I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The problem there being you penalise people for living in their homes rather than for any monies they might make when they sell. You also end up with a nurse in London paying far more tax than, for example, a consultant geologist in Lincolnshire. Which even with my personal interest seems a tad unfair to me.
Agree about greater taxation on second homes though. 700,000 of them in the UK at last count.
Yesterday, I think the battle lines for the next GE were drawn. Getting sucked into a debate about whether a windfall tax is a good idea, or how much it will raise, is, I think, to miss the point and is just noise. It's the principle that matters. Truss has set out a clear vision of a low tax economy which will benefit the rich, and corporations (no increase in CT), the most. It will only benefit those lower down the pecking order if one believes in trickle-down economics. Labour will re-emphasise the virtue of the state using its financial firepower to redistribute wealth and income - very modestly, at the moment.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
I’d do it the other way round, reduce central governments grants to councils and allow CT to rise while reducing income tax.
But yes, the need is to avoid transaction taxes, which act as a brake on mobility.
That policy (cutting central Government Grants while allowing more council tax to be kept) is why social care is in such a mess up north.
Simply put - your average house in the Home Counties is band D, your average house up north may well be band B....
And? The council can set the charge for each band, based on their property mix and their budget.
It’s why we get misleading headlines like “Westminster has the lowest council tax in the country”, when what it actualy has is the highest property mix in the country, with almost no Band A-C homes at all.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Except that IHT gets charged on far fewer estates. So this would widen those paying.
It seems to me that one of the problems with our tax system is not just the rate at which taxes are charged but their incidence. Too many exemptions etc so the rates are too high on too small a group. So NI on all income (no exclusion for pensioners) and CGT on all capital gains (not just on one class of assets) etc.
And @HYUFD I don't want higher taxes. But if you borrow the sorts of sums the government is borrowing - for worthwhile reasons - you are going to have to pay for this with taxes. So the question is how is that tax burden shared. I don't think it should be loaded solely on the young and future generations. It should be shared more fairly. Since all benefit from help with energy all should contribute.
And that applies even if you get growth. That growth will generate tax revenues but the question of who those revenues come from still arises.
Growth does not obviate the need for fairness ie a fair sharing between groups and generations which maintains and enhances social cohesion. This is the point which the Tories (and to an extent also Labour) don't seem to get.
As actual (not cosplay) Thatcher put it,
"'Those who have been boasting that they have the burden of tax lower have got to say that they had not the guts to cover their expenditure by taxation and in fact they covered it by borrowing and therefore handed on the burden to future generations."
It could well be that government borrowing is the least bad way of funding something that needs to be done. It could well be that a windfall tax is more trouble than it's worth.
But the current slogan "silly old Labour, putting up taxes" doesn't wash when the government's alternative is putting up taxes on future generations.
It might help if Labour was a bit more honest about what their windfall tax could actually deliver. No doubt if Starmer was PM right now the borrowing taps would be turning pretty much the same. Frankly its the right thing to do at the moment, as long the future of energy supply is also addressed.
I find it mildly amusing that it seems polls have not shown a bounce for Truss when she has only been PM for less than 48 hours
She did do well yesterday and today is extremely important, but it will take time and not just weeks for the government to show progress and of course her refusal to join the chorus of demands for a windfall tax may well be a negative, while being the right thing to do to get the producers investing in the North Sea and at last a change in the narrative to a pro business government
I would be concerned if she is polling like this this time next year, but everything pivots around Russia and the outcome of the war
If Putin and Russia suddenly fold for any reason then things could change overnight, or as an analyst said last night this could go on for a decade or more at which time we will all be penniless
We should encourage investment in North Sea wind farms, but not in fossil fuel extraction. We all now know how real climate change is. We’ve made good progress in switching to other forms of energy production. We’ve got to accelerate that move.
We should do both.
Climate change is real but tackling climate change means reducing our domestic fossil fuel consumption over time, not extraction.
Consuming Qatari or Russian hydrocarbons instead of North Sea ones doesn't achieve a single thing for climate change.
If we reduce consumption as much as we need to, then there will be a huge excess of production. New extraction developments will be economically unviable, in the North Sea, in Russia or in Qatar.
We'll just have to introduce aluminium smelting to use up all that lovely power. Just rejoice at that news.
We should install wind and tidal with a peak generation capacity many times our needs.
In light winds our needs are still covered; when the wind blows hard use it to create (net zero) hydrocarbons:
The UK is enormously rich in wind and tidal capacity.
I 100% completely agree with you.
But it can't be done overnight. We can and should invest in North Sea hydrocarbons alongside developing wind and tidal as fast as is economically possible.
If revenues from hydrocarbon investments go to the UK instead of Qatar and make it easier to develop wind faster not slower then all the better too.
Too many people see this as an either/or solution. North Sea hydrocarbons are the appetiser while renewables are the main course, but there's no reason not to make both courses ourselves.
Very little of the North Sea revenue goes to the UK. That's why we don't have a sovereign wealth fund and Norway does. And since the offshore wind sector relies on some of the same support industry as oil and gas, ramping up fossil fuel extraction in the North Sea (which will take many years to come on line anyway) might create capacity constraints for offshore wind, slowing the rollout. We just need to ramp up our transition to renewables, including tidal for baseload and nuclear if tidal plus storage isn't sufficient.
Whilst this is true today, historically it is not. So prior to 2014 and George Osborne's interminable tinkering, Oil companies paid a PRT of 50% on every barrel of oil produced. In addition they then paid a supplementary charge of 32% over and above the normal rate of corporation tax. In total in the first coalition government oil companies were paying between 65 and 70% of the value of every barrel of oil in tax.
This was comparable with Norway where the rate has been around 70% for many many years. The difference is that they leave it alone and don't keep changing it. We tinker with it at almost every opportunity - it changed 3 times in one year under Osborne.
One crucial difference between Norway and the UK was the state ownership of oil and gas extraction. This may well have been to their benefit in the long run (although they have now reduced it massively in the last decade) but it did have a severe impact at the speed at which the Norwegian oil field developed. Peak oil production in the UK was 1985. In Norway it was 2004.
Given that Brent crude prices since 2005 have been way higher than in the 1980s it sounds like developing their field more slowly hasn't worked out too badly for them!
As I said, in the long run it helped them a great deal. But it would have caused huge problems in the UK if we had had that delay.
As an aside, to back up your correct assumption, in 2014 there was a study done that showed that the delay in development of the Norwegian oil field was worth an additional $10 a barrel compared to the UK.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The problem there being you penalise people for living in their homes rather than for any monies they might make when they sell. You also end up with a nurse in London paying far more tax than, for example, a consultant geologist in Lincolnshire. Which even with my personal interest seems a tad unfair to me.
Agree about greater taxation on second homes though. 700,000 of them in the UK at last count.
But if you sell one and move into another then you're just moving, its no different in the big picture to still living in the first one. All you're doing is taxing mobility.
The other advantage of taxing homes at a proportion of their value, is that at present home owners have a fiscal incentive to inflate the price of their homes, by preventing developments nearby that would make sense apart from the fact people want to keep their asset valuable.
Under my proposed system, if people's houses went down in equity, then they'd get a tax cut, so they'd no longer be encouraged to treat their house as an asset to sweat but instead a home to live in.
If people want to oppose developments due to sound reasons then, even though a development nearby might give them a tax cut, that'd be separated from what's just current greed-based NIMBYism.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
I’d do it the other way round, reduce central governments grants to councils and allow CT to rise while reducing income tax.
But yes, the need is to avoid transaction taxes, which act as a brake on mobility.
I agree with the mobility point, but really it'd be incredibly unfair to shift income tax onto locally-raised council tax, since a wealthy area like Westminster could raise a fortune from council tax, while a typical Red Wall area absolutely couldn't. Bart's proposal looks much more reasonable, and in addition would nudge people to downsize. I know one lady who lives alone in a 6-room house for no particular reason except that she's used to it and likes to have guests sometimes - if she was paying 0.5% of the value in tax each year it might concentrate her mind.
Yesterday, I think the battle lines for the next GE were drawn. Getting sucked into a debate about whether a windfall tax is a good idea, or how much it will raise, is, I think, to miss the point and is just noise. It's the principle that matters. Truss has set out a clear vision of a low tax economy which will benefit the rich, and corporations (no increase in CT), the most. It will only benefit those lower down the pecking order if one believes in trickle-down economics. Labour will re-emphasise the virtue of the state using its financial firepower to redistribute wealth and income - very modestly, at the moment.
Take your pick. I know which side I'm on.
Unfortunately it sounds a lot like the 1992 GE, which didn't go the way I was hoping.
Yesterday, I think the battle lines for the next GE were drawn. Getting sucked into a debate about whether a windfall tax is a good idea, or how much it will raise, is, I think, to miss the point and is just noise. It's the principle that matters. Truss has set out a clear vision of a low tax economy which will benefit the rich, and corporations (no increase in CT), the most. It will only benefit those lower down the pecking order if one believes in trickle-down economics. Labour will re-emphasise the virtue of the state using its financial firepower to redistribute wealth and income - very modestly, at the moment.
Take your pick. I know which side I'm on.
Remember Truss has a long record of changing her mind so we can't be sure that what she believes today will be the same in the future.
Yesterday, I think the battle lines for the next GE were drawn. Getting sucked into a debate about whether a windfall tax is a good idea, or how much it will raise, is, I think, to miss the point and is just noise. It's the principle that matters. Truss has set out a clear vision of a low tax economy which will benefit the rich, and corporations (no increase in CT), the most. It will only benefit those lower down the pecking order if one believes in trickle-down economics. Labour will re-emphasise the virtue of the state using its financial firepower to redistribute wealth and income - very modestly, at the moment.
Take your pick. I know which side I'm on.
Remember Truss has a long record of changing her mind so we can't be sure that what she believes today will be the same in the future.
The only people with no record of changing their mind as they grow up are people like Corbyn who are too thick and stuck in their past to do so.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The issue is always how you assess value. One of the houses in our village has been up for sale for the best part of a year. What is its value? This may not matter if the rate is so low that it's not worth making a fuss about.
But given what we are spending the rates need to be significant. It seems to me that it is easier to collect tax at the point when there is a transaction or when you are receiving money than on some notional value.
I would also look at exemptions. Are they really needed?
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Just as the housing market is slowing down that would be a disastrous policy.
In any case you can forget any new taxes on bankers, energy companies or home owners and their heirs while Truss is PM. Ideologically she is a free market Thatcherite Tory leader and wants to slash taxes and cut the state where she can not increase tax as she made clear at PMQs yesterday.
If you want higher taxes you will have to get Starmer elected
Coming, I think. I pretty much share Heathener's take. A Labour government is close to baked-in now.
You don't think CON will go 10% clear following Liz saving the nation?
That would flabbergast me. Only word for it. I'd be flabbergasted.
Yesterday, I think the battle lines for the next GE were drawn. Getting sucked into a debate about whether a windfall tax is a good idea, or how much it will raise, is, I think, to miss the point and is just noise. It's the principle that matters. Truss has set out a clear vision of a low tax economy which will benefit the rich, and corporations (no increase in CT), the most. It will only benefit those lower down the pecking order if one believes in trickle-down economics. Labour will re-emphasise the virtue of the state using its financial firepower to redistribute wealth and income - very modestly, at the moment.
Take your pick. I know which side I'm on.
It really is crunch time: do we want to be Scandinavia or the USA? Because with the increased care and NHS bills and the amount of (largely Victorian) infrastructure on the point of collapse, we need to be a high tax economy, or cut the bottom third of society largely adrift.
Jokowi spilled the deets about his meeting with Putin, in which he said: "I did not want to talk to him if I sit 5 meters from him, maybe other people would. I would go home if that's the case"
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The issue is always how you assess value. One of the houses in our village has been up for sale for the best part of a year. What is its value? This may not matter if the rate is so low that it's not worth making a fuss about.
