While the British left is buried in factional debate, Reform is rapidly securing a foothold in former socialist heartlands across the country — paving the way for a nightmarish far-right takeover of the British state.
It’s very simple: tax the rich fucks who currently don’t pay their fair share of taxes and you’ll get plenty of dosh to make poor people noticeably less financially stressed out and less willing to vote for extremist shit, is what I meant by my Musk comment.
On income, the “rich fucks” could be defined as the top 1% of individuals with an income over £160k. Call the average income of someone in that bracket 200k, and tax them every penny they earn - that’s about £68 billion, which is net 40 billion once you subtract the tax they already pay. This is not a marginal rate of 100%, this is leaving them with no income. £40b is a decent but not massive amount, equivalent to 3% of the current budget.
That maximum shrinks from 40b to something like 20b once you decide on a marginal rate instead, and probably to something like 10b once behavioural change from those high earners trying to pay less tax.
So wealth then. The commonly touted version (I believe that’s 1% on everything anyone owns over £10m) is projected to earn 24bn a year, but then rapidly be avoided by people stashing their money elsewhere. A one off wealth tax might work much better, and would work well from the point of view of “wealth inequality has increased massively, we need a once in a generation rebalancing” but this would raise 160bn once only.
If we can optimistically raise £44bn per year for a while, that works out at £1500 per household, or £30 a week. That is not nothing - many households are desperate for that much. But that is not an amount that just fixes poverty for the entire country. It is not an amount that pays for every school with RAAC to be renovated, or every GP surgery to have enough appointments, or every town to have a bus service that isn’t shit.
This doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. The country does not tax the rich enough, and fixing that will help equality. But it will not turn the country around. It will also have knock on effects that make its practical efficacy even less.
You could also apply the only truly fair tax: VAT.
Sales tax are great because they don’t care where the money is coming from: if you can blow a lot of it, you pay a lot of taxes. If you can’t, you don’t. Very fair.
As for imported goods and services, apply duties to collect the money as if it was sold locally.
Finally, if you think taxing rich people enough will drive them away, consider this:
The rich keep saying that so local government don’t dare tax them, but in fact not that many follow through an actually pack up and leave.
If they do want to leave, good riddance: they’re not contributing anything to the economy anyway, and they won’t be taking their local brick-and-mortars with them. If they don’t have business physically in the UK, double-good riddance.
Wut. Poor people spend more of their money so have to pay a higher proportion of their income in things subject to vat.
You can raise far more money from taxes than what a set out, but it involves taxing “ordinary people” more. This is exactly the current debate in the UK. The point is, if you want to raise a lot of money to truly solve poverty, you can’t just tax the very rich; you also have to tax the merely comfortable.
I actually agree that this is probably the right thing to do, but it’s extremely unpopular, because the merely comfortable are taxed quite highly by historic UK standards.
The idea that rich people will just “move their wealth elsewhere” fundamentally misunderstands how rich people’s wealth actually looks like. We’re talking businesses, factories and stