Tuesday 21 February 2012

Tax/benefits spreadsheet for future reference

For general reference, I have prepared a Zoho Sheet showing how much tax people actually pay under the current tax/benefit system (it's more than you think, because of all the stealth taxes), and just for fun, I tacked on what your tax bills would be if I were in charge. To save arguments, let's assume that pensioners' main residences are exempt from LVT, so the comparative figures do not apply to them.

I'm sure you're all familiar with the current tax/benefits system, so that needs little explanation. I explained my suggested tax system here and my suggested Citizen's Income scheme here.

29 comments:

Derek said...

You know, you really should have a Must Read pages section on the blog where you could put posts like this so they don't get lost in the archives.

Derek said...

One suggestion though. Renters should do really well under a shift to LVT/CI. Any chance of a similar sheet to show that?

Alice Cook said...

Mark,

An insolent little spreadsheet.....

I fear it suggests we pay too much tax.

Alice

Mark Wadsworth said...

D, ta. For renters, you just type 0% in cell C10.

AC, more to the point, people pay twice as much as they think.

Bayard said...

Mark, your spreadsheet doesn't seem to take into account rental income, which is not subject to NI, but maybe I'm misreading it.

Old BE said...

Very interesting. I pay about what I thought I did :-)

However, under your proposed system I pay half what I pay now. As I am one of the people who props up the current level of public spending, clearly a tax reformer would never let me get away with halving my tax bill.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, for most people, most of their income is employment income. But I stuck in Cell C8 for "other income" which let's assume is taxed at average rate 20%.

BE, I was vaguely hoping you'd notice that. But I'm the kind of tax reformer who is perfectly happy for there to be winners and losers.

Lola said...

As I had already estimated, and this s/s has confiremd - I'd be about 10K better off p.a.
But surely it gets even better since we can lose 90% of HMRC staff and lots of other leeches which'll bring down lvt and without the deaweight cost of the other taxes I know I can expand my business..?

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, ta, I'd end up massively worse off because I'm one of the leeches :-)

Anonymous said...

Assuming that 1/3 of my upcoming flat rental costs can be imputed to my landlord's LVT and deducting that from my CI, I'm still over 2 grand to the good. I'd expected as I'm in the home counties to not really be any better off.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Frag, for tenants, type in the value of the home you'd like to rent in Cell C9 as normal, type in 0% in Cell C10, and that gives you the answer as normal.

This assumes that:
- half the current market rent/value of any house is bricks+mortar, and half is location rent/value.
- the tenant will end up paying the entire LVT on top of bricks+mortar rent
- the LVT soaks up the entire location rent/value.

Simplifying assumptions I know, but what else can we do?

Anonymous said...

The next step is to link in your previous spreadsheet on LVT rates by postcode.

Lola said...

mW - No you wouldn't. Anyway you have a 'transportable skill'.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Frag, I never did one by postcode sectors (there are 10,000 of them, I know how I could do it, but it would take weeks), the best I've got is by local authority area (there are about 300 of those, and this one took me quite a few hours).

L, ta for vote of confidence.

Bayard said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mark Wadsworth said...

Frag, I've checked, 11,598 postcode sectors (forget it) but 3,064 postcode districts (which is just about do-able, as you can look up average selling prices at Rightmove with a few clicks).

So that'll keep me busy next time I'm not so busy...

Bayard said...

Mark, thanks, I've found the relevant workings now. It look like that, under the new system, my income would shrink by just over a third, leaving me a very poor man indeed.

Old BE said...

Aha, so it is Bayard I have to thank :-))

MW I wouldn't invest too much energy in a LA selling price index. Even for my *postcode* there is such huge variation in average selling price that the details would be almost meaningless. I suppose I do live in an unusually diverse area (Georgian squares, grimy towers and everything in between) but still.

Anonymous said...

Have you still got my email address? There must be a way of automating it.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, you'll have to down size, try and earn a bit more or rein in spending.