But given what we are spending the rates need to be significant. It seems to me that it is easier to collect tax at the point when there is a transaction or when you are receiving money than on some notional value.
I would also look at exemptions. Are they really needed?
We are talking about £2000 to £3000 a year. Which would be £20,000 to £30,000 if it was attached to CGT for similar money and that's before we talk about the amount need to replace stamp duty (so probably £25,000 to £40,000).
How willing would you be to move home if you had to stump up that up to move....
Yesterday, I think the battle lines for the next GE were drawn. Getting sucked into a debate about whether a windfall tax is a good idea, or how much it will raise, is, I think, to miss the point and is just noise. It's the principle that matters. Truss has set out a clear vision of a low tax economy which will benefit the rich, and corporations (no increase in CT), the most. It will only benefit those lower down the pecking order if one believes in trickle-down economics. Labour will re-emphasise the virtue of the state using its financial firepower to redistribute wealth and income - very modestly, at the moment.
Take your pick. I know which side I'm on.
Remember Truss has a long record of changing her mind so we can't be sure that what she believes today will be the same in the future.
She has changed her mind on some things eg Brexit and the monarchy.
What she has never changed her mind on is being an economic and social liberal, who wants a small state and low tax and limited regulation. Ideologically she has always been a classical liberal whether as a LD or now as a Conservative. Indeed she is more a classical liberal than traditional Tory.
Truss is the closest we have had to a libertarian PM yet and at the next general election we will discover how popular libertarian ideology is with the British electorate
Yesterday, I think the battle lines for the next GE were drawn. Getting sucked into a debate about whether a windfall tax is a good idea, or how much it will raise, is, I think, to miss the point and is just noise. It's the principle that matters. Truss has set out a clear vision of a low tax economy which will benefit the rich, and corporations (no increase in CT), the most. It will only benefit those lower down the pecking order if one believes in trickle-down economics. Labour will re-emphasise the virtue of the state using its financial firepower to redistribute wealth and income - very modestly, at the moment.
Take your pick. I know which side I'm on.
Remember Truss has a long record of changing her mind so we can't be sure that what she believes today will be the same in the future.
The only people with no record of changing their mind as they grow up are people like Corbyn who are too thick and stuck in their past to do so.
See the history of Jeremy Corbyn's attitude towards British membership of the EEC and EU.
I find it mildly amusing that it seems polls have not shown a bounce for Truss when she has only been PM for less than 48 hours
She did do well yesterday and today is extremely important, but it will take time and not just weeks for the government to show progress and of course her refusal to join the chorus of demands for a windfall tax may well be a negative, while being the right thing to do to get the producers investing in the North Sea and at last a change in the narrative to a pro business government
I would be concerned if she is polling like this this time next year, but everything pivots around Russia and the outcome of the war
If Putin and Russia suddenly fold for any reason then things could change overnight, or as an analyst said last night this could go on for a decade or more at which time we will all be penniless
We should encourage investment in North Sea wind farms, but not in fossil fuel extraction. We all now know how real climate change is. We’ve made good progress in switching to other forms of energy production. We’ve got to accelerate that move.
We should do both.
Climate change is real but tackling climate change means reducing our domestic fossil fuel consumption over time, not extraction.
Consuming Qatari or Russian hydrocarbons instead of North Sea ones doesn't achieve a single thing for climate change.
If we reduce consumption as much as we need to, then there will be a huge excess of production. New extraction developments will be economically unviable, in the North Sea, in Russia or in Qatar.
We'll just have to introduce aluminium smelting to use up all that lovely power. Just rejoice at that news.
We should install wind and tidal with a peak generation capacity many times our needs.
In light winds our needs are still covered; when the wind blows hard use it to create (net zero) hydrocarbons:
The UK is enormously rich in wind and tidal capacity.
Tidal I agree with. If wind is many times our needs, who is going to pay for all those turbines to idle? Companies have invested to build those turbines; if they're not being paid to generate power, do they still get paid not to generate it? That's the regime at the moment. In fact they get paid more than double not to provide energy than they get to provide it. That would be a vast bill for consumers (added on to energy bills). We could cancel constraint payments (that's what I would do), forcing wind owners to find their own solutions to store power, but I am realistic that that would dampen the 'gold rush' of building wind that we have at the moment.
Duh! You have answered you own question.
The lasted offshore wind electricity contracts are being won by generating companies committing to 4.8p per kWh.
(Edit: it's now actually ten times cheaper than gas)
This is only going one way.
Investing in hydrocarbons from excess electricity will be a great way to maximise the benefit of wind capacity.
Um, there is no 'Duh' warranted except for the very basic concept that you have failed to grasp. Wind is currently booming because whatever happens, wind providers are guaranteed money; in many instances, free money. Stop that free money, and you get diminishing returns and therefore investment, especially as more and more capacity gets added to the system, which is what you want. You won't get investors adding that wind capacity if half the time they won't get paid. Do you understand that, or shall I draw a diagram?
An unexpected selection of answers to my question why aren’t the Ukes bombing Red Square
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult 2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground 3. Something to do with population size 4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning 5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
Yesterday, I think the battle lines for the next GE were drawn. Getting sucked into a debate about whether a windfall tax is a good idea, or how much it will raise, is, I think, to miss the point and is just noise. It's the principle that matters. Truss has set out a clear vision of a low tax economy which will benefit the rich, and corporations (no increase in CT), the most. It will only benefit those lower down the pecking order if one believes in trickle-down economics. Labour will re-emphasise the virtue of the state using its financial firepower to redistribute wealth and income - very modestly, at the moment.
Take your pick. I know which side I'm on.
Remember Truss has a long record of changing her mind so we can't be sure that what she believes today will be the same in the future.
She has changed her mind on some things eg Brexit and the monarchy.
What she has never changed her mind on is being an economic and social liberal, who wants a small state and low tax and limited regulation. Ideologically she has always been a classical liberal whether as a LD or now as a Conservative. Indeed she is more a classical liberal than traditional Tory.
Truss is the closest we have had to a libertarian PM yet and at the next general election we will discover how popular libertarian ideology is with the British electorate
I gave you a like as I agree with all of that apart from your final line.
At the next election, like all elections, there will be many factors at play. People might be fed-up post-Covid/post-Russia etc, people might be bored of the Tories, people might still feel resentment at "partygate" etc, people might feel its time for a change.
You can't judge any ideology from a sample of 1 election.
David Cameron and Margaret Thatcher were for their days also both quite libertarian rather than traditional Tory too.
Yesterday, I think the battle lines for the next GE were drawn. Getting sucked into a debate about whether a windfall tax is a good idea, or how much it will raise, is, I think, to miss the point and is just noise. It's the principle that matters. Truss has set out a clear vision of a low tax economy which will benefit the rich, and corporations (no increase in CT), the most. It will only benefit those lower down the pecking order if one believes in trickle-down economics. Labour will re-emphasise the virtue of the state using its financial firepower to redistribute wealth and income - very modestly, at the moment.
Take your pick. I know which side I'm on.
It really is crunch time: do we want to be Scandinavia or the USA? Because with the increased care and NHS bills and the amount of (largely Victorian) infrastructure on the point of collapse, we need to be a high tax economy, or cut the bottom third of society largely adrift.
What rubbish most western nations are neither the US nor Sweden but somewhere in between. Even Sweden is shifting a bit right as Sunday's election will show while Biden and the Democrats are shifting the US more to the statist left anyway.
Excess tax also slows growth leading to higher unemployment and lower revenues raised
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
I’d do it the other way round, reduce central governments grants to councils and allow CT to rise while reducing income tax.
But yes, the need is to avoid transaction taxes, which act as a brake on mobility.
I agree with the mobility point, but really it'd be incredibly unfair to shift income tax onto locally-raised council tax, since a wealthy area like Westminster could raise a fortune from council tax, while a typical Red Wall area absolutely couldn't. Bart's proposal looks much more reasonable, and in addition would nudge people to downsize. I know one lady who lives alone in a 6-room house for no particular reason except that she's used to it and likes to have guests sometimes - if she was paying 0.5% of the value in tax each year it might concentrate her mind.
The issue is that there’s such discrepancies in property prices in different areas, that anything based on a national scale is terribly unfair on low-income workers in the South East and London. How does a nurse afford 0.5% of £700,000, just because her two bed flat has gone up so much in value? The result would be a genuine crash in house prices, leaving millions of people upside-down on their mortgages. My suggestion also means that councils are incentivised financially to allow more properties to be built in their districts, whereas a flat %age of value paid to central government incentivises them to keep property prices high.
Despite Johnson's supernatural talent for self-promotion it's the Baltics, Norway and Poland who are doing the heavy lifting on a GDP basis.
It means much more to the people of the Baltics and Poland, for reasons that should be obvious even to the Western Putin supporter.
Shocking display from the Krauts
There’s a video on Twitter of Scholz explaining to the German parliament how Germany can’t give any more APCs or tanks until “Biden says it’s OK” a claim dismissed with derision by German and Ukrainian pundits. Scholz is not having a brilliant war
Yesterday, I think the battle lines for the next GE were drawn. Getting sucked into a debate about whether a windfall tax is a good idea, or how much it will raise, is, I think, to miss the point and is just noise. It's the principle that matters. Truss has set out a clear vision of a low tax economy which will benefit the rich, and corporations (no increase in CT), the most. It will only benefit those lower down the pecking order if one believes in trickle-down economics. Labour will re-emphasise the virtue of the state using its financial firepower to redistribute wealth and income - very modestly, at the moment.
Take your pick. I know which side I'm on.
It really is crunch time: do we want to be Scandinavia or the USA? Because with the increased care and NHS bills and the amount of (largely Victorian) infrastructure on the point of collapse, we need to be a high tax economy, or cut the bottom third of society largely adrift.
It's not quite as black-and-white as that; there are spaces in-between which are viable perches as well. The important thing is to acknowledge the trade-off exists. Unless you think other governments are fools and don't work to optimise the bang they get for their buck, the consequence of spending less money on public services and welfare is that they end up worse overall.
What the UK wants is something-for-nothing; high quality services and low taxes. That's the bit that's for the birds.
An unexpected selection of answers to my question why aren’t the Ukes bombing Red Square
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult 2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground 3. Something to do with population size 4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning 5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
Nah. It's because doing so would divide their Western allies. And threaten their supply of weapons. They don't need to take that risk just now. So 4.
Yesterday, I think the battle lines for the next GE were drawn. Getting sucked into a debate about whether a windfall tax is a good idea, or how much it will raise, is, I think, to miss the point and is just noise. It's the principle that matters. Truss has set out a clear vision of a low tax economy which will benefit the rich, and corporations (no increase in CT), the most. It will only benefit those lower down the pecking order if one believes in trickle-down economics. Labour will re-emphasise the virtue of the state using its financial firepower to redistribute wealth and income - very modestly, at the moment.
Take your pick. I know which side I'm on.
Remember Truss has a long record of changing her mind so we can't be sure that what she believes today will be the same in the future.
She has changed her mind on some things eg Brexit and the monarchy.
What she has never changed her mind on is being an economic and social liberal, who wants a small state and low tax and limited regulation. Ideologically she has always been a classical liberal whether as a LD or now as a Conservative. Indeed she is more a classical liberal than traditional Tory.
Truss is the closest we have had to a libertarian PM yet and at the next general election we will discover how popular libertarian ideology is with the British electorate
I gave you a like as I agree with all of that apart from your final line.
At the next election, like all elections, there will be many factors at play. People might be fed-up post-Covid/post-Russia etc, people might be bored of the Tories, people might still feel resentment at "partygate" etc, people might feel its time for a change.
