Well, that’s the message tonight from Alistair Darling in his Mansion House speech – and to be fair there is a point in what he was saying about the dangers of getting into an inflationary wage-price spiral. We all need to tighten our belts.
But, and the but is all-important here, there are ways to do this that are fair and ways that are not. In particular, there is no better time than now to rejig the tax system to ensure the burden of taxation falls on those who most deserve to pay: the rich.
My modest proposal:
1. An increase in personal allowances to take everyone on £10,000 a year or less out of income tax altogether.
2. Introduction of new top-rate income tax of 60 per cent for everyone earning more than £60,000, 80 per cent on £80,000-plus and 100 per cent on £100,000 or more.
3. Standardisation of national insurance rates so everyone pays the same percentage on every penny of income above £5,000.
4. An end to all non-dom privileges.
5. A council tax revaluation with abolition of bands and a straightforward proportional relationship between value and payment, so households in £10m homes pay 100 times what a household in a £100,000 home pays.
6. Abolition of inheritance tax up to £500,000 and introduction of 100 per cent inheritance tax over £1m.
So footballers would whinge and plutocrats would quit London? Pah! If we’re talking austerity it’s got to be shared, as I'm sure Sir Stafford Cripps would have said.
7 comments:
Wot sort of a so0cialist are you?
for fuck's sake man.
"I warn you that there are going to be howls of anguish from those rich enough to pay over 75% on their last slice of earnings".
and I seem to remember it didn't work out to well for us...
-d
True. But the principle was right then and it's right now: make the rich bastards pay!
Doesn't work, mate. I'm a retired soccer player (you can observe this by my spelling and grammar) with gazillions in the bank but you can't touch those because they are overseas. What you need is mega-VAT too.
“It’s time for brown people to switch to Tory”
-Sunny Hundal, 16 June 2008
I agree with 1 and 3, but then it would be better to stop pretending income tax and national insurance should be different and incorporate them. 2 and 4 doesn't apply to me, but they're not pragmatic and therefore will never happen.
5 makes no sense at all, because the value of a person's home may not correlate with their income, would you force people on fixed incomes to pay a huge wedge of tax because the value of their house has shot up?
6 isn't pragmatic either, people will simply shift their wealth into trusts. Plus inheritance tax is a touchy subject because people have usually already been taxed on their wealth, having it appropriated by the state when they choose to dispose of it is dubious behaviour in a liberal democracy.
Personally I'd favour a citizens basic allowance, but this is counter to a managerialist/interventionist approach to the state.
Gawd - It wasn't supposed to be 100 per cent serious. You never heard of Swift?
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