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.
Who are “The Energy Companies”, of which you speak?
Saudi Aramco and Qatargas are the guys making out like bandits at the moment, how does the UK government tax them without sending bills even higher?
The company to whom you pay your domestic bill is likely to be making a loss. In fact, several have recently gone bust.
Truss seems to have a clear philosophy that rates have been too low and taxes too high. I agree, UK inflation is being driven by the wets running the BoE through covid. Putin's war meanwhile is a one-time impact on energy prices (and productivity unless we address supply).
As things stand, I will be voting in a general election for the first time since 2010 and it will be for Liz Truss. She seems to be the first leader post-Brown to understand and is willing to try and overturn the damage inflicted by his political philosophy, which still flows through the cultural veins of the Treasury.
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 be 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...
But Putin has just forcibly imported another 1m Ukrainians who may be less chillaxed about it all
Besides the numbers are so huge it doesn’t take much
Say there are now 3m Ukrainians in Russia. If just 0.05% - 1 in 5000 - become deeply, murderously radicalised that’s 1,500 people ready to kill and bomb and maim. The IRA only ever had a few dozen hardened killers in the UK
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.
A few things can be done about it. As far as foreign homes are concerned, if someone claims to be non-domiciled in the UK, so are not paying UK taxes in full, then I would treat all homes they have in this country as second homes (their primary home being presumably in their country of domicile).
This would also help to deal with the issue of foreign speculators buying property in this country.
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
No one at the Gazette will know
What would YOU do?
I would see if there is a pleasant town square with dwinkx at the other end.
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
No one at the Gazette will know
What would YOU do?
Put a few of those custard tarts in your knapsack and hike it.
Who are these knobs that keep butting in and why is that allowed? Half the country is watching and wants to know what’s being announced. They can talk later.
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 think it would be very different if Kyiv had fallen and most of Ukraine occupied.
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
No one at the Gazette will know
What would YOU do?
Me? I would would take the cab.
However, as PB's resident bon vivant and raconteur, you could pay a scantily clad woman in a bikini to do it and then watch her through binoculars whilst drinking the local wine and eating well. It would be more in character...
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 think it would be very different if Kyiv had fallen and most of Ukraine occupied.
Yes. For sure. Then we would see an all out war of terror on Russia
Which again underlines how this war is basically unwinnable for Putin. He cannot permanently conquer and subdue a vast nation of 44m, not in the long term m
Who are these knobs that keep butting in and why is that allowed? Half the country is watching and wants to know what’s being announced. They can talk later.
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
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?
Remember to add in the unaffordability of mortgages and the payment of student debt along with zero hour contract jobs on minimum wage.
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
No one at the Gazette will know
What would YOU do?
Only YOU can decide that as its only YOU in those (hiking potentially) shoes. Knowing YOU though on here and from reading your books I think you respect YOUR readers and YOUR work enough and thus must do the physical sacrifice
Naughty nicknames for President Zelensky do not increase your non-Troll credibility.
In return, just call them Moscow Dynamo.
Fortunately he has two further citizenships - Israel and Cyprus.
He is also disturbingly similar to one of our own defenestrated politicians. Has anyone seen this chap with any blonde Russian spies who (allegedly) like old blokes with beards?
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
No one at the Gazette will know
What would YOU do?
Well, no-one should be surprised at my answer: walk.
For several reasons. Firstly, I believe you've said you want to lose weight, and walking is a good way of doing that - especially if the alternative is sitting around and drinking. Secondly, walking is good for your mental health. Thirdly, and most importantly, if you are hiking then you cannot be spamming PB about aliens or AI.
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
No one at the Gazette will know
What would YOU do?
Do the hike.
The wine and food will be vastly improved by the exertion and physical stimulation of the hike. The mind will benefit and the creativity will flourish from the natural environment.
⚡️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.
And there've been various abortive attempts for Ukraine to buy surplus Leopards from both Germany and other European countries. Every one has been slow-timed, or found unworkable for *reasons*, some of which might even be true.
Interesting that this policy has been agreed with the energy sector and entails renewable/nuclear firms no longer getting revenues via the price of gas.
That's a major change in the way the market works, and clearly hasn't been negotiated in 72 hours since she was elected.
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?