You can't judge any ideology from a sample of 1 election.
David Cameron and Margaret Thatcher were for their days also both quite libertarian rather than traditional Tory too.
Osborne was a libertarian, Cameron more One Nation Tory. Thatcher was an economic liberal but more of a social conservative than Truss
Yesterday, I think the battle lines for the next GE were drawn. Getting sucked into a debate about whether a windfall tax is a good idea, or how much it will raise, is, I think, to miss the point and is just noise. It's the principle that matters. Truss has set out a clear vision of a low tax economy which will benefit the rich, and corporations (no increase in CT), the most. It will only benefit those lower down the pecking order if one believes in trickle-down economics. Labour will re-emphasise the virtue of the state using its financial firepower to redistribute wealth and income - very modestly, at the moment.
Take your pick. I know which side I'm on.
It really is crunch time: do we want to be Scandinavia or the USA? Because with the increased care and NHS bills and the amount of (largely Victorian) infrastructure on the point of collapse, we need to be a high tax economy, or cut the bottom third of society largely adrift.
What rubbish most western nations are neither the US nor Sweden but somewhere in between. Even Sweden is shifting a bit right as Sunday's election will show while Biden and the Democrats are shifting the US more to the statist left anyway.
Excess tax also slows growth leading to higher unemployment and lower revenues raised anyway.
and insufficient tax leads to the sewage system giving up and a healthcare crisis. trickle down theory is bollocks anyway, but it is certainly bollocks to think that expenditure by the rich on anything other than taxes, leads to mr Bazalgette's excellent sewers being updated. sorry, but there it is.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
I’d do it the other way round, reduce central governments grants to councils and allow CT to rise while reducing income tax.
But yes, the need is to avoid transaction taxes, which act as a brake on mobility.
I agree with the mobility point, but really it'd be incredibly unfair to shift income tax onto locally-raised council tax, since a wealthy area like Westminster could raise a fortune from council tax, while a typical Red Wall area absolutely couldn't. Bart's proposal looks much more reasonable, and in addition would nudge people to downsize. I know one lady who lives alone in a 6-room house for no particular reason except that she's used to it and likes to have guests sometimes - if she was paying 0.5% of the value in tax each year it might concentrate her mind.
The issue is that there’s such discrepancies in property prices in different areas, that anything based on a national scale is terribly unfair on low-income workers in the South East and London. How does a nurse afford 0.5% of £700,000, just because her two bed flat has gone up so much in value? The result would be a genuine crash in house prices, leaving millions of people upride-down on their mortgages. My suggestion also means that councils are incentivised financially to allow more properties to be built in their districts, whereas a flat %age of value paid to central government incentivises them to keep property prices high.
Let us not forget this is to replace Council Tax too, so the additional tax on a £700k home isn't £3.5k its the difference between Council Tax (and Stamp Duty etc) and that.
Plus if the price of that home comes down as a result of the tax system no longer incentivising ever higher house prices, the nurse and their partner might actually find it easier to afford a home and play tax on a percentage of a cheaper to buy home rather than Council Tax and rent on an unaffordable home.
An unexpected selection of answers to my question why aren’t the Ukes bombing Red Square
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult 2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground 3. Something to do with population size 4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning 5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
you omit 6. which is my answer, and the right one: avoidance of disproportionate reprisals in Ukraine against Ukr citizens.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The problem there being you penalise people for living in their homes rather than for any monies they might make when they sell. You also end up with a nurse in London paying far more tax than, for example, a consultant geologist in Lincolnshire. Which even with my personal interest seems a tad unfair to me.
Agree about greater taxation on second homes though. 700,000 of them in the UK at last count.
But if you sell one and move into another then you're just moving, its no different in the big picture to still living in the first one. All you're doing is taxing mobility.
The other advantage of taxing homes at a proportion of their value, is that at present home owners have a fiscal incentive to inflate the price of their homes, by preventing developments nearby that would make sense apart from the fact people want to keep their asset valuable.
Under my proposed system, if people's houses went down in equity, then they'd get a tax cut, so they'd no longer be encouraged to treat their house as an asset to sweat but instead a home to live in.
If people want to oppose developments due to sound reasons then, even though a development nearby might give them a tax cut, that'd be separated from what's just current greed-based NIMBYism.
Still doesn't address the fact that I would pay less tax on a nice pile in Lincolnshire than a nurse or teaching assistant would pay on a small flat in London.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Just as the housing market is slowing down that would be a disastrous policy.
In any case you can forget any new taxes on bankers, energy companies or home owners and their heirs while Truss is PM. Ideologically she is a free market Thatcherite Tory leader and wants to slash taxes and cut the state where she can not increase tax as she made clear at PMQs yesterday.
If you want higher taxes you will have to get Starmer elected
Coming, I think. I pretty much share Heathener's take. A Labour government is close to baked-in now.
You don't think CON will go 10% clear following Liz saving the nation?
That would flabbergast me. Only word for it. I'd be flabbergasted.
I do not see a sudden bounce for Truss and expect it will take quite some time for the conservatives to regain a hearing since their ridiculous behaviour this summer
If they are to recover it is likely to take many months and into 2023 and frankly will depend on events largely out of their control, not least the war in Ukraine
An unexpected selection of answers to my question why aren’t the Ukes bombing Red Square
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult 2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground 3. Something to do with population size 4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning 5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
Nah. It's because doing so would divide their Western allies. And threaten their supply of weapons. They don't need to take that risk just now. So 4.
I’m certainly willing to be persuaded it is 4. The mystery requires an answer
But as I say I am still puzzled why Ukrainians INSIDE Russia aren’t doing more brutal, terror-style stuff. It seems to be basic human nature
If they are all obeying an Edict of Restraint from Zelensky that is mightily impressive
I find it mildly amusing that it seems polls have not shown a bounce for Truss when she has only been PM for less than 48 hours
She did do well yesterday and today is extremely important, but it will take time and not just weeks for the government to show progress and of course her refusal to join the chorus of demands for a windfall tax may well be a negative, while being the right thing to do to get the producers investing in the North Sea and at last a change in the narrative to a pro business government
I would be concerned if she is polling like this this time next year, but everything pivots around Russia and the outcome of the war
If Putin and Russia suddenly fold for any reason then things could change overnight, or as an analyst said last night this could go on for a decade or more at which time we will all be penniless
We should encourage investment in North Sea wind farms, but not in fossil fuel extraction. We all now know how real climate change is. We’ve made good progress in switching to other forms of energy production. We’ve got to accelerate that move.
We should do both.
Climate change is real but tackling climate change means reducing our domestic fossil fuel consumption over time, not extraction.
Consuming Qatari or Russian hydrocarbons instead of North Sea ones doesn't achieve a single thing for climate change.
If we reduce consumption as much as we need to, then there will be a huge excess of production. New extraction developments will be economically unviable, in the North Sea, in Russia or in Qatar.
We'll just have to introduce aluminium smelting to use up all that lovely power. Just rejoice at that news.
We should install wind and tidal with a peak generation capacity many times our needs.
In light winds our needs are still covered; when the wind blows hard use it to create (net zero) hydrocarbons:
The UK is enormously rich in wind and tidal capacity.
Tidal I agree with. If wind is many times our needs, who is going to pay for all those turbines to idle? Companies have invested to build those turbines; if they're not being paid to generate power, do they still get paid not to generate it? That's the regime at the moment. In fact they get paid more than double not to provide energy than they get to provide it. That would be a vast bill for consumers (added on to energy bills). We could cancel constraint payments (that's what I would do), forcing wind owners to find their own solutions to store power, but I am realistic that that would dampen the 'gold rush' of building wind that we have at the moment.
Duh! You have answered you own question.
The lasted offshore wind electricity contracts are being won by generating companies committing to 4.8p per kWh.
(Edit: it's now actually ten times cheaper than gas)
This is only going one way.
Investing in hydrocarbons from excess electricity will be a great way to maximise the benefit of wind capacity.
Um, there is no 'Duh' warranted except for the very basic concept that you have failed to grasp. Wind is currently booming because whatever happens, wind providers are guaranteed money; in many instances, free money. Stop that free money, and you get diminishing returns and therefore investment, especially as more and more capacity gets added to the system, which is what you want. You won't get investors adding that wind capacity if half the time they won't get paid. Do you understand that, or shall I draw a diagram?
And when do you imagine such a time will come ?
By the time we have the amount of capacity you're talking about, we will also have multiple HVDC interconnects with Europe, along with a substantial base of electric vehicles, and a growing menu of options for energy storage.
The point of having excess generating capacity at effectively zero marginal cost is that markets will find a way of utilising it. In the meantime, incentives to make installation of capacity make sense both economically and strategically.
An unexpected selection of answers to my question why aren’t the Ukes bombing Red Square
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult 2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground 3. Something to do with population size 4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning 5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
There's definitely some sabotage going on inside Russia. If you had a choice between blowing up some random office workers and probably getting caught, and sabotaging a railway in a way that actually disrupted Russia's war effort and you'd probably get away with it, would you really go for the random office workers? I mean, it's not implausible that somebody will, but the second option seems like a better way to win.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The problem there being you penalise people for living in their homes rather than for any monies they might make when they sell. You also end up with a nurse in London paying far more tax than, for example, a consultant geologist in Lincolnshire. Which even with my personal interest seems a tad unfair to me.
Agree about greater taxation on second homes though. 700,000 of them in the UK at last count.
But if you sell one and move into another then you're just moving, its no different in the big picture to still living in the first one. All you're doing is taxing mobility.
The other advantage of taxing homes at a proportion of their value, is that at present home owners have a fiscal incentive to inflate the price of their homes, by preventing developments nearby that would make sense apart from the fact people want to keep their asset valuable.
Under my proposed system, if people's houses went down in equity, then they'd get a tax cut, so they'd no longer be encouraged to treat their house as an asset to sweat but instead a home to live in.
If people want to oppose developments due to sound reasons then, even though a development nearby might give them a tax cut, that'd be separated from what's just current greed-based NIMBYism.
Still doesn't address the fact that I would pay less tax on a nice pile in Lincolnshire than a nurse or teaching assistant would pay on a small flat in London.
To be honest you probably should, land in Lincolnshire is less demanded. Land should be taxed because whoever owns it is preventing someone else from doing something with that land, and if your land is less valued/demanded then you should be paying less tax on it.
If the nurses wages aren't high enough, that should be addressed through increasing her pay to the appropriate rate. If you're well off because you earn a high income, you should be taxed on that income. Land tax shouldn't be a form of income tax, it should be to deal with land issues.
Despite Johnson's supernatural talent for self-promotion it's the Baltics, Norway and Poland who are doing the heavy lifting on a GDP basis.
It means much more to the people of the Baltics and Poland, for reasons that should be obvious even to the Western Putin supporter.
Shocking display from the Krauts
There’s a video on Twitter of Scholz explaining to the German parliament how Germany can’t give any more APCs or tanks until “Biden says it’s OK” a claim dismissed with derision by German and Ukrainian pundits. Scholz is not having a brilliant war
It strikes me as admirable frankness. Not to mention an extremely interesting insight into the evolution of American policy. If only our politicians were as honest.
Yesterday, I think the battle lines for the next GE were drawn. Getting sucked into a debate about whether a windfall tax is a good idea, or how much it will raise, is, I think, to miss the point and is just noise. It's the principle that matters. Truss has set out a clear vision of a low tax economy which will benefit the rich, and corporations (no increase in CT), the most. It will only benefit those lower down the pecking order if one believes in trickle-down economics. Labour will re-emphasise the virtue of the state using its financial firepower to redistribute wealth and income - very modestly, at the moment.
Take your pick. I know which side I'm on.
Remember Truss has a long record of changing her mind so we can't be sure that what she believes today will be the same in the future.
