPTIMUM PERMITTED USE, which means that LVT is perfectly feasible WITH planning restrictions.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Kj, ta for back up.

Snarf, yes of course, we all know that including Sobers, but you must realise that Home-Owner-ists are capable of DoubleThink:
1. We hate banks, and don't like the fact that under LVT they'd pay less tax.
2. We love banks, and don't like the fact that under LVT they'd earn less money.

It's the same with Sobers' original comment, he will argue two opposites at the same time:
1. Under LVT many businesses would pay more in tax (this is factually untrue and he knows it, but never mind) and would go bankrupt and this is a bad thing.
2. Under LVT, foreign-owned businesses would pay less tax (this is factually true) and therefore would take more money out of the country (this is untrue, why would they?)

Ed, ta for back up,

I'm a big fan of averaging over a postcode sector (that means about 3,000 addresses in the UK). I've looked at the numbers and it is quite simply untrue that there is a big difference between rental value of land zoned for business and land zoned for residential.

For sure, most of these planning and use restrictions are a load of shit because they prevent the free market from discovering the optimum mix of different types of commercial and residential uses, but all in all, what we have is not wildly wrong.

i.e. perhaps the optimum on a town would be 40% commercial 60% residential, but because of planning restrictions, we end up with 35% commercial 65% residential. Once you average it all out, it doesn't really matter, and if the outcome is that some business land is under-taxed, well so what?

Anonymous said...

I assume you've abandoned the idea that LVT discourages "physical businesses" Sobers? I'm not seeing any answers to my question.

-Kj

Shineymart said...

'ere Mark

Re your 25 quid per sq yard (for SW postcodes as adjusted for other locations). Does it only cover the 'core functions of the state' as we discussed in a previous post, i.e. about £70 billion pa, or a bit more?

Just askin'...

Shiney

Sobers said...

"I assume you've abandoned the idea that LVT discourages "physical businesses" Sobers? I'm not seeing any answers to my question."

Absolutely not. As I've repeatedly stated, a system that taxes land use will favour businesses that use no or little land. The general thrust of economic activity would be towards any industry or sector that could make the most money for the smallest amount of tax, and that would not be land intensive industries.

Anonymous said...

I'll just have to cut and paste my previous question, and I'll love for you to take a shot at it:
Ok, if you disagree that LVT can be applied without increasing rents and the cost of land (it can), that's one thing. But if you accept this fact, the cost of land use is the exact same with or without LVT. How then is LVT able to discourage "physical business"?

How? What you are saying is that people would avoid a cost they would otherwise voluntarily incur, because they suddenly realise that the same cost is part tax, not all of it going to some private entity, out of principle.

-Kj

Mark Wadsworth said...

Shiney, see next post. £25 is full-on LVT to replace all other taxes.

S: "a system that taxes land use will favour businesses that use no or little land".

You are now repeating things which I thought you had accepted were untrue.

You gave Honda as an example and I explained that the total tax bill on that factory and its employees would fall by about ninety per cent.

Farmland is such low value, relatively speaking, so to all intents and purposes it's exempt from LVT.

Take it from me, ALL businesses will be better off under LVT, some a bit, some a lot and some a heck of a lot. or are you doing this envy thing where you don't want Business A to be £100 better off if that means that Business B is £200 better off?

Kj keeps asking you the same question, which can you please answer.

The existing land ownership system favours businesses which require less land, because they can reduce their rents, mortgage payments and Business Rates bills if they trade from smaller or cheaper premises.

So what's the big difference if Business Rates £25 billion are doubled to £50 billion (see next post), rents and mortgage payments come down £ for £ and ALL OTHER TAXES on business (£300 billion odd) are scrapped?

Shineymart said...

Mark

Tx for the clarification on the £25.

Shiney

Mark Wadsworth said...

Shiney, my pleasure. I am here to inform and entertain. And hopefully annoy the living Hell out of Home-Owner-Ists.

Bayard said...

"Which is why people will never vote for it. Running a campaign against LVT would be like shooting fish in a barrel. All I'd need to do is list everyone in the Times Rich list, show how much tax they and their businesses pay now, and how much they'd pay under LVT. I'd win by 3 to 1 at least."

So what you are saying is that the people who run this country have set up the tax system to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else, just as you'd expect, and so they'd very much be against any attempt to re-jig the tax system so that it benefitted everyone else at their expense. Well, no shit, Sherlock!

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, that's the puzzling thing.

I doubt very much that Sobers believes a single word of anything he says, he does it for dramatic effect to illustrate the depths to which the self-appointed elite (in this case the Homeys, but he might as well be referring to the EU or Goldman Sachs) will stoop.

Logic says that under LVT this elite would be rather worse off (as would the people right at the bottom) and the people in the middle would be a lot better off. For them to stoke opinion against something on the basis it would make them (as a hated class) even better off, when actually it would make them worse off is just DoubleThink to the power of three.

Anonymous said...

I'm doing my christmas wish-list. And right after a pair of leather gloves, I've added an answer from Sobers on my above mentioned question.

-Kj