Remember to add in the unaffordability of mortgages and the payment of student debt along with zero hour contract jobs on minimum wage.
Who is paying student debt while on a zero hour contract on minimum wage?
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
No one at the Gazette will know
What would YOU do?
15k isn't "punishing" unless you are as soft as shit. Get it done, pa.
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 think it would be very different if Kyiv had fallen and most of Ukraine occupied.
Leon you are normally well read on matters when you set your mind to it. You’ve been too long enjoying nice Mediterrran dinners on this one!
It seems fairly obvious to me when you look at the war strategy deeply enough that Ukraine will win this war, retaking all territory including Crimea, contingent on two conditions. 1) US continues providing the military goodies, 2) Russia is unable to enact mass mobilisation.
Your suggestion for bombing children in Starbux and Mkdonalds would undermine both conditions. If it starts to happen, we should therefore assume it was done by the FSB rather than Ukrainian agents.
Truss seems to be handling this well enough. I've little idea if her proposals will do enough, but presentation-wise she has been good so far. Far more managerial and serious than Boris.
Interesting that this policy has been agreed with the energy sector and entails renewable/nuclear firms no longer getting revenues via the price of gas.
That's a major change in the way the market works, and clearly hasn't been negotiated in 72 hours since she was elected.
It’s almost as if government wasn’t completely paralysed by the leadership contest after 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.
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.
So a measure designed to increase tax revenue actually ends up costing the NHS more? For reference to pay for the 0.5% on a £700K house you would have to almost double the London weighting. Actually more so because that pay increase is also subject to 33.25% tax at source (20% tax and 13.35% NI). So for a nurse to stand still under your proposal still they would have to have a pay increase of around £4,600 a year. Paid for by the tax payer.
Nobody gives a fuck. Truss has lost the room. We are currently trying to bully Leon into dying of exhaustion and dehydration on a Portuguese sand dune.
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
No one at the Gazette will know
What would YOU do?
Get off your arse and do your job, you lazy get.
I thought Leon was a knapper or a writer; don't they do their jobs sitting on their butts?
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
No one at the Gazette will know
What would YOU do?
15k isn't "punishing" unless you are as soft as shit. Get it done, pa.
I would normally agree. I walk quite a lot. But apparently this one really is quite hard as so much of it is through thick sand. I hate walking on soft sand. It’s boringly hard
I’m going to have a pingado and medronho to help me decide. It will either fire me with fortitude or fill me with fuck-it
Who are these knobs that keep butting in and why is that allowed? Half the country is watching and wants to know what’s being announced. They can talk later.
This is not what the public want to hear from mps
They want to hear Truss
I’m bored now. We half an hour in and she’s barely made it through the first half of the speech. The parliamentary system in this country needs ripping up and starting again.
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
No one at the Gazette will know
What would YOU do?
Get off your arse and do your job, you lazy get.
I thought Leon was a knapper or a writer; don't they do their jobs sitting on their butts?
Perhaps he collects his flints on hikes or something?
Truss seems to be handling this well enough. I've little idea if her proposals will do enough, but presentation-wise she has been good so far. Far more managerial and serious than Boris.
One very encouraging thing is that what she is proposing is nothing like the rhetoric about tax cuts that she has been banging on about for months now. So I retract my suggestion that Liz Truss may be dangerously stupid, she is not taking the path I feared she would.
Interesting that this policy has been agreed with the energy sector and entails renewable/nuclear firms no longer getting revenues via the price of gas.
That's a major change in the way the market works, and clearly hasn't been negotiated in 72 hours since she was elected.
I think it rather more likely that the work was done by the energy companies, which have proposed a number of different arrangements.
Property is too big a tax base to make the preserve of councils.
We should abolish council tax, abolish stamp duty and add an annual tax on the property value (rolled forward in a transparent way using a house price index maintained by the ONS). This should all be paid for by the owner and not the occupier.
For cash poor people there can be a provision to put a charge on the property to be paid on sale/death with an interest rate applied like with student loans.
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
No one at the Gazette will know
What would YOU do?
15k isn't "punishing" unless you are as soft as shit. Get it done, pa.
I would normally agree. I walk quite a lot. But apparently this one really is quite hard as so much of it is through thick sand. I hate walking on soft sand. It’s boringly hard
I’m going to have a pingado and medronho to help me decide. It will either fire me with fortitude or fill me with fuck-it
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.
