So they DO plan to tax on house value.
Discussion
Just read this in Telegraph. If I commented I would use up what little is left of the swearbox fund.
[quote=Daily Telegraph]
Now they want to tax us on what we might get if we sold the house
By Neil Collins
(Filed: 27/06/2005)
You may not have noticed a little news item in this paper a week ago; if you missed it, that's just fine by the Government, because it would only have upset you, and you know how much our dear friends in Downing Street hate that. This surely explains why they slipped out their proposals to reform the financing of local government in Northern Ireland shortly before the election, confident that we'd be thinking of other things.
In contrast to so many such documents, this one is deliberately designed to sound dull, since the central proposal is dynamite for homeowners. It suggests that the council tax in Ulster should be replaced with an annual levy of 0.78 per cent of the value of the home, but so carefully hidden was the bomb that it took until last week for the Tories to spot it. "It's only fair," whined one Ian Pearson, a Northern Ireland minister, when challenged, "that those who can afford to pay do pay a fairer share." Of course. As Mr Pearson might not say, they already are: six per cent of the population are paying 55 per cent of the total raised in income tax, which seems a pretty fair start, although clearly not fair enough to him.
The curiously precise figure of 0.78 per cent would cause upheavals in the housing market to make the current protests about council tax look like mere mumbling. The average house, worth around £150,000, would pay £1,170 a year, which is pretty eye-watering, while the owner of the half-million house, hardly a mansion in the South-East, would have to find £75 a week from his taxed income to keep the council's bailiffs away.
At present the proposal is merely a small cloud, but it's not coming out of a clear sky. Look carefully, and there are others. The new rules for probate were slipped in with the familiar prestidigitation; Gordon Brown simply couldn't find room to mention them in the Budget speech, and the Inland Revenue's press release crowed that they would save 30,000 estates the bother of having to prove exhaustively that there was no inheritance tax (IHT) to pay. It did not say that about 250,000 other estates would now have to fill in a highly intrusive form (four pages, 28 pages of notes, 16 pages of notes to the notes) even when all the assets were left to a surviving spouse, and were thus specifically exempted from IHT.
This information is of no immediate use to the taxman, but its future value will be substantial. When the surviving spouse dies, the Revenue can compare the inventory following hubby's death with that in his widow's estate. The matrimonial home is an obvious target, but if some valuable items have disappeared, he'll want to know where they've gone. If that little Matisse sketch has been sold to pay the care home fees, he'll inquire as to whether capital gains tax was paid. If the family silver has migrated to the spinster daughter, he'll want proof that it was given away at least seven years earlier, or he'll tax it.
Of course, as the standard bleat always has it, those who abide by the letter of the law have nothing to fear, but how many of us do? IHT is a tax that is hated out of all proportion to its revenue-raising powers, although the new rules will go some way to balance that by forcing the middle classes to disgorge a lot more when they die. This also helps explain why the Treasury's projections for "taxes on income and wealth" show them roaring away from £184 billion this year to £201 billion next and £215 billion in 2007/08.
Still, do not be so sad and glum, there's bound to be far worse to come. This week's New Statesman contains an article by Anthony Giddens, of the sort of length and tedium for which he is so justly famous, on the "brute luck" of those who inherit wealth. It's all so unfair, he wails, that even after eight years of Labour, "we have surprisingly little reliable data about high-earning professionals, and even less about the tiny minority of the rich". He bemoans "the steady rise of inequalities in the distribution of wealth" which "must be tackled".
The tackle he wants to use is another new tax, on capital transfers, distinguishing between the deserving rich and the "undeserving". Disappointingly, he doesn't give examples; if pop stars and footballers fall into the former category, perhaps their wives and offspring might fall into the latter. This is the old Labour monster at its green-eyed best, and George Osborne was quick to invite Gordon Brown to distance himself from it. He didn't, of course, but it could be safely dismissed as a traditional Left-wing rant, except that Tony Giddens is the man who invented the Third Way, on which the other Tony has built his career.
Giddens is the author of such must-read tomes as Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber (1972), Sociology: a Brief but Critical Introduction (1986) and (of course) Third Way (1998). So great was the impact that he made on Tony Blair that Giddens finally joined the ruling classes himself last year, becoming a life peer, something that the right-on New Statesman clearly feels is irrelevant to disclose to the gallant few who struggle to the end of Giddens's treatise.
Even though he is such an arch-Blairite, this stuff could well appeal to Gordon Brown as well, as he (or his Chancellor) thrashes about for still more revenue to spend on "reforming" the public services. So good of Lord Giddens to warn us.
[/quote]
[quote=Daily Telegraph]
Now they want to tax us on what we might get if we sold the house
By Neil Collins
(Filed: 27/06/2005)
You may not have noticed a little news item in this paper a week ago; if you missed it, that's just fine by the Government, because it would only have upset you, and you know how much our dear friends in Downing Street hate that. This surely explains why they slipped out their proposals to reform the financing of local government in Northern Ireland shortly before the election, confident that we'd be thinking of other things.
In contrast to so many such documents, this one is deliberately designed to sound dull, since the central proposal is dynamite for homeowners. It suggests that the council tax in Ulster should be replaced with an annual levy of 0.78 per cent of the value of the home, but so carefully hidden was the bomb that it took until last week for the Tories to spot it. "It's only fair," whined one Ian Pearson, a Northern Ireland minister, when challenged, "that those who can afford to pay do pay a fairer share." Of course. As Mr Pearson might not say, they already are: six per cent of the population are paying 55 per cent of the total raised in income tax, which seems a pretty fair start, although clearly not fair enough to him.
The curiously precise figure of 0.78 per cent would cause upheavals in the housing market to make the current protests about council tax look like mere mumbling. The average house, worth around £150,000, would pay £1,170 a year, which is pretty eye-watering, while the owner of the half-million house, hardly a mansion in the South-East, would have to find £75 a week from his taxed income to keep the council's bailiffs away.
At present the proposal is merely a small cloud, but it's not coming out of a clear sky. Look carefully, and there are others. The new rules for probate were slipped in with the familiar prestidigitation; Gordon Brown simply couldn't find room to mention them in the Budget speech, and the Inland Revenue's press release crowed that they would save 30,000 estates the bother of having to prove exhaustively that there was no inheritance tax (IHT) to pay. It did not say that about 250,000 other estates would now have to fill in a highly intrusive form (four pages, 28 pages of notes, 16 pages of notes to the notes) even when all the assets were left to a surviving spouse, and were thus specifically exempted from IHT.
This information is of no immediate use to the taxman, but its future value will be substantial. When the surviving spouse dies, the Revenue can compare the inventory following hubby's death with that in his widow's estate. The matrimonial home is an obvious target, but if some valuable items have disappeared, he'll want to know where they've gone. If that little Matisse sketch has been sold to pay the care home fees, he'll inquire as to whether capital gains tax was paid. If the family silver has migrated to the spinster daughter, he'll want proof that it was given away at least seven years earlier, or he'll tax it.
Of course, as the standard bleat always has it, those who abide by the letter of the law have nothing to fear, but how many of us do? IHT is a tax that is hated out of all proportion to its revenue-raising powers, although the new rules will go some way to balance that by forcing the middle classes to disgorge a lot more when they die. This also helps explain why the Treasury's projections for "taxes on income and wealth" show them roaring away from £184 billion this year to £201 billion next and £215 billion in 2007/08.
Still, do not be so sad and glum, there's bound to be far worse to come. This week's New Statesman contains an article by Anthony Giddens, of the sort of length and tedium for which he is so justly famous, on the "brute luck" of those who inherit wealth. It's all so unfair, he wails, that even after eight years of Labour, "we have surprisingly little reliable data about high-earning professionals, and even less about the tiny minority of the rich". He bemoans "the steady rise of inequalities in the distribution of wealth" which "must be tackled".
The tackle he wants to use is another new tax, on capital transfers, distinguishing between the deserving rich and the "undeserving". Disappointingly, he doesn't give examples; if pop stars and footballers fall into the former category, perhaps their wives and offspring might fall into the latter. This is the old Labour monster at its green-eyed best, and George Osborne was quick to invite Gordon Brown to distance himself from it. He didn't, of course, but it could be safely dismissed as a traditional Left-wing rant, except that Tony Giddens is the man who invented the Third Way, on which the other Tony has built his career.
Giddens is the author of such must-read tomes as Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber (1972), Sociology: a Brief but Critical Introduction (1986) and (of course) Third Way (1998). So great was the impact that he made on Tony Blair that Giddens finally joined the ruling classes himself last year, becoming a life peer, something that the right-on New Statesman clearly feels is irrelevant to disclose to the gallant few who struggle to the end of Giddens's treatise.