BE, I've already done the LA one!

For averaging purposes, there are 350 LA's so that would be 77,000 addresses each, much too big.

But don't say "postcode", it's meaningless. There are 3,000 postcode districts (9,000 addresses each, which is better) and ideal would be using 11,500 postcode sectors (2,300 adresses each), that's quite small enough.

F, I've sent you an email.

Old BE said...

OK, I meant the first half of the postcode which in London means the pre-1965ish boroughs i.e. N1 or SW6 or whatever. These areas are quite big so my comment stands that it wouldn't be a useful number.

In inner London the next breakdown such as N1 4xx wouldn't help much either I suspect.

Mark Wadsworth said...

BE, yes, N1 is too big, but N1 4 looks about right for tax purposes (nobody said that the government would actually each individual land title, but it's better to be roughly right than precisely wrong).

Rightmove says for N1 4xx:

Flat - £303k
Semi - £939k
Detached - £856k
Terrace - £810k

We can download a full list and work out Standard Deviation and so on, if SD is less than 30% or so, then that's accurate enough.

Old BE said...

So under your system the resident of "a flat" in N1 4xx would pay the LVT on £303k no matter whether that particular flat was worth anything like £303k? That would go down well...

Mark Wadsworth said...

BE, certainly not!

The point is I like to start with known figures - we can decide how much tax we want to raise, and we know how many square yards of privately owned developed land there is, so we can then work out a target rate in £/sq yard.

Now, clearly we cannot have the same rate all over the country, so I would suggest (just to get the ball rolling) that we pro-rate it according to relative values of e.g. semi-detached houses.

So if our median area is Swindon, where semi costs £180k and LVT is £20/sq yd, then in N1 4xx the tax is about £100/sq yard.

So if your (large) house is on a 500 sq yard plot, the tax is £50,000 a year and no back chat.

If there's a block of 50 flats on a half-acre site, the tax per flat = 2,420 x £100 ÷ 50 = £4,840 per flat, and so on.

I'm no expert in valuing, I'm just working backwards from the answer (total tax to be raised).

Bayard said...

BE, the valuations for the council tax (if you can remeber them, it was so long ago) was done on a similarly broad-brush approach and it didn't take too long. Anomalies were picked up by the appeals system, which was only hampered by the need in latter years to try and work out a value in the dim and distant past.
However, this does highlight the disadvantage of basing LVT on selling prices, not on plot values, which vary a lot less within a postcode sector.

Shiney said...

Mark

I'm an owner manger of a manufacturing SME - the sort of guy this govt should be encouraging as we've created jobs in the last two yeas (28% up) and invested circa £1m in new kit.

LVT is a no brainer - saves me £30k pa in family taxes without taking into account the corp tax/vat/ni issues in my business which would lead to increased investment etc etc etc.

Shiney

Mark Wadsworth said...

S, I'm glad you're doing well and ta for vote of confidence.

Business tax under LVT is simple - the LVT would be approx. twice what your Business Rates are now and the rest of it - VAT, corp tax, PAYE, NIC would all be scrapped.

Kj said...

Superb work MW. I've adapted the sheet for the applicable tax rates here, and for the first time I realised just how much I'd personally gain by such a tax shift. Two people working, living relatively cheap, even if the house(land) were to increase 150% as an effect of the shift, I'd cut my taxes in half.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Kj, thanks.

As I've said many a time, if you take the total of all the taxes you want to replace and divide it by the amount of privately owned developed land in that country (ignore farmland for now), then you get a number in pounds (or Kroner) per square yard (per square metre).

All you then have to do is adjust the land tax rate up and down for poor/cheap and rich/expensive areas so that it becomes a proper land VALUE tax, logic says, if you do the adjustment correctly, most people will pay the same amount in LVT as they did in all the other taxes

Sure, some people will pay more (but that's because they weren't paying enough under the old system) and some people will pay less (but that's because they were paying too much under the old system), end of discussion.