The only people with no record of changing their mind as they grow up are people like Corbyn who are too thick and stuck in their past to do so.
True, but she's done it in mere weeks, without any acknowledgement of why she's chdnged her mind.
U turns can be good and to be applauded. But people do need to explain why it happens.
Not 'Everything was great under my predecessor who I thought should continue, but also this is why we need to change'.
An unexpected selection of answers to my question why aren’t the Ukes bombing Red Square
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult 2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground 3. Something to do with population size 4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning 5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
There's definitely some sabotage going on inside Russia. If you had a choice between blowing up some random office workers and probably getting caught, and sabotaging a railway in a way that actually disrupted Russia's war effort and you'd probably get away with it, would you really go for the random office workers? I mean, it's not implausible that somebody will, but the second option seems like a better way to win.
The Ukes are showing little restraint inside Ukraine’s occupied territories (and nor should they)
“In Kherson, it is said that Russian officers … have been avoiding evening walks recently,” he wrote. “As soon as city falls asleep, the partisans wake up. … We wish all the collaborators a ‘good night.’ ”
it must also be very tempting for Ukrainian spies and allies to take out a few family members of top Russians. Putin’s kids. Lavrov’s daughter. Why not?
Cruel and heartless, and maybe evil, but you’d gain intense emotional satisfaction knowing that you’d made Putin suffer deeply and PERSONALLY
These people will never be able to live without anxiety, ever again
Which of the following do you think would make the best Prime Minister? Liz Truss: 25% (-3 from Boris Johnson's final score on 4-5 Aug) Keir Starmer: 32% (-6) Neither: 40% (+10)
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The issue is always how you assess value. One of the houses in our village has been up for sale for the best part of a year. What is its value? This may not matter if the rate is so low that it's not worth making a fuss about.
But given what we are spending the rates need to be significant. It seems to me that it is easier to collect tax at the point when there is a transaction or when you are receiving money than on some notional value.
I would also look at exemptions. Are they really needed?
We are talking about £2000 to £3000 a year. Which would be £20,000 to £30,000 if it was attached to CGT for similar money and that's before we talk about the amount need to replace stamp duty (so probably £25,000 to £40,000).
How willing would you be to move home if you had to stump up that up to move....
£3000 pa is quite a significant proportion of my pre-tax income, which fluctuates considerably and from which I have to pay increasing bills etc. I'd rather pay 10 times that at the point where I'm getting a large amount of money from a sale.
We can always find reasons to to increase or impose a tax. Or dislike one. But if we carry on as we are we are either debauching our currency and so our wealth or loading all the taxes on the young and yet to be born and degrading our services and infrastructure.
So we need to find a way to get those who are better off and those who are benefiting from exemptions to contribute a bit more.
Despite Johnson's supernatural talent for self-promotion it's the Baltics, Norway and Poland who are doing the heavy lifting on a GDP basis.
It means much more to the people of the Baltics and Poland, for reasons that should be obvious even to the Western Putin supporter.
Shocking display from the Krauts
There’s a video on Twitter of Scholz explaining to the German parliament how Germany can’t give any more APCs or tanks until “Biden says it’s OK” a claim dismissed with derision by German and Ukrainian pundits. Scholz is not having a brilliant war
Saw a piece outlining how Germany has provided a lot more than people think. But Scholz seems to put his foot in it a lot.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The problem there being you penalise people for living in their homes rather than for any monies they might make when they sell. You also end up with a nurse in London paying far more tax than, for example, a consultant geologist in Lincolnshire. Which even with my personal interest seems a tad unfair to me.
Agree about greater taxation on second homes though. 700,000 of them in the UK at last count.
But if you sell one and move into another then you're just moving, its no different in the big picture to still living in the first one. All you're doing is taxing mobility.
The other advantage of taxing homes at a proportion of their value, is that at present home owners have a fiscal incentive to inflate the price of their homes, by preventing developments nearby that would make sense apart from the fact people want to keep their asset valuable.
Under my proposed system, if people's houses went down in equity, then they'd get a tax cut, so they'd no longer be encouraged to treat their house as an asset to sweat but instead a home to live in.
If people want to oppose developments due to sound reasons then, even though a development nearby might give them a tax cut, that'd be separated from what's just current greed-based NIMBYism.
Still doesn't address the fact that I would pay less tax on a nice pile in Lincolnshire than a nurse or teaching assistant would pay on a small flat in London.
To be honest you probably should, land in Lincolnshire is less demanded. Land should be taxed because whoever owns it is preventing someone else from doing something with that land, and if your land is less valued/demanded then you should be paying less tax on it.
If the nurses wages aren't high enough, that should be addressed through increasing her pay to the appropriate rate. If you're well off because you earn a high income, you should be taxed on that income. Land tax shouldn't be a form of income tax, it should be to deal with land issues.
I know it should. There are lots of things that 'should' happen. But they either never will (with never being within our lifetimes) or they will at least take so long that in the meantime those caught by the issues will be unable to survive. The discrepancies between London/South East and the rest of the country are so large that proposal you are making is unworkable. You would have no one able to work in low paid jobs and own their own home in London.
Theoretical suggestions (as in the tax reflecting land values) are all well and good but we have to live in the real world with real world consequences addressed by real world answers.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The issue is always how you assess value. One of the houses in our village has been up for sale for the best part of a year. What is its value? This may not matter if the rate is so low that it's not worth making a fuss about.
But given what we are spending the rates need to be significant. It seems to me that it is easier to collect tax at the point when there is a transaction or when you are receiving money than on some notional value.
I would also look at exemptions. Are they really needed?
We are talking about £2000 to £3000 a year. Which would be £20,000 to £30,000 if it was attached to CGT for similar money and that's before we talk about the amount need to replace stamp duty (so probably £25,000 to £40,000).
How willing would you be to move home if you had to stump up that up to move....
£3000 pa is quite a significant proportion of my pre-tax income, which fluctuates considerably and from which I have to pay increasing bills etc. I'd rather pay 10 times that at the point where I'm getting a large amount of money from a sale.
We can always find reasons to to increase or impose a tax. Or dislike one. But if we carry on as we are we are either debauching our currency and so our wealth or loading all the taxes on the young and yet to be born and degrading our services and infrastructure.
So we need to find a way to get those who are better off and those who are benefiting from exemptions to contribute a bit more.
You keep saying you wish to not have all taxes lumped upon the young, but taxing mobility by putting taxes on point of sale harms those who are most mobile, which is the young, and allows those who are old and 'settled down' to escape paying their fair share and to put all the burden on the young instead.
If a young person moves three times in a decade, while a 'settled down' old person never moves, is it really right that the latter pays no tax while the young person is lumped with three sets of tax to pay?
An unexpected selection of answers to my question why aren’t the Ukes bombing Red Square
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult 2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground 3. Something to do with population size 4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning 5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
Nah. It's because doing so would divide their Western allies. And threaten their supply of weapons. They don't need to take that risk just now. So 4.
I’m certainly willing to be persuaded it is 4. The mystery requires an answer
But as I say I am still puzzled why Ukrainians INSIDE Russia aren’t doing more brutal, terror-style stuff. It seems to be basic human nature
If they are all obeying an Edict of Restraint from Zelensky that is mightily impressive
The Chechens were no slouch when it came to terrorism within Russia.
How much world support did they get? How many Western arms? How much training?
That is your answer. Terrorism by the Ukrainians would be utterly self-defeating and would not help win the war.
An unexpected selection of answers to my question why aren’t the Ukes bombing Red Square
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult 2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground 3. Something to do with population size 4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning 5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
Wouldn't Putin's sound position on Woke make you hesitate just a little?
An unexpected selection of answers to my question why aren’t the Ukes bombing Red Square
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult 2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground 3. Something to do with population size 4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning 5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
There's definitely some sabotage going on inside Russia. If you had a choice between blowing up some random office workers and probably getting caught, and sabotaging a railway in a way that actually disrupted Russia's war effort and you'd probably get away with it, would you really go for the random office workers? I mean, it's not implausible that somebody will, but the second option seems like a better way to win.
The Ukes are showing little restraint inside Ukraine’s occupied territories (and nor should they)
“In Kherson, it is said that Russian officers … have been avoiding evening walks recently,” he wrote. “As soon as city falls asleep, the partisans wake up. … We wish all the collaborators a ‘good night.’ ”
it must also be very tempting for Ukrainian spies and allies to take out a few family members of top Russians. Putin’s kids. Lavrov’s daughter. Why not?
Cruel and heartless, and maybe evil, but you’d gain intense emotional satisfaction knowing that you’d made Putin suffer deeply and PERSONALLY
These people will never be able to live without anxiety, ever again
Win/win if you chuck them out of windows, because Putin knows it wasn't him but everyone else thinks it was.
An unexpected selection of answers to my question why aren’t the Ukes bombing Red Square
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult 2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground 3. Something to do with population size 4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning 5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
There's definitely some sabotage going on inside Russia. If you had a choice between blowing up some random office workers and probably getting caught, and sabotaging a railway in a way that actually disrupted Russia's war effort and you'd probably get away with it, would you really go for the random office workers? I mean, it's not implausible that somebody will, but the second option seems like a better way to win.
The Ukes are showing no such restraint inside Ukraine’s occupied territories
“In Kherson, it is said that Russian officers … have been avoiding evening walks recently,” he wrote. “As soon as city falls asleep, the partisans wake up. … We wish all the collaborators a ‘good night.’ ”
Sure, that's a different problem. Targeting occupying troops directly helps the war effort, and targeting collaborators directly hinders the attempt to take control of the occupied towns. Targeting random civilians... doesn't. At best it gets you revenge - on somebody not directly involved, to no obvious strategic purpose.
There may of course be people trying to do this, but I guess it's harder to bring off an attack without support, so at that point don't just need one individual, you need a group of like-minded bad strategists.
An unexpected selection of answers to my question why aren’t the Ukes bombing Red Square
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult 2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground 3. Something to do with population size 4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning 5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
No you wouldn't. You'd just get soused and get off talking about it.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The problem there being you penalise people for living in their homes rather than for any monies they might make when they sell. You also end up with a nurse in London paying far more tax than, for example, a consultant geologist in Lincolnshire. Which even with my personal interest seems a tad unfair to me.
Agree about greater taxation on second homes though. 700,000 of them in the UK at last count.
But if you sell one and move into another then you're just moving, its no different in the big picture to still living in the first one. All you're doing is taxing mobility.
The other advantage of taxing homes at a proportion of their value, is that at present home owners have a fiscal incentive to inflate the price of their homes, by preventing developments nearby that would make sense apart from the fact people want to keep their asset valuable.
Under my proposed system, if people's houses went down in equity, then they'd get a tax cut, so they'd no longer be encouraged to treat their house as an asset to sweat but instead a home to live in.
If people want to oppose developments due to sound reasons then, even though a development nearby might give them a tax cut, that'd be separated from what's just current greed-based NIMBYism.
Still doesn't address the fact that I would pay less tax on a nice pile in Lincolnshire than a nurse or teaching assistant would pay on a small flat in London.
To be honest you probably should, land in Lincolnshire is less demanded. Land should be taxed because whoever owns it is preventing someone else from doing something with that land, and if your land is less valued/demanded then you should be paying less tax on it.
If the nurses wages aren't high enough, that should be addressed through increasing her pay to the appropriate rate. If you're well off because you earn a high income, you should be taxed on that income. Land tax shouldn't be a form of income tax, it should be to deal with land issues.
I know it should. There are lots of things that 'should' happen. But they either never will (with never being within our lifetimes) or they will at least take so long that in the meantime those caught by the issues will be unable to survive. The discrepancies between London/South East and the rest of the country are so large that proposal you are making is unworkable. You would have no one able to work in low paid jobs and own their own home in London.
