88V8 wrote:Hallucigenia wrote:I strongly recommend you read this LSE report to get a better understanding of how it would work :https://www.lse.ac.uk/International-Inequalities/Assets/Documents/OLDWealthTaxCommission-Final-reportold.pdf
Interesting report. The whole notion founders on the level of information required and the intrusion necessary to obtain and validate that information, in an era when privacy and our 'data' are allegedly sacrosanct. One could however envisage that a property tax might be feasible, raised at local level, a sort of 'enhancement' to Council tax with additional bands above the present levels.
I was incidentally struck by this observation in the report...
We firmly reject any adjustment of the tax owed by reference to income – if a wealth tax is desirable, its distinctive feature is raising revenue from those who hold wealth that is large in relation to their income.So someone with wealth
and a large income would not be classed as wealthy? Mind you, Labour has tended to regard non-work income as fair game, but woe betide a pensioner living in a large house.
V8
That article is a couple of years old and was discussed here at the time. The giveaway is its undue focus on Covid, a topic that has largely vanished from focus now. ''
Note also that it was presented as a one-time only tax in order to justify its invasive and confiscatory nature. Of course nobody actually believes that it would ever be only one time, and nothing could be legislated to ensure that.
The article is written by a small group of academics who are clearly in love with the idea of a wealth tax, which renders the piece biased and suspect from the start. They come across as almost giddy with joy about the prospect of seizing the wealth of others and, in that zeal, they mostly ignore the various ways that such wealth could be hidden or moved.
I find the distinction between income and wealth to be rather arbitrary. The more wealth you have, the more income can be generated from it. But I still think it is better to tax that income rather than the capital from which it derives. After all the assets may be illiquid, meaning that the cash to pay any wealth tax is not available - the same problem with council tax now.
And of course we already have a wealth tax. It is called IHT. Funny that the authors do not consider abolishing that as a quid pro quo.