Trouble is that doesn't help the issue of ghost towns and poor use of housing stock. The idea is to make second home ownership as onerous as possible.
If you own a property in Hungary that is the Hungarian's problem not ours.
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.
So a measure designed to increase tax revenue actually ends up costing the NHS more? For reference to pay for the 0.5% on a £700K house you would have to almost double the London weighting. Actually more so because that pay increase is also subject to 33.25% tax at source (20% tax and 13.35% NI). So for a nurse to stand still under your proposal still they would have to have a pay increase of around £4,600 a year. Paid for by the tax payer.
My proposal is not designed to increase tax revenue, its designed to be revenue neutral and to tax land based upon land so as not to punish mobility etc, not based upon other issues.
Other issues should be dealt with at their source. Income should have a single, solitary, income tax in my view not be taxed with umpteen times over throughout the system.
If you want to tax the well off more, then I'd be interested in your proposals to do so, I don't think Council Tax/Land Tax should be the way it is done.
How many nurses own a £700k house on just their own income and how much is that mortgage costing them?
Property is too big a tax base to make the preserve of councils.
We should abolish council tax, abolish stamp duty and add an annual tax on the property value (rolled forward in a transparent way using a house price index maintained by the ONS). This should all be paid for by the owner and not the occupier.
For cash poor people there can be a provision to put a charge on the property to be paid on sale/death with an interest rate applied like with student loans.
How do you establish the base property value? There would be reams of appeals. What about when home improvements such as extensions are done?
If the main reason not to do a windfall tax is to create a stable environment for long term investment it makes no sense at all. A quick scan of Betfair would tell long term investors that the Tories have only a 25% chance of a majority in a couple of years time. No serious investor is going to plan for profits in the 2030s based on her current policy today.
Who was the last PM dropped into a couple of crises of tis severity when they got the job? I'm thinking the energy crisis and Ukraine, but sadly Covid is still bubbling along in the background.
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
No one at the Gazette will know
What would YOU do?
15k isn't "punishing" unless you are as soft as shit. Get it done, pa.
I would normally agree. I walk quite a lot. But apparently this one really is quite hard as so much of it is through thick sand. I hate walking on soft sand. It’s boringly hard
I’m going to have a pingado and medronho to help me decide. It will either fire me with fortitude or fill me with fuck-it
She should have just given a speech in a press studio and away from all the braying monkeys. And then let her energy minister introduce a bill with no one watching. This is not the way to conduct a headline speech with all these idiots chiming in.
Who are these knobs that keep butting in and why is that allowed? Half the country is watching and wants to know what’s being announced. They can talk later.
This is not what the public want to hear from mps
They want to hear Truss
I’m bored now. We half an hour in and she’s barely made it through the first half of the speech. The parliamentary system in this country needs ripping up and starting again.
I think rather you need to improve your attention span.
Who was the last PM dropped into a couple of crises of tis severity when they got the job? I'm thinking the energy crisis and Ukraine, but sadly Covid is still bubbling along in the background.
Nobody gives a fuck. Truss has lost the room. We are currently trying to bully Leon into dying of exhaustion and dehydration on a Portuguese sand dune.
I basically support the Truss plan: 1)The price freeze caps inflation and helps prevent it becoming entrenched. 2) It removes the excess profit from suppliers of renewals without resorting to a tax of their excess profits.
I'd like to know how much it will cost. Less than £100b will be good. Fracking is a distraction - doubt if much will happen. New oil and gas licences is good.
PB - I have a dilemma. I am meant to go on a punishing 15km hike across cliffs and dunes to my next hotel. I know I will arrive - sore and tired - with a sense of achievement. And this hike is my assignment
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
No one at the Gazette will know
What would YOU do?
Get off your arse and do your job, you lazy get.
I thought Leon was a knapper or a writer; don't they do their jobs sitting on their butts?
If he did that, no-one would ever hear anything he said.
She should have just given a speech in a press studio and away from all the braying monkeys. And then let her energy minister introduce a bill with no one watching. This is not the way to conduct a headline speech with all these idiots chiming in.
And deservedly admonished by the Speaker for doing so.
These things should be announced in Parliament first, even if there’s a few idiots heckling.