Theoretical suggestions (as in the tax reflecting land values) are all well and good but we have to live in the real world with real world consequences addressed by real world answers.
There are already London weightings to deal with higher cost of living issues in London. Paying rent or a mortgage on a £700k house utterly dwarfs any tax differentials we are discussing.
If the London weighting paid to a nurse needs to go up to compensate for the higher tax, then that should be done, and your 'problem' is solved. If the cost of housing in London goes down, then your nurse may be better off, not worse off actually.
Incidentally, on the degrading of public services, this is one of the real world consequences.
Defendants charged with serious offences being released from custody and left free to commit other offences, assuming they were guilty. No justice for either them or their victims and the public put at risk.
Wait to see what happens today to see what happens to the polling. If Truss bribes the electorate with sufficient borrowed money it may change dramatically. The opposition parties as usual have nothing to say about anything. It's said that governments lose elections rather than oppositions win them. With ideas and principle free leaders like Starmer and Davey that's never been more true.
Thank you Malcolm, I always look forward to reading your impartial analysis.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
I’d do it the other way round, reduce central governments grants to councils and allow CT to rise while reducing income tax.
But yes, the need is to avoid transaction taxes, which act as a brake on mobility.
I agree with the mobility point, but really it'd be incredibly unfair to shift income tax onto locally-raised council tax, since a wealthy area like Westminster could raise a fortune from council tax, while a typical Red Wall area absolutely couldn't. Bart's proposal looks much more reasonable, and in addition would nudge people to downsize. I know one lady who lives alone in a 6-room house for no particular reason except that she's used to it and likes to have guests sometimes - if she was paying 0.5% of the value in tax each year it might concentrate her mind.
The issue is that there’s such discrepancies in property prices in different areas, that anything based on a national scale is terribly unfair on low-income workers in the South East and London. How does a nurse afford 0.5% of £700,000, just because her two bed flat has gone up so much in value? The result would be a genuine crash in house prices, leaving millions of people upride-down on their mortgages. My suggestion also means that councils are incentivised financially to allow more properties to be built in their districts, whereas a flat %age of value paid to central government incentivises them to keep property prices high.
Let us not forget this is to replace Council Tax too, so the additional tax on a £700k home isn't £3.5k its the difference between Council Tax (and Stamp Duty etc) and that.
Plus if the price of that home comes down as a result of the tax system no longer incentivising ever higher house prices, the nurse and their partner might actually find it easier to afford a home and play tax on a percentage of a cheaper to buy home rather than Council Tax and rent on an unaffordable home.
Yes, the difference is that I want to see the taxes raised locally go up, and the taxes raised centrally come down.
I also suspect that 0.5% is too low for a revenue-neutral solution, 0.8% is closer.
There’s c. 28m residential properties, worth on average c.£250k 0.5% would raise £35bn, you’d need 0.67% to replace both CT and SD - assuming a zero cost of accurately re-valuing each property annually.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
I’d do it the other way round, reduce central governments grants to councils and allow CT to rise while reducing income tax.
But yes, the need is to avoid transaction taxes, which act as a brake on mobility.
I agree with the mobility point, but really it'd be incredibly unfair to shift income tax onto locally-raised council tax, since a wealthy area like Westminster could raise a fortune from council tax, while a typical Red Wall area absolutely couldn't. Bart's proposal looks much more reasonable, and in addition would nudge people to downsize. I know one lady who lives alone in a 6-room house for no particular reason except that she's used to it and likes to have guests sometimes - if she was paying 0.5% of the value in tax each year it might concentrate her mind.
The issue is that there’s such discrepancies in property prices in different areas, that anything based on a national scale is terribly unfair on low-income workers in the South East and London. How does a nurse afford 0.5% of £700,000, just because her two bed flat has gone up so much in value? The result would be a genuine crash in house prices, leaving millions of people upride-down on their mortgages. My suggestion also means that councils are incentivised financially to allow more properties to be built in their districts, whereas a flat %age of value paid to central government incentivises them to keep property prices high.
Let us not forget this is to replace Council Tax too, so the additional tax on a £700k home isn't £3.5k its the difference between Council Tax (and Stamp Duty etc) and that.
Plus if the price of that home comes down as a result of the tax system no longer incentivising ever higher house prices, the nurse and their partner might actually find it easier to afford a home and play tax on a percentage of a cheaper to buy home rather than Council Tax and rent on an unaffordable home.
Yes, the difference is that I want to see the taxes raised locally go up, and the taxes raised centrally come down.
I also suspect that 0.5% is too low for a revenue-neutral solution, 0.8% is closer.
There’s c. 28m residential properties, worth on average c.£250k 0.5% would raise £35bn, you’d need 0.67% to replace both CT and SD - assuming a zero cost of accurately re-valuing each property annually.
You just can't do that in the UK.
Typical home in South Bucks £500,000 - up North it's £150,000
it must also be very tempting for Ukrainian spies and allies to take out a few family members of top Russians. Putin’s kids. Lavrov’s daughter. Why not?
Cruel and heartless, and maybe evil, but you’d gain intense emotional satisfaction knowing that you’d made Putin suffer deeply and PERSONALLY
These people will never be able to live without anxiety, ever again
Sure, they'd be a target, and the Dugin assassination may have been something like this. (I don't think we know whether it was Ukrainians or false-flag or internal Russian politics/business.) But they also have a lot of security, so it's hard to do even if you want to and your odds of getting caught are very high.
Despite Johnson's supernatural talent for self-promotion it's the Baltics, Norway and Poland who are doing the heavy lifting on a GDP basis.
It means much more to the people of the Baltics and Poland, for reasons that should be obvious even to the Western Putin supporter.
Shocking display from the Krauts
There’s a video on Twitter of Scholz explaining to the German parliament how Germany can’t give any more APCs or tanks until “Biden says it’s OK” a claim dismissed with derision by German and Ukrainian pundits. Scholz is not having a brilliant war
Saw a piece outlining how Germany has provided a lot more than people think. But Scholz seems to put his foot in it a lot.
It's stating the bleeding obivous but the poltical culture is I surmise worlds away from eg the UK's. Our politics (no doubt further debauched by u kno who) finds it incomprehensible that Scholz would not trumpet military aid to the point of exaggeration while his innate pacifism would prefer to downplay German armed support to the point of pretending it isn't happening.
An unexpected selection of answers to my question why aren’t the Ukes bombing Red Square
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult 2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground 3. Something to do with population size 4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning 5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
No you wouldn't. You'd just get soused and get off talking about it.
Those Russian geese can be pretty scary when you say boo to them.
it must also be very tempting for Ukrainian spies and allies to take out a few family members of top Russians. Putin’s kids. Lavrov’s daughter. Why not?
Cruel and heartless, and maybe evil, but you’d gain intense emotional satisfaction knowing that you’d made Putin suffer deeply and PERSONALLY
These people will never be able to live without anxiety, ever again
Sure, they'd be a target, and the Dugin assassination may have been something like this. (I don't think we know whether it was Ukrainians or false-flag or internal Russian politics/business.) But they also have a lot of security, so it's hard to do even if you want to and your odds of getting caught are very high.
But a lot of them are walking around western cities
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The issue is always how you assess value. One of the houses in our village has been up for sale for the best part of a year. What is its value? This may not matter if the rate is so low that it's not worth making a fuss about.
But given what we are spending the rates need to be significant. It seems to me that it is easier to collect tax at the point when there is a transaction or when you are receiving money than on some notional value.
I would also look at exemptions. Are they really needed?
We are talking about £2000 to £3000 a year. Which would be £20,000 to £30,000 if it was attached to CGT for similar money and that's before we talk about the amount need to replace stamp duty (so probably £25,000 to £40,000).
How willing would you be to move home if you had to stump up that up to move....
£3000 pa is quite a significant proportion of my pre-tax income, which fluctuates considerably and from which I have to pay increasing bills etc. I'd rather pay 10 times that at the point where I'm getting a large amount of money from a sale.
We can always find reasons to to increase or impose a tax. Or dislike one. But if we carry on as we are we are either debauching our currency and so our wealth or loading all the taxes on the young and yet to be born and degrading our services and infrastructure.
So we need to find a way to get those who are better off and those who are benefiting from exemptions to contribute a bit more.
You keep saying you wish to not have all taxes lumped upon the young, but taxing mobility by putting taxes on point of sale harms those who are most mobile, which is the young, and allows those who are old and 'settled down' to escape paying their fair share and to put all the burden on the young instead.
If a young person moves three times in a decade, while a 'settled down' old person never moves, is it really right that the latter pays no tax while the young person is lumped with three sets of tax to pay?
The young aren't buying. They can't afford to. I'd remove a lot of the IHT exemptions, would use houses to pay for care, levy NI on pensioners and am not in principle opposed to some sort of land value tax provided you have a sensible way of assessing value and linking it to income.
Ideally, I'd want to discourage people buying and selling houses 3 times in a decade. Houses should be homes for living in not for asset speculation.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
I’d do it the other way round, reduce central governments grants to councils and allow CT to rise while reducing income tax.
But yes, the need is to avoid transaction taxes, which act as a brake on mobility.
I agree with the mobility point, but really it'd be incredibly unfair to shift income tax onto locally-raised council tax, since a wealthy area like Westminster could raise a fortune from council tax, while a typical Red Wall area absolutely couldn't. Bart's proposal looks much more reasonable, and in addition would nudge people to downsize. I know one lady who lives alone in a 6-room house for no particular reason except that she's used to it and likes to have guests sometimes - if she was paying 0.5% of the value in tax each year it might concentrate her mind.
The issue is that there’s such discrepancies in property prices in different areas, that anything based on a national scale is terribly unfair on low-income workers in the South East and London. How does a nurse afford 0.5% of £700,000, just because her two bed flat has gone up so much in value? The result would be a genuine crash in house prices, leaving millions of people upride-down on their mortgages. My suggestion also means that councils are incentivised financially to allow more properties to be built in their districts, whereas a flat %age of value paid to central government incentivises them to keep property prices high.
Let us not forget this is to replace Council Tax too, so the additional tax on a £700k home isn't £3.5k its the difference between Council Tax (and Stamp Duty etc) and that.
Plus if the price of that home comes down as a result of the tax system no longer incentivising ever higher house prices, the nurse and their partner might actually find it easier to afford a home and play tax on a percentage of a cheaper to buy home rather than Council Tax and rent on an unaffordable home.
Yes, the difference is that I want to see the taxes raised locally go up, and the taxes raised centrally come down.
I also suspect that 0.5% is too low for a revenue-neutral solution, 0.8% is closer.
There’s c. 28m residential properties, worth on average c.£250k 0.5% would raise £35bn, you’d need 0.67% to replace both CT and SD - assuming a zero cost of accurately re-valuing each property annually.
You just can't do that in the UK.
Typical home in South Bucks £500,000 - up North it's £150,000
Exactly! Which is why I would devolve more revenue-raising to councils, who can set CT rates according to their property mix and budget.
A £500k property up North (five bedrooms and half an acre of land), would pay a lot more CT than a £500k property in South Bucks (two bedroom flat).
An unexpected selection of answers to my question why aren’t the Ukes bombing Red Square
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult 2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground 3. Something to do with population size 4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning 5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
No you wouldn't. You'd just get soused and get off talking about it.
I don’t think you guys quite realise how deeply volatile and unpleasant I can be. I present a moderate agreeable, sober and even-tempered persona on here, I know, but the reality is quite different
it must also be very tempting for Ukrainian spies and allies to take out a few family members of top Russians. Putin’s kids. Lavrov’s daughter. Why not?
