Skip to main content

Mansion Tax - Vince is Wrong

My previous post about why a mansion tax would not only be wrong but impractical, seems to have persuaded most of the government together with all sensibly-minded folk, but not, apparently, the unconvinced Vince. From the Guardian today:
Cable did not rule out new, higher council tax bands on multimillion-pound properties. "There are vast numbers of extraordinarily valuable properties now around the south of England netting very large gains for their owners – many of whom come from abroad, incidentally – and it's not taxed at all," he said. "Basically, you get people with multimillion-pound properties paying exactly the same council tax as somebody in a three-bedroom semi. So the system doesn't work."
What does he mean "netting very large gains for their owners"? Is he under a delusion that by sitting in an expensive property people are somehow making money from it? Quite apart from the obvious point that a bigger property costs more to run (maintenance, heating, lighting, gardening, cleaning etc), is he suggesting that someone living in a larger property in some way costs councils more, so they should pay more? Surely the opposite is true. Wealthier people need less council services than poorer ones, so actually cost their councils less. Doesn't this mean, taking his logic of fairness a step further, that they should therefore pay less for what they actually receive? It's a little like arguing that people who pay for the best education they can afford for their children should also pay more to help state-educated kids. Whereas the truth is that private education lightens the burden on the state by not requiring it to educate those children, whilst at the same time freeing up seats in overcrowded state classrooms. "Thank you private education parents" I (don't) hear Vince cry. Is this what he means by "So the system doesn't work."?

Of course wealthier people should pay for the less fortunate in our society. No-one would disagree with that. It's why percentages were invented. 10% of something big is proportionately and fairly bigger than 10% of something smaller. It's wrong to make people pay disproportionately more by using nonsensical and misleading statements related entirely to the size and location of their property, and especially without understanding a) whether they can personally afford to pay more (since they are already paying higher ownership costs than people who live in smaller places), and b) how they came to be wealthy (or not) in the first place. Go on Vince.. Give job-creators a good kicking. Let's see how hard you can kick them before they decide there's little point staying in the UK.

And so we come to the final Vince delusion "...and it's not taxed at all". This really made me see red. How was the bloody mansion purchased in the first place, Vince?  Their owners are not all lottery winners, African warlords and dodgy Ruskies. Most 'mansions' that aren't owned through inheritance by destitute 'church-mice' were bought with money on which tax had already been paid! The more that was paid, the more tax that person originally paid. Not taxed? Come on Vince. Why peddle this misleading nonsense?...

I know why, of course, because this is politics and popularity is everything. Why ruin a popular argument by using truth, logic and fairness?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Thanks for taking an interest.

Popular posts from this blog

Phillips screws - yes I'm angry about them too

Don't get me wrong. They're a brilliant invention to assist automation and prevent screwdrivers from slipping off screw heads - damaging furniture, paintwork and fingers in the process. Interestingly they weren't invented by Mr Phillips at all, but by a John P Thompson who sold Mr P the idea after failing to commercialise it. Mr P, on the otherhand, quickly succeeded where Mr T had failed. Incredible isn't it. You don't just need a good idea, you need a great salesman and, more importantly, perfect timing to make a success out of something new. Actually, it would seem, he did two clever things (apart from buying the rights). He gave the invention to GM to trial. No-brainer #1. After it was adopted by the great GM, instead of trying to become their sole supplier of Phillips screws, he sold licenses to every other screw manufacturer in the world. A little of a lot is worth a great deal more than a lot of a little + vulnerability (watch out Apple!). My gromble is abo
7 comments
Read more

Would we pay more for their stuff?

I'm confused. Brexiters argue the Germans, Italians and French will still want to sell us their cars, so continued free trade with the UK is in their best interests. But we'll have to negotiate this (with an EU unwilling to make leaving easy) by threatening to make their cars more expensive for British people to buy. We'll do this because WE need to make imports more expensive to try to restore our balance of payments. Are Brits prepared to pay more for their Audis, Fiats and Renaults in order to make British cars more appealing, or do Brexiters want to pay more in order to punish them for taxing our insurance and banking products? Either way, imports will cost more. While in the EU, we buy their cars because we like the choice and don't want our own government to tax them. Indeed it would be better for British car manufacturing if we went back to the good old days of being encouraged to buy cheaper British cars (made by foreign owned factories). Is that what Brexite
Post a Comment
Read more

Addictions. Porn, Drugs, Alcohol and Sex. Don't prevent it, make it safer.

In 1926 New York, during Prohibition, 1,200 people were poisoned by whiskey containing small quantities of wood alcohol (methanol). Around 400 died, the rest were blinded. The methanol they drank was in the moonshine they had bought illegally. In fact it had been added by law to industrial ethanol in order to make it undrinkable. Prohibition existed to protect everyone from the 'evils of the demon drink'. However, people still wanted to enjoy alcohol. So bootleggers bought cheap industrial alcohol and attempted to distill it to remove the impurities the state had added, but the process wasn't regulated. The state was inadvertently responsible for the suffering - although it was easy for them to blame the bootleggers and to justify escalating the war. This didn't stop the bootleggers. In fact it forced them to become more violent to protect their operations, and even less cautious about their production standards. Volumes of illicit alcohol, and therefore proportionat
Post a Comment
Read more