Originally Posted by
Onceapilot
Well, it just shows how badly-off the Polies have got us! Methinks the Tories ought to revise their views of wealth taxation or, they will collapse under comrade corbyn. Certainly, by getting real about wealth tax, they could steal the comrades' thunder.
OAP
Don't encourage them! If they did go down the route of a wealth tax and it went beyond property to be a percentage of the total value of your assets including savings and pensions, I can see that landing people with a chunky bill each year given how we currently value pensions for annual / life time limit purposes. It would actually be quite interesting to see how they would handle those with public sector pensions, especially unfunded schemes and those you cannot withdraw the cash from. They wouldn't get away with leaving them as on paper they are worth a fair chunk and it would be further cries of pensions apartheid. But there in lies the rub, like much else in the financial world, the value is paper only.
'Here's your 1%, now if you wouldn't awfully mind, we're going to take 1% back from your entire net worth. And if you don't have the liquid assets to pay, you can always treat it as a loan and roll it up until you die when we just add it on to the other tax bill'
All that said, I'm afraid there's just a little hint of the politics of envy buried in the notion of a wealth tax as espoused by the likes of Monsieur Picketty, coupled with it being too much of a very blunt instrument for my liking. If only they would just stop being so damned careless with the billions they already get in tax, we might not be so badly off! We're one of (currently!) the world's biggest economies. From the IFS, tax receipts are the highest they've been for years and are forecast to increase. If you listen to the politicians the UK economy is in rude health (I said listen, not necessarily believe). And the various Governments seemed to be so damned keen to divest themselves of anything that might cost money to keep on the books. So with all that in mind, surely they should be able to manage without introducing yet more ways to tax people to pay for rapidly diminishing public services and infrastructure?
That said, Corbyn's team did appoint Monsieur Picketty to their Economics Advisory Committee a while back; so if they do get in, don't be surprised if the first budget is a cross between Mao's 'Little Red Book' and Picketty's 'Capital in the 21st Century'