Cruel and heartless, and maybe evil, but you’d gain intense emotional satisfaction knowing that you’d made Putin suffer deeply and PERSONALLY
These people will never be able to live without anxiety, ever again
Sure, they'd be a target, and the Dugin assassination may have been something like this. (I don't think we know whether it was Ukrainians or false-flag or internal Russian politics/business.) But they also have a lot of security, so it's hard to do even if you want to and your odds of getting caught are very high.
But a lot of them are walking around western cities
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The issue is always how you assess value. One of the houses in our village has been up for sale for the best part of a year. What is its value? This may not matter if the rate is so low that it's not worth making a fuss about.
But given what we are spending the rates need to be significant. It seems to me that it is easier to collect tax at the point when there is a transaction or when you are receiving money than on some notional value.
I would also look at exemptions. Are they really needed?
We are talking about £2000 to £3000 a year. Which would be £20,000 to £30,000 if it was attached to CGT for similar money and that's before we talk about the amount need to replace stamp duty (so probably £25,000 to £40,000).
How willing would you be to move home if you had to stump up that up to move....
£3000 pa is quite a significant proportion of my pre-tax income, which fluctuates considerably and from which I have to pay increasing bills etc. I'd rather pay 10 times that at the point where I'm getting a large amount of money from a sale.
We can always find reasons to to increase or impose a tax. Or dislike one. But if we carry on as we are we are either debauching our currency and so our wealth or loading all the taxes on the young and yet to be born and degrading our services and infrastructure.
So we need to find a way to get those who are better off and those who are benefiting from exemptions to contribute a bit more.
You keep saying you wish to not have all taxes lumped upon the young, but taxing mobility by putting taxes on point of sale harms those who are most mobile, which is the young, and allows those who are old and 'settled down' to escape paying their fair share and to put all the burden on the young instead.
If a young person moves three times in a decade, while a 'settled down' old person never moves, is it really right that the latter pays no tax while the young person is lumped with three sets of tax to pay?
The young aren't buying. They can't afford to. I'd remove a lot of the IHT exemptions, would use houses to pay for care, levy NI on pensioners and am not in principle opposed to some sort of land value tax provided you have a sensible way of assessing value and linking it to income.
Ideally, I'd want to discourage people buying and selling houses 3 times in a decade. Houses should be homes for living in not for asset speculation.
Young people should be able to buy homes and we should be fixing the reasons they can't not designing a system assuming or to ensure that they can't.
A young family moving three times in a decade is not exceptional or something to discourage. Getting a first home while a young couple, moving five years later to a slightly bigger home while starting a family, then moving again five years after that to a bigger family home . . . is that something to discourage? Or to penalise while those who are already settled down evade the taxes the young are disproportionately paying?
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The issue is always how you assess value. One of the houses in our village has been up for sale for the best part of a year. What is its value? This may not matter if the rate is so low that it's not worth making a fuss about.
But given what we are spending the rates need to be significant. It seems to me that it is easier to collect tax at the point when there is a transaction or when you are receiving money than on some notional value.
I would also look at exemptions. Are they really needed?
We are talking about £2000 to £3000 a year. Which would be £20,000 to £30,000 if it was attached to CGT for similar money and that's before we talk about the amount need to replace stamp duty (so probably £25,000 to £40,000).
How willing would you be to move home if you had to stump up that up to move....
£3000 pa is quite a significant proportion of my pre-tax income, which fluctuates considerably and from which I have to pay increasing bills etc. I'd rather pay 10 times that at the point where I'm getting a large amount of money from a sale.
We can always find reasons to to increase or impose a tax. Or dislike one. But if we carry on as we are we are either debauching our currency and so our wealth or loading all the taxes on the young and yet to be born and degrading our services and infrastructure.
So we need to find a way to get those who are better off and those who are benefiting from exemptions to contribute a bit more.
You keep saying you wish to not have all taxes lumped upon the young, but taxing mobility by putting taxes on point of sale harms those who are most mobile, which is the young, and allows those who are old and 'settled down' to escape paying their fair share and to put all the burden on the young instead.
If a young person moves three times in a decade, while a 'settled down' old person never moves, is it really right that the latter pays no tax while the young person is lumped with three sets of tax to pay?
The young aren't buying. They can't afford to. I'd remove a lot of the IHT exemptions, would use houses to pay for care, levy NI on pensioners and am not in principle opposed to some sort of land value tax provided you have a sensible way of assessing value and linking it to income.
Ideally, I'd want to discourage people buying and selling houses 3 times in a decade. Houses should be homes for living in not for asset speculation.
The people buying and selling three times in a decade, are most likely to be the middle-aged moving for employment reasons.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
I’d do it the other way round, reduce central governments grants to councils and allow CT to rise while reducing income tax.
But yes, the need is to avoid transaction taxes, which act as a brake on mobility.
I agree with the mobility point, but really it'd be incredibly unfair to shift income tax onto locally-raised council tax, since a wealthy area like Westminster could raise a fortune from council tax, while a typical Red Wall area absolutely couldn't. Bart's proposal looks much more reasonable, and in addition would nudge people to downsize. I know one lady who lives alone in a 6-room house for no particular reason except that she's used to it and likes to have guests sometimes - if she was paying 0.5% of the value in tax each year it might concentrate her mind.
The issue is that there’s such discrepancies in property prices in different areas, that anything based on a national scale is terribly unfair on low-income workers in the South East and London. How does a nurse afford 0.5% of £700,000, just because her two bed flat has gone up so much in value? The result would be a genuine crash in house prices, leaving millions of people upride-down on their mortgages. My suggestion also means that councils are incentivised financially to allow more properties to be built in their districts, whereas a flat %age of value paid to central government incentivises them to keep property prices high.
Let us not forget this is to replace Council Tax too, so the additional tax on a £700k home isn't £3.5k its the difference between Council Tax (and Stamp Duty etc) and that.
Plus if the price of that home comes down as a result of the tax system no longer incentivising ever higher house prices, the nurse and their partner might actually find it easier to afford a home and play tax on a percentage of a cheaper to buy home rather than Council Tax and rent on an unaffordable home.
Yes, the difference is that I want to see the taxes raised locally go up, and the taxes raised centrally come down.
I also suspect that 0.5% is too low for a revenue-neutral solution, 0.8% is closer.
There’s c. 28m residential properties, worth on average c.£250k 0.5% would raise £35bn, you’d need 0.67% to replace both CT and SD - assuming a zero cost of accurately re-valuing each property annually.
You just can't do that in the UK.
Typical home in South Bucks £500,000 - up North it's £150,000
Exactly! Which is why I would devolve more revenue-raising to councils, who can set CT rates according to their property mix and budget.
A £500k property up North (five bedrooms and half an acre of land), would pay a lot more CT than a £500k property in South Bucks (two bedroom flat).
Years ago I suggested to someone senior in the Treasury that they should introduce regional bands as that would allow them to sort out council tax (which remember is a cludge because it was the only option after rates and council tax had been trashed). Their reaction was a picture as it's a political nightmare...
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The issue is always how you assess value. One of the houses in our village has been up for sale for the best part of a year. What is its value? This may not matter if the rate is so low that it's not worth making a fuss about.
But given what we are spending the rates need to be significant. It seems to me that it is easier to collect tax at the point when there is a transaction or when you are receiving money than on some notional value.
I would also look at exemptions. Are they really needed?
We are talking about £2000 to £3000 a year. Which would be £20,000 to £30,000 if it was attached to CGT for similar money and that's before we talk about the amount need to replace stamp duty (so probably £25,000 to £40,000).
How willing would you be to move home if you had to stump up that up to move....
£3000 pa is quite a significant proportion of my pre-tax income, which fluctuates considerably and from which I have to pay increasing bills etc. I'd rather pay 10 times that at the point where I'm getting a large amount of money from a sale.
We can always find reasons to to increase or impose a tax. Or dislike one. But if we carry on as we are we are either debauching our currency and so our wealth or loading all the taxes on the young and yet to be born and degrading our services and infrastructure.
So we need to find a way to get those who are better off and those who are benefiting from exemptions to contribute a bit more.
You keep saying you wish to not have all taxes lumped upon the young, but taxing mobility by putting taxes on point of sale harms those who are most mobile, which is the young, and allows those who are old and 'settled down' to escape paying their fair share and to put all the burden on the young instead.
If a young person moves three times in a decade, while a 'settled down' old person never moves, is it really right that the latter pays no tax while the young person is lumped with three sets of tax to pay?
The young aren't buying. They can't afford to. I'd remove a lot of the IHT exemptions, would use houses to pay for care, levy NI on pensioners and am not in principle opposed to some sort of land value tax provided you have a sensible way of assessing value and linking it to income.
Ideally, I'd want to discourage people buying and selling houses 3 times in a decade. Houses should be homes for living in not for asset speculation.
The people buying and selling three times in a decade, are most likely to be the middle-aged moving for employment reasons.
⚡️Welt: Scholz blocks delivery of tanks to Ukraine.
Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) is ready to supply Ukraine with 100 Leopard 2A7 tanks and provide training sessions for soldiers worth 1.55 billion euros. Yet, according to Die Welt, Chancellor Scholz did not react to the offer.
I think it shows the modern (brainwashed to me) mindset on here and elsewhere in the media that to solve the gas price subsidy borrowing all the comments/arguments have been abut finding additional taxes and which ones and how much - The government has never been bigger in terms of its tax take - what the debate shoudl be about is what government /local government spending to cut .Its not as is it is super efficient and wholly valued by the population - For instance do we really need period officers -male or female (I notice the only allowable debate on that in the media was if a male could do it not that the post should not be there ). .
Basically, a primary residence is essential so taxes on that should be kept to a minimum.
But ownership of second and subsequent properties isn't so we should go LARGE on taxes on them.
Many councils have tried to do that but they have been barred by central government.
Also it's fairly easy for a married couple to each claim 1 house is their main abode and if greedy claim the single person discount.
So block the loopholes and enforce it. Central Government should change their attitude. I want taxes to be as low as possible, as decentralised as possible, but as fair as possible.
⚡️Welt: Scholz blocks delivery of tanks to Ukraine.
Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) is ready to supply Ukraine with 100 Leopard 2A7 tanks and provide training sessions for soldiers worth 1.55 billion euros. Yet, according to Die Welt, Chancellor Scholz did not react to the offer.
Scholz obviously wants the war to continue, and for Germans to be further impoverished by the bills this winter. Hopefully the penny will drop some day soon.
The trouble with messing around with taxation on housing is that too much economic activity is dependent on the housing market. Much growth and economic activity is based on house price inflation. Many of the parents of the children in my sons school work in the building trade. If you screw up the housing market and cause a crash the wider economic effects will be catastrophic.
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The issue is always how you assess value. One of the houses in our village has been up for sale for the best part of a year. What is its value? This may not matter if the rate is so low that it's not worth making a fuss about.
But given what we are spending the rates need to be significant. It seems to me that it is easier to collect tax at the point when there is a transaction or when you are receiving money than on some notional value.
I would also look at exemptions. Are they really needed?
We are talking about £2000 to £3000 a year. Which would be £20,000 to £30,000 if it was attached to CGT for similar money and that's before we talk about the amount need to replace stamp duty (so probably £25,000 to £40,000).
How willing would you be to move home if you had to stump up that up to move....
£3000 pa is quite a significant proportion of my pre-tax income, which fluctuates considerably and from which I have to pay increasing bills etc. I'd rather pay 10 times that at the point where I'm getting a large amount of money from a sale.
We can always find reasons to to increase or impose a tax. Or dislike one. But if we carry on as we are we are either debauching our currency and so our wealth or loading all the taxes on the young and yet to be born and degrading our services and infrastructure.
So we need to find a way to get those who are better off and those who are benefiting from exemptions to contribute a bit more.
You keep saying you wish to not have all taxes lumped upon the young, but taxing mobility by putting taxes on point of sale harms those who are most mobile, which is the young, and allows those who are old and 'settled down' to escape paying their fair share and to put all the burden on the young instead.