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.
It’s probably a mix of 1,2,4 and, as you say, it would threaten their alliances.
Plus military utility - attack on Red Square, what do you gain?
Comments
Saudi Aramco and Qatargas are the guys making out like bandits at the moment, how does the UK government tax them without sending bills even higher?
The company to whom you pay your domestic bill is likely to be making a loss. In fact, several have recently gone bust.
As things stand, I will be voting in a general election for the first time since 2010 and it will be for Liz Truss. She seems to be the first leader post-Brown to understand and is willing to try and overturn the damage inflicted by his political philosophy, which still flows through the cultural veins of the Treasury.
Besides the numbers are so huge it doesn’t take much
Say there are now 3m Ukrainians in Russia. If just 0.05% - 1 in 5000 - become deeply, murderously radicalised that’s 1,500 people ready to kill and bomb and maim. The IRA only ever had a few dozen hardened killers in the UK
This would also help to deal with the issue of foreign speculators buying property in this country.
Alternatively I could sit in this pleasant town square and sip medronho and pingado and read my biography of Pessoa and then just get a cab in about 3 hours. In other words, cheat
No one at the Gazette will know
What would YOU do?
Quite an important decision and was omitted from alternative proposals.
support for oil fired houses
A near perfect Prime Minister
Do you want to be like Boris or not?
No easy answer, to be sure.
However, as PB's resident bon vivant and raconteur, you could pay a scantily clad woman in a bikini to do it and then watch her through binoculars whilst drinking the local wine and eating well. It would be more in character...
Which again underlines how this war is basically unwinnable for Putin. He cannot permanently conquer and subdue a vast nation of 44m, not in the long term m
It is a colossal geopolitical error
They want to hear Truss
He is also disturbingly similar to one of our own defenestrated politicians. Has anyone seen this chap with any blonde Russian spies who (allegedly) like old blokes with beards?
For several reasons. Firstly, I believe you've said you want to lose weight, and walking is a good way of doing that - especially if the alternative is sitting around and drinking. Secondly, walking is good for your mental health. Thirdly, and most importantly, if you are hiking then you cannot be spamming PB about aliens or AI.
But seriously, hike it.
There were at least 50 Leopard 1s available this spring.
https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/04/13/rheinmetall-leopard-tanks-ukraine/
And there've been various abortive attempts for Ukraine to buy surplus Leopards from both Germany and other European countries.
Every one has been slow-timed, or found unworkable for *reasons*, some of which might even be true.
That's a major change in the way the market works, and clearly hasn't been negotiated in 72 hours since she was elected.
Tough crowd
It seems fairly obvious to me when you look at the war strategy deeply enough that Ukraine will win this war, retaking all territory including Crimea, contingent on two conditions. 1) US continues providing the military goodies, 2) Russia is unable to enact mass mobilisation.
Your suggestion for bombing children in Starbux and Mkdonalds would undermine both conditions. If it starts to happen, we should therefore assume it was done by the FSB rather than Ukrainian agents.
I’m going to have a pingado and medronho to help me decide. It will either fire me with fortitude or fill me with fuck-it
We should abolish council tax, abolish stamp duty and add an annual tax on the property value (rolled forward in a transparent way using a house price index maintained by the ONS). This should all be paid for by the owner and not the occupier.
For cash poor people there can be a provision to put a charge on the property to be paid on sale/death with an interest rate applied like with student loans.
If you own a property in Hungary that is the Hungarian's problem not ours.
Other issues should be dealt with at their source. Income should have a single, solitary, income tax in my view not be taxed with umpteen times over throughout the system.
If you want to tax the well off more, then I'd be interested in your proposals to do so, I don't think Council Tax/Land Tax should be the way it is done.
How many nurses own a £700k house on just their own income and how much is that mortgage costing them?
1)The price freeze caps inflation and helps prevent it becoming entrenched.
2) It removes the excess profit from suppliers of renewals without resorting to a tax of their excess profits.
I'd like to know how much it will cost. Less than £100b will be good.
Fracking is a distraction - doubt if much will happen. New oil and gas licences is good.
He's not remotely serious, he's just engaging in populism.
These things should be announced in Parliament first, even if there’s a few idiots heckling.
Plus military utility - attack on Red Square, what do you gain?