Even though he is such an arch-Blairite, this stuff could well appeal to Gordon Brown as well, as he (or his Chancellor) thrashes about for still more revenue to spend on "reforming" the public services. So good of Lord Giddens to warn us.
[/quote]
The more I read in the news of late, the more I'm convinced I've slipped into some surreal parallel dimension somewhat akin the Terry Gilliam's film, Brazil.
There are so many things wrong with the direction this country is being dragged in that it's hard to believe it's really happening. I've passed the point of rage and despair; I've now reached a kind of punch-drunk stupefaction with all that is happening. This is not a good state to be in.
But yes, they are utter, utter c
nts.
There are so many things wrong with the direction this country is being dragged in that it's hard to believe it's really happening. I've passed the point of rage and despair; I've now reached a kind of punch-drunk stupefaction with all that is happening. This is not a good state to be in.
But yes, they are utter, utter c
nts.
What a shower of shitkerfuffle said:
It's just not funny any more. How the hell did this shower of c
Know what you mean
People tend to forget that at the heart of the Labour party is socialism, which is very very closely related to communism. The essence of this is that everyone should have the same, it matters not whether you work your balls off all your life to get what you want, or sit on your fat arse all day watching Sky and smoking fags, subsidised by us, we should ALL have the same, and no-one should be better off than the other.
A lot of working people know this, which is why Labour didn't get many votes in England, the people who voted for Labour are either on benefits, or high salary 'socialist conscience' workers, the kind that love to take on the moral high ground, purely and simply because they can afford to. Until the government increasingly lunatic oppressive policies affect these 2 sets of people, we have no hope!
Zod said:
that's easy: by not mentioning any of this in their manifesto.
Think you'll find that only a very tiny minority of the electorate actually bothered to read any of the party manifestos. Any who did will have noted that they were all put forward by scabby self serving lying b'stards. Not Labour wone because of two things ultimately
1) They have systematically gerrymandered to make their victory more likely, not unusual, nor particularly reprehensible, they all do it.... and
2) The Tories were completely unelectable, looking as they did very much like Labour Lite, and being led by a man with too much of the previous unpopular regime about him, who even his supposed supporters didn't appear to rate very much
Rude-boy said:
Anyone else notice that they have yet again failed to publish the full accounts that they are supposed to and that they don't want to say when they will.
Not unsing proper name of them as can't remember ott of my head
It amazes me people still keep anouncing Greedy Gordon as the best thing since sliced bread. The guy obviously hasn't got a control on his spending what with high amounts of borrowing coupled with constant pillaging of tax-payers.
scorp said:
Do they think we will vote them in the next election ?
Do you mean that you voted for them this time?
I do not know how any solvent and employed person of sound mind could ever vote Labour.
Unfortunately there are enough of the great unwashed out there to keep Bliar afloat and Brown next time too no doubt.
This country is going down the shitter im afraid. I'm off to France tomorrow - house hunting.
scorp said:
It amazes me people still keep anouncing Greedy Gordon as the best thing since sliced bread. The guy obviously hasn't got a control on his spending what with high amounts of borrowing coupled with constant pillaging of tax-payers.
Well then it's a good job we've got our hot-shot, young, new shadow chancellor in post keeping the slack-jawed thieving
on account. Oh, no wait..unrepentant said:
Do you mean that you voted for them this time?
I meant 'we' as a collective of citizens of the UK (I personally didn't vote for them, not that i care what you opinion on that is). Im still baffled as to how Labour manage to get so many votes when they make miserable the lives of so many people.
>> Edited by scorp on Monday 27th June 12:59
scorp said:
Do you mean that you voted for them this time?
I meant 'we' as a collective of citizens of the UK (I personally didn't vote for them, not that i care what you opinion on that is). Im still baffled as to how Labour manage to get so many votes when they make miserable the lives of so many people.
>> Edited by scorp on Monday 27th June 12:59
Don't forget that 78% of the electorate did not vote Labour! Of those that did vote only 35% of them voted Labour!
apache said:
If they expect us to pay tax because we did so well from the market price rising will they fork out and help us when it falls?
I, like many others, suffered very badly when house prices fell in the early 90s, the bastards didn't help then
In fairness, it was a different set of bastards until 1997.
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