If a young person moves three times in a decade, while a 'settled down' old person never moves, is it really right that the latter pays no tax while the young person is lumped with three sets of tax to pay?
The young aren't buying. They can't afford to. I'd remove a lot of the IHT exemptions, would use houses to pay for care, levy NI on pensioners and am not in principle opposed to some sort of land value tax provided you have a sensible way of assessing value and linking it to income.
Ideally, I'd want to discourage people buying and selling houses 3 times in a decade. Houses should be homes for living in not for asset speculation.
Young people should be able to buy homes and we should be fixing the reasons they can't not designing a system assuming or to ensure that they can't.
A young family moving three times in a decade is not exceptional or something to discourage. Getting a first home while a young couple, moving five years later to a slightly bigger home while starting a family, then moving again five years after that to a bigger family home . . . is that something to discourage? Or to penalise while those who are already settled down evade the taxes the young are disproportionately paying?
I don't think we disagree. We need to make it easier for the young to buy homes or rent decent property, as they wish. We need to have inter-generational fairness in our tax system. We need to share the burden fairly by limiting exemptions. We need to make the tax easy to collect and pay.
It's the how that is the hard part! And getting from where we are now to where we want to be.
So Liz Truss did what I expected and promised financial manna from heaven with the young to spend the rest of their lives working like slaves to pay for it.
If the Tories win an election with this lemon in charge, then the UK really is beyond saving
I am possibly going to be called some sort of communist for suggesting this. But if the money to help with energy costs has to be borrowed and paid out of taxation then some of it could be paid by taxes on the wealthy, rather than expecting the poor and the young to pay for it - on top of everything else. We could start by not giving tax cuts to the well off, for instance.
And maybe we can increase IHT and other taxes on unearned wealth 👍
CGT on the sale of houses. No issue with assessing what the value is. No liquidity issues either. It doesn't need to be put at a very high level either and it taps into some of the housing wealth at precisely the moment when that wealth is turned into cash.
I expect there are downsides which others will now point out.
Hampers mobility, so needs unlimited rollovers, so will really just be IHT under another name.
Does it? It's assessed on the actual price and is predictable once one has that. No point in doing it if you have rollovers.
Its not the predictability that is the issue, it is the fact that it hampers people buying larger properties as they move up the property ladder. More people stay for longer in smaller houses which limits the supply for first time buyers even more. That is the theory at least.
That said I am quite fond of the idea in some ways. Again, houses should ideally be for living in, not investments.
The problem with taxes like stamp duty is it is a tax on mobility rather than a tax on ownership or speculation.
If it were up to me I would abolish stamp duty on all homes (primary or secondary) and abolish Council Tax and replace with an annual tax at a percentage of the property value. Say 0.5% of value. With the tax doubled for non-primary homes.
The issue is always how you assess value. One of the houses in our village has been up for sale for the best part of a year. What is its value? This may not matter if the rate is so low that it's not worth making a fuss about.
But given what we are spending the rates need to be significant. It seems to me that it is easier to collect tax at the point when there is a transaction or when you are receiving money than on some notional value.
I would also look at exemptions. Are they really needed?
We are talking about £2000 to £3000 a year. Which would be £20,000 to £30,000 if it was attached to CGT for similar money and that's before we talk about the amount need to replace stamp duty (so probably £25,000 to £40,000).
How willing would you be to move home if you had to stump up that up to move....
£3000 pa is quite a significant proportion of my pre-tax income, which fluctuates considerably and from which I have to pay increasing bills etc. I'd rather pay 10 times that at the point where I'm getting a large amount of money from a sale.
We can always find reasons to to increase or impose a tax. Or dislike one. But if we carry on as we are we are either debauching our currency and so our wealth or loading all the taxes on the young and yet to be born and degrading our services and infrastructure.
So we need to find a way to get those who are better off and those who are benefiting from exemptions to contribute a bit more.
You keep saying you wish to not have all taxes lumped upon the young, but taxing mobility by putting taxes on point of sale harms those who are most mobile, which is the young, and allows those who are old and 'settled down' to escape paying their fair share and to put all the burden on the young instead.
If a young person moves three times in a decade, while a 'settled down' old person never moves, is it really right that the latter pays no tax while the young person is lumped with three sets of tax to pay?
The young aren't buying. They can't afford to. I'd remove a lot of the IHT exemptions, would use houses to pay for care, levy NI on pensioners and am not in principle opposed to some sort of land value tax provided you have a sensible way of assessing value and linking it to income.
Ideally, I'd want to discourage people buying and selling houses 3 times in a decade. Houses should be homes for living in not for asset speculation.
Young people should be able to buy homes and we should be fixing the reasons they can't not designing a system assuming or to ensure that they can't.
A young family moving three times in a decade is not exceptional or something to discourage. Getting a first home while a young couple, moving five years later to a slightly bigger home while starting a family, then moving again five years after that to a bigger family home . . . is that something to discourage? Or to penalise while those who are already settled down evade the taxes the young are disproportionately paying?
I don't think we disagree. We need to make it easier for the young to buy homes or rent decent property, as they wish. We need to have inter-generational fairness in our tax system. We need to share the burden fairly by limiting exemptions. We need to make the tax easy to collect and pay.
It's the how that is the hard part! And getting from where we are now to where we want to be.
My daughter has decided on an alternative and is moving to Australia. She wants a life rather than indentured servitude.
So Liz Truss did what I expected and promised financial manna from heaven with the young to spend the rest of their lives working like slaves to pay for it.
If the Tories win an election with this lemon in charge, then the UK really is beyond saving
There wasn't much of an alternative. She should have done a windfall tax and not cut corporation tax but those impacts are still dwarfed by the handouts needed for energy bills.
So Liz Truss did what I expected and promised financial manna from heaven with the young to spend the rest of their lives working like slaves to pay for it.
If the Tories win an election with this lemon in charge, then the UK really is beyond saving
It's equivalent to people paying £50 extra per yer for the duration of their working lives. Is that slavery?
Basically, a primary residence is essential so taxes on that should be kept to a minimum.
But ownership of second and subsequent properties isn't so we should go LARGE on taxes on them.
Many councils have tried to do that but they have been barred by central government.
Also it's fairly easy for a married couple to each claim 1 house is their main abode and if greedy claim the single person discount.
So block the loopholes and enforce it. Central Government should change their attitude. I want taxes to be as low as possible, as decentralised as possible, but as fair as possible.
How do you block the loopholes?
As well as my house in Essex, suppose I own a property in Hungary as my second home, my flat in Islington as my third home, and my house in N. Ireland as my fourth home. (Shades of an ex-pber).
How does Essex Council find out about all these?
I am fully in favour of increasing property taxes, which are absurdly low in the UK even compared to the US.
But, a second-home tax is really very difficult to police, especially if some of the property is abroad.
I think it is simpler & fairer to reform Council Tax with more bands, and make sure the top end are paying a bigger whack.
⚡️Welt: Scholz blocks delivery of tanks to Ukraine.
Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) is ready to supply Ukraine with 100 Leopard 2A7 tanks and provide training sessions for soldiers worth 1.55 billion euros. Yet, according to Die Welt, Chancellor Scholz did not react to the offer.
An unexpected selection of answers to my question why aren’t the Ukes bombing Red Square
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult 2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground 3. Something to do with population size 4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning 5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
3 was partly a response to your analogy with a hypothetical invasion in which France had killed 1 million Brits, and also to your previous comparison with Chechenia. The bloodshed in Ukraine and the Donbas has not been on ANYTHING LIKE the same level as in Chechenia; nor has the Russian brutality. For correspondence with 1m/~70m Brits killed there would have to have been about 0.5m Ukrainians killed and that hasn't happened. And although the bloodshed in Chechenia was far more extensive than in the Ukraine (or the Donbas), the reason why the Chechens didn't mount a large-scale terrorist campaign in Moscow wasn't down to their being few in number.
You give too much meaning to there being 2 million Ukrainians in Russia. Back in the old days, Soviet citizens had both a "nationality" (Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Tatar, etc.) (chosen by each person from one of their parents' nationalities when they were 16) and a "citizenship" (Soviet), and there were FAR more than 2 million Soviet citizens in Russia who had "Ukrainian" written in their documents as their nationality. Many who came across as being as Russian as anything had "Ukrainian" written in their passports. For many or most, that didn't mean much at all. Maybe a parent or grandparent had come from the Ukraine and pronounced "g" the Ukrainian or Southern Russian way (like a voiced "kh"). Quite a few people moved around quite a lot in the USSR. Few of these Ukrainians saw themselves as Ukrainian nationals "living in a foreign country" called Russia - especially if their family links were with Eastern Ukraine. Things are different now, there are no longer the two different fields in the documentation, and those 2 million ARE citizens of a different country, but quite a few probably have the citizenship because they thought they might go back to the Ukraine some time, maybe in a few years' time, when their children were grown up, or maybe never; and as for those who have emigrated to Russia from the Ukraine in the past 30 years, most of them too probably don't give huge emotional weight to their Ukrainian citizenship but of course they keep it because they don't automatically get Russian passports. Not very many of these people would be into the idea of nail-bombing the cafes where their neighbours and workmates go...
So Liz Truss did what I expected and promised financial manna from heaven with the young to spend the rest of their lives working like slaves to pay for it.
If the Tories win an election with this lemon in charge, then the UK really is beyond saving
It's equivalent to people paying £50 extra per yer for the duration of their working lives. Is that slavery?
Do you have any choice? If you’re frugal with your energy use you still pay. The big question is where all this money is going to The energy companies do not need a handout from the taxpayer.
So Liz Truss did what I expected and promised financial manna from heaven with the young to spend the rest of their lives working like slaves to pay for it.
If the Tories win an election with this lemon in charge, then the UK really is beyond saving
It's equivalent to people paying £50 extra per yer for the duration of their working lives. Is that slavery?
Do you have any choice? If you’re frugal with your energy use you still pay. The big question is where all this money is going to The energy companies do not need a handout from the taxpayer.
The same goes for general taxation. You can lead a very healthy life and still have to pay for all the unhealthy people on the NHS. Is paying taxes for that slavery?
So Liz Truss did what I expected and promised financial manna from heaven with the young to spend the rest of their lives working like slaves to pay for it.
If the Tories win an election with this lemon in charge, then the UK really is beyond saving
It's equivalent to people paying £50 extra per yer for the duration of their working lives. Is that slavery?
Do you have any choice? If you’re frugal with your energy use you still pay. The big question is where all this money is going to The energy companies do not need a handout from the taxpayer.
Its going to help consumers not energy companies.
If she were doing nothing you'd be screaming blue murder at her for letting people "freeze" and not be talking about money going to energy companies.
More Republicans [candidates] fully denied the results of the 2020 election than accepted it in any form.
Yebbut BLM, Woke and radical Joe Biden has made them like that so they’re not really to blame.
Was that in doubt? Just common sense
The Right really should chill about the old wokerooni. They're making themselves look like complete plonkers.
Easy to say, when it’s not the woke left who are getting fired from jobs and visits from police, for liking Tweets.
When almost every instance of something is reported - and the "story" much of the time turns out to be bollocks - it tends to give a somewhat false impression of the scale of the problem.
The "asylum seeker in mansion with a pool and a lovely patio" effect.
So Liz Truss did what I expected and promised financial manna from heaven with the young to spend the rest of their lives working like slaves to pay for it.
If the Tories win an election with this lemon in charge, then the UK really is beyond saving
It's equivalent to people paying £50 extra per yer for the duration of their working lives. Is that slavery?
Do you have any choice? If you’re frugal with your energy use you still pay. The big question is where all this money is going to The energy companies do not need a handout from the taxpayer.
