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New polling finds 44% prepared to pay more tax to cover costs of COVID19 – politicalbetting.com
New polling finds 44% prepared to pay more tax to cover costs of COVID19 – politicalbetting.com
New @IpsosMORI polling finds 44% of Brits say they are prepared to pay more taxes in the context of COVID-19 requiring high levels of government spending pic.twitter.com/2cWkSF7HZz
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Wealth taxes will be particularly favoured because they seem bound to be paid by somebody else.
The concept of spending rises for me, paid for by tax rises for somebody else, earns lots of likes. Who'd-a-thunk it?
Edit - and I don’t think it will happen given MPs routinely own second homes.
The obvious target is property, as so much of the national wealth is tied up in it and (unlike, say, shares, where one is investing in a business) it's a non-productive asset. OTOH it would upset an awful lot of old people with valuable properties but modest fixed incomes, so it won't happen, least of all with the Geriatric Party currently in Government.
Second homes would be the thing to go for, on the basis that no-one really needs more than one.
And good morning, one and all!
Am I a bad person when I say I essentially agree with his don't let Coronavirus dominate you message?
Suggests to me there's a sweet spot for Starmer to say he will not raise income tax on wealthiest, but instead will sort out the issue of wealthiest paying very low effective tax rate.
If you live your life in such a way that doesn't endanger others, ok.
If you are reckless, then you're an ass.
Like Trump.
This income vs capital thang is a usful accounting wheeze, but it's all just money.
I fear that 'taxing second' homes is one of those ideas which look good on a poster, but are more difficult to actually put into effect.
Not that I've got, or have either had or ever expect to have, one.
People often throw practical objections at suggested new tax arrangements without remembering how many holes there are and how much evasion there is with the taxes we are relying on already. Establishing that Mrs X doesn’t really spend most of her time in some south coast hideaway is probably easier than that she gets a lot of income paid in cash.
Or, just forget about first and second, and simply tax property.
I'm not opposed to a second homes tax; just saying it's not necessarily as easy as might at first appear.
And probably the only people who pay tax as originally anticipated are those on PAYE without expense accounts.
Trump`s comments, and Johnson`s on Marr, are welcome and much needed to address this irrationality to some degree, from such high profile figures who have gone through the experience (conspiracy theories withstanding). No matter how much you may despise Trump and Johnson, give credit where credit`s due.
Mental wellbeing is everything when you think about it. Going forward optimistically, fearlessly, confidently but also cautiously and with common sense is what people should always have been doing. It`s what I`ve always been doing and I wish everyone else would jump aboard, accepting that hiding scared from a virus, rather than accepting that life now carries an additional danger that we have to live with, is no way to be.
Covid provides cover to do some of the above, and I wouldnt be entirely surprised to see the government take action on either of the first two, despite being a Tory govt.
Yet many seemed to believe that the scale of likelihood went in the other direction.
That Trump is out of hospital (though the White House will be a quasi-hospital, I know) is not surprising, though medics point out that he`s not out of the woods yet.
When taxes are optional for the rich, it creates a lot of resentment, and rightly so.
"Now I'm better and maybe I'm immune? I don't know. But don't let it dominate your lives. Get out there, be careful," the President said.
His behavior alarmed public health experts.
"It is inexplainable that the President of the United States, who is actively shedding virus in millions of particles, would walk into that building with an enormous number of staff, unmasked," said Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor at George Washington University School of Medicine.
"It is really hard to understand how no one told him not to do that. There doesn't seem to be anyone in charge of his care other than the President of the United States, other than the patient," Reiner told CNN's Erin Burnett.
It’s led to rampant inflation in financial assets (including parts of the uk property market) but has been accompanied by stagnant wages, due to some combination of the globalisation of labour/goods and poor productivity due to underinvestment in private sector r&d and state capital spending.
The other kicker is that those households and corporates most able to raise leverage are the ones that benefit most, by taking out huge new debts at negative real rates and using the proceeds variously for property investment and stock buybacks.
So what to do... as much as it pains me, there does need to be some way of recapturing wealth gained by capital holders through asset inflation and returning it to income earners.
The trouble is, almost all the gain has been earned by something like the top 0.01% and we all know how this will play out. A clumsy government measure that kicks the middle 40% or so in the nuts, while simultaneously punishing “honest” gains made, as well as QE inspired ones. And leaving the 0.01% untouched.
Short term what we need to do is get everyone off their arses and back functioning in the economy again. The triple lock needs to be ripped up - it’s a total scandal that the demographic that lockdown / semi lockdown is most targeted at assisting health-wise is the only demographic not having its income affected.
Thereafter, capital gains ramped up with some form of index linking. Multiple home ownership kicked hard (it’s easy to close the loop holes if you really try). And dare I say it, centrally driven reform of council tax, both to normalise not just the revenue raising side but also the spending (for e.g. in the year before covid my parish increased its tax rate by 9%!).
At a corporate level, I’d like to see an impact study not just of punitive tax measures on buybacks but corporate cash hoarding. We can’t persist with a situation where rather than investing in r&d, executives can gold plate their options packages, by artificially boosting the stock price with QE-funded stock buybacks. But equally we don’t much want trillions of dollars wasted on deposit either. Sci-fi movies have long predicted individuals being forced to consume, to keep the merry go round spinning. But I think they have it wrong. It’s the corporate giants that are underinvesting that are the biggest obstacle to wider societal wealth gains (in all senses of the word wealth).
That today’s 30-somethings have no chance of leading the lifestyle that we at the same age and career point twenty or thirty years ago had, is bound to play into our politics as these people get older.