I would just say that you simply do not understand the energy market as the measures about to be taken in the UK are being repeated across Europe and elsewhere
Basically, a primary residence is essential so taxes on that should be kept to a minimum.
But ownership of second and subsequent properties isn't so we should go LARGE on taxes on them.
Many councils have tried to do that but they have been barred by central government.
Also it's fairly easy for a married couple to each claim 1 house is their main abode and if greedy claim the single person discount.
So block the loopholes and enforce it. Central Government should change their attitude. I want taxes to be as low as possible, as decentralised as possible, but as fair as possible.
How do you block the loopholes?
As well as my house in Essex, suppose I own a property in Hungary as my second home, my flat in Islington as my third home, and my house in N. Ireland as my fourth home. (Shades of an ex-pber).
How does Essex Council find out about all these?
I am fully in favour of increasing property taxes, which are absurdly low in the UK even compared to the US.
But, a second-home tax is really very difficult to police, especially if some of the property is abroad.
I think it is simpler & fairer to reform Council Tax with more bands, and make sure the top end are paying a bigger whack.
Agreed, 'block the loopholes' is always easier said than done. What if the second home is owned by a company? What about a caravan on a caravan park? What about a development site? What if you need a second flat for work? What if there is a married couple, can each own their own house?
Comments
Kolomoisky is an important figure because he is the person who put H'Angus in office.
Even the Spectator has run a piece about Ihor.
Agree about greater taxation on second homes though. 700,000 of them in the UK at last count.
Take your pick. I know which side I'm on.
It’s why we get misleading headlines like “Westminster has the lowest council tax in the country”, when what it actualy has is the highest property mix in the country, with almost no Band A-C homes at all.
As an aside, to back up your correct assumption, in 2014 there was a study done that showed that the delay in development of the Norwegian oil field was worth an additional $10 a barrel compared to the UK.
The other advantage of taxing homes at a proportion of their value, is that at present home owners have a fiscal incentive to inflate the price of their homes, by preventing developments nearby that would make sense apart from the fact people want to keep their asset valuable.
Under my proposed system, if people's houses went down in equity, then they'd get a tax cut, so they'd no longer be encouraged to treat their house as an asset to sweat but instead a home to live in.
If people want to oppose developments due to sound reasons then, even though a development nearby might give them a tax cut, that'd be separated from what's just current greed-based NIMBYism.
But given what we are spending the rates need to be significant. It seems to me that it is easier to collect tax at the point when there is a transaction or when you are receiving money than on some notional value.
I would also look at exemptions. Are they really needed?
Jokowi spilled the deets about his meeting with Putin, in which he said: "I did not want to talk to him if I sit 5 meters from him, maybe other people would. I would go home if that's the case"
https://twitter.com/restyworo/status/1567802084174753792
How willing would you be to move home if you had to stump up that up to move....
What she has never changed her mind on is being an economic and social liberal, who wants a small state and low tax and limited regulation. Ideologically she has always been a classical liberal whether as a LD or now as a Conservative. Indeed she is more a classical liberal than traditional Tory.
Truss is the closest we have had to a libertarian PM yet and at the next general election we will discover how popular libertarian ideology is with the British electorate
1. They can’t, it’s too far away and so too difficult
2. They don’t want to, because they want the moral high ground
3. Something to do with population size
4. They don’t need to, they’ think they’re winning
5. They’ve got a tacit agreement with Putin: no terror in St Pete’s, no nukes in Lviv
Intriguing, I don’t buy 5 (simply improbable) or 1 (there are millions of Ukes inside Russia, and even more now, with easy access to Moscow). I don’t understand 3
So it must be a combination of 2, and 4?
That still means Ukrainians inside Russia are showing unbelievable restraint. If I was a Ukrainian in Russia and my sister had been raped and my nephews kidnapped for adoption and my parents bombed and dismembered I would ABSOLUTELY go out and slaughter a few Muscovites, if I could find a suitable means
At the next election, like all elections, there will be many factors at play. People might be fed-up post-Covid/post-Russia etc, people might be bored of the Tories, people might still feel resentment at "partygate" etc, people might feel its time for a change.
You can't judge any ideology from a sample of 1 election.
David Cameron and Margaret Thatcher were for their days also both quite libertarian rather than traditional Tory too.
Excess tax also slows growth leading to higher unemployment and lower revenues raised
There’s a video on Twitter of Scholz explaining to the German parliament how Germany can’t give any more APCs or tanks until “Biden says it’s OK” a claim dismissed with derision by German and Ukrainian pundits. Scholz is not having a brilliant war
What the UK wants is something-for-nothing; high quality services and low taxes. That's the bit that's for the birds.
It's because doing so would divide their Western allies. And threaten their supply of weapons.
They don't need to take that risk just now.
So 4.
Plus if the price of that home comes down as a result of the tax system no longer incentivising ever higher house prices, the nurse and their partner might actually find it easier to afford a home and play tax on a percentage of a cheaper to buy home rather than Council Tax and rent on an unaffordable home.
If they are to recover it is likely to take many months and into 2023 and frankly will depend on events largely out of their control, not least the war in Ukraine
But as I say I am still puzzled why Ukrainians INSIDE Russia aren’t doing more brutal, terror-style stuff. It seems to be basic human nature
If they are all obeying an Edict of Restraint from Zelensky that is mightily impressive
By the time we have the amount of capacity you're talking about, we will also have multiple HVDC interconnects with Europe, along with a substantial base of electric vehicles, and a growing menu of options for energy storage.
The point of having excess generating capacity at effectively zero marginal cost is that markets will find a way of utilising it. In the meantime, incentives to make installation of capacity make sense both economically and strategically.
If the nurses wages aren't high enough, that should be addressed through increasing her pay to the appropriate rate. If you're well off because you earn a high income, you should be taxed on that income. Land tax shouldn't be a form of income tax, it should be to deal with land issues.
U turns can be good and to be applauded. But people do need to explain why it happens.
Not 'Everything was great under my predecessor who I thought should continue, but also this is why we need to change'.
“In Kherson, it is said that Russian officers … have been avoiding evening walks recently,” he wrote. “As soon as city falls asleep, the partisans wake up. … We wish all the collaborators a ‘good night.’ ”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/08/ukraine-assassinations-occupied-territory-russia/
it must also be very tempting for Ukrainian spies and allies to take out a few family members of top Russians. Putin’s kids. Lavrov’s daughter. Why not?
Cruel and heartless, and maybe evil, but you’d gain intense emotional satisfaction knowing that you’d made Putin suffer deeply and PERSONALLY
These people will never be able to live without anxiety, ever again
We can always find reasons to to increase or impose a tax. Or dislike one. But if we carry on as we are we are either debauching our currency and so our wealth or loading all the taxes on the young and yet to be born and degrading our services and infrastructure.
So we need to find a way to get those who are better off and those who are benefiting from exemptions to contribute a bit more.
Theoretical suggestions (as in the tax reflecting land values) are all well and good but we have to live in the real world with real world consequences addressed by real world answers.
If a young person moves three times in a decade, while a 'settled down' old person never moves, is it really right that the latter pays no tax while the young person is lumped with three sets of tax to pay?
How much world support did they get? How many Western arms? How much training?
That is your answer. Terrorism by the Ukrainians would be utterly self-defeating and would not help win the war.
There may of course be people trying to do this, but I guess it's harder to bring off an attack without support, so at that point don't just need one individual, you need a group of like-minded bad strategists.
If the London weighting paid to a nurse needs to go up to compensate for the higher tax, then that should be done, and your 'problem' is solved. If the cost of housing in London goes down, then your nurse may be better off, not worse off actually.
Defendants charged with serious offences being released from custody and left free to commit other offences, assuming they were guilty. No justice for either them or their victims and the public put at risk.
Note the judge's comments.
https://twitter.com/jamesdrossiter/status/1567804223990923264?s=21&t=prOTDzP2YBH1SMTqmEiaKA
I also suspect that 0.5% is too low for a revenue-neutral solution, 0.8% is closer.
2020 numbers, council tax raised £35.3bn, stamp duty is around £12bn.
https://ukpublicrevenue.co.uk/year_revenue_2020UKbf_17bc1n_401043#ukgs302
There’s c. 28m residential properties, worth on average c.£250k
0.5% would raise £35bn, you’d need 0.67% to replace both CT and SD - assuming a zero cost of accurately re-valuing each property annually.
Typical home in South Bucks £500,000 - up North it's £150,000
But a lot of them are walking around western cities
Ideally, I'd want to discourage people buying and selling houses 3 times in a decade. Houses should be homes for living in not for asset speculation.
A £500k property up North (five bedrooms and half an acre of land), would pay a lot more CT than a £500k property in South Bucks (two bedroom flat).
No wonder you like sash windows!
But ownership of second and subsequent properties isn't so we should go LARGE on taxes on them.
A young family moving three times in a decade is not exceptional or something to discourage. Getting a first home while a young couple, moving five years later to a slightly bigger home while starting a family, then moving again five years after that to a bigger family home . . . is that something to discourage? Or to penalise while those who are already settled down evade the taxes the young are disproportionately paying?
⚡️Welt: Scholz blocks delivery of tanks to Ukraine.
Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) is ready to supply Ukraine with 100 Leopard 2A7 tanks and provide training sessions for soldiers worth 1.55 billion euros. Yet, according to Die Welt, Chancellor Scholz did not react to the offer.
https://twitter.com/kyivindependent/status/1567154233505468418?s=46&t=cWS3i6gH4eXUmIgptpKVkg
Also it's fairly easy for a married couple to each claim 1 house is their main abode and if greedy claim the single person discount.
.
It's the how that is the hard part! And getting from where we are now to where we want to be.
If the Tories win an election with this lemon in charge, then the UK really is beyond saving
This was an interesting account from a woman who is bringing up a 'trans' teenager.
As well as my house in Essex, suppose I own a property in Hungary as my second home, my flat in Islington as my third home, and my house in N. Ireland as my fourth home. (Shades of an ex-pber).
How does Essex Council find out about all these?
I am fully in favour of increasing property taxes, which are absurdly low in the UK even compared to the US.
But, a second-home tax is really very difficult to police, especially if some of the property is abroad.
I think it is simpler & fairer to reform Council Tax with more bands, and make sure the top end are paying a bigger whack.
You give too much meaning to there being 2 million Ukrainians in Russia. Back in the old days, Soviet citizens had both a "nationality" (Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Tatar, etc.) (chosen by each person from one of their parents' nationalities when they were 16) and a "citizenship" (Soviet), and there were FAR more than 2 million Soviet citizens in Russia who had "Ukrainian" written in their documents as their nationality. Many who came across as being as Russian as anything had "Ukrainian" written in their passports. For many or most, that didn't mean much at all. Maybe a parent or grandparent had come from the Ukraine and pronounced "g" the Ukrainian or Southern Russian way (like a voiced "kh"). Quite a few people moved around quite a lot in the USSR. Few of these Ukrainians saw themselves as Ukrainian nationals "living in a foreign country" called Russia - especially if their family links were with Eastern Ukraine. Things are different now, there are no longer the two different fields in the documentation, and those 2 million ARE citizens of a different country, but quite a few probably have the citizenship because they thought they might go back to the Ukraine some time, maybe in a few years' time, when their children were grown up, or maybe never; and as for those who have emigrated to Russia from the Ukraine in the past 30 years, most of them too probably don't give huge emotional weight to their Ukrainian citizenship but of course they keep it because they don't automatically get Russian passports. Not very many of these people would be into the idea of nail-bombing the cafes where their neighbours and workmates go...
If she were doing nothing you'd be screaming blue murder at her for letting people "freeze" and not be talking about money going to energy companies.
The "asylum seeker in mansion with a pool and a lovely patio" effect.
What if there is a married couple, can each own their own house?