Because they can't tax I have to guess that the UK national debt will remain sky high for a long time. And we aren't bankrupt after all. Which will be a problem in the future the next the Tories want to spin a load of old bollocks.
https://twitter.com/JenWilliamsMEN/status/1313373763224903681
Dr. Foxy, yeah. And like the EU's VATmess shafted small businesses, attempting to hit a small group with a sledgehammer will affect others too. Taxing assets is a wonderful way to discourage saving, something we don't do enough of already.
Why do you keep defending these utter cretins? You're better than this.
The reason taxes on earnings are favoured is of course that they involve the actual movement of monies from which it is reasonably easy for the state to grab a share. The most effective wealth tax we currently have, SDLT, works on the same basis as, to a limited extent, does CGT. This leaves so much appreciating wealth beyond the scope of taxes that the whole system is distorted.
Discretionary trusts and the like face a tax claim based upon the wealth of the Trust already in a 10 year anniversary charge that is designed to compensate for the fact that the trust would otherwise avoid inheritance tax. I think that this would be the start of the model that we need but applied much more widely.
The role of QE in distorting economy and society is woefully unexamined, partly because it is so arcane and complicated, and partly because it has dug politicians out of a disastrous spot and so they avoid digging too deeply.
The other factor is that, after allowing for differential turnout, our politics is in the spot where a majority of voters are not economically active.
Make tax avoidance an anathema. Make consumers refuse to engage with the likes of Amazon so that paying due taxes is what makes their business viable. I know, it won't work. Because the likes of Amazon are far too useful to be boycotted.
It simply isn't true that Amazon and Starbucks don't pay taxes. They pay taxes on every sale that occurs (VAT) on wages they pay their employees (NI, PAYE) and many more. The issue is that HMRC tries to tax businesses about 8 different ways and these businesses are getting out of 1 of them. Well if that 1 is broken then fix the system and apply a level playing field.
To a large extent it would be best for HMRC to either not worry about it or find a mechanism that would make our corporate tax rates the lowest in the world so large companies send the money here rather than away from here.
I see Trump is even more off his head than normal.
God help us all if Biden gets this in next three weeks.
With Covid I suspect there is then far more useful things that a developer could be doing them implementing a proper solution for a short term issue that has a working quick fix.
If the tax doesn't work then simplify and lower it. The money that comes here is taxed through other means then.
Personally I would love a LVT as its about the only sane wealth tax you could apply and recover in a world which is far more international than most people believe.
Covid has entrenched on line shopping and working like nothing else could, and we cannot stop this revolution
Everyone wants Amazon to pay more tax, but the jobs but on the other side of the balance sheet they have created thousands of jobs providing security to their workforce and of course who pay their taxes
Standby for a month of this now.
He needs to be extraordinarily careful for the next three weeks.
A tax on WAGS would be very popular as well.
https://unherd.com/2020/10/why-the-young-hate-the-tories/
It was the use of Excel *inside* PHE to play with the data that, apparently, caused the problem.
I'm very nervous about the polls in next few days. Hoping Larry Sabato is right and none of this charade will make any difference now as too late to change minds.
A working solution is needed.
According to Amazon they paid £793mn in taxes in 2018 so it's not nothing. We need to find what works and ensure that applies consistently and fairly to all.
Ascribing patient outcomes to individual strength or determination is the mark of an idiot. So yes, we should expect it from him.
I suspect that he will want to come off the drugs asap as that will be evidence (for himself if nothing else) that he has "beaten" the virus, and the consequences could be quite bad.
It may even be that the drugs have made it worse by creating distorting effects of his condition in his mind, and side effects of drugs are being confused with impacts of the virus.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/05/boris-johnson-to-unveil-plan-to-power-all-uk-homes-with-wind-by-2030
I'm all for more green energy but really, is this the most pressing issue today?
Steroids in particular need to be tapered carefully - and while it's difficult to tell if they've affected his behaviour as its not notably more erratic than previously - time will tell.
They paid under £15m in corporation tax.
Their reported UK sales were around $17 billion, and it’s anyone’s guess what the realistic profit generated on those sales might be. But I think it reasonable to conclude that it’s at least an order of magnitude greater than stated.
Expect a weapons grade Circuit Breaker dead cat in three....two....
By splitting off employers NI, which doesn't appear on a payslip, government is able to hide how much tax is being raised on the employee's work.
"The show must go on.
Where, exactly, the rest of us go from here, I cannot say. What feats Republican senators will be asked to perform alongside Trump to prove their commitment we cannot guess."
https://thebulwark.com/the-weirdest-90-seconds-in-presidential-history/
Th usefulness of amazon has bought them a lot of leeway. I'm naturally more disinclined toward Facebook as a company as it doesn't offer me a service I need or want, so all I see is the negatives and therefore a pretty sinister entity. Likewise Apple I associate with overpriced electronics at best slightly better than others, so their scale looks wrong. But the big ones don't need a pass, any of them.
Not forgetting the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.
Amazon deliberately minimises profits by spending as much as it can on investing in growing. Tesla does the same.
So even if you eliminated all the profit trading around the world, there is a problem. It is quite easy not to make a profit. And if you can do so in a way that keeps the shareholders happy....
And has a very clear understanding of the importance of rapid and locally usable test results, as opposed to tractor statistics.
Why the government believed a second rate corporate apparatchik was a sensible appointment is not a mystery, but it is still a disgrace.
https://twitter.com/rudygiuliani/status/1313271096947421185?s=21
Anyhow focusing on pension income regarding tax and NI is missing the broader issue - harmonising tax on earned and unearned income surely makes sense? Why should someone receiving income from investments or property pay so much less tax than someone who works for it?
One look at this morning's video of him after the hospital tells you he now thinks he is the King of America, saved by God, and only death will end it.
It is going to be very very dark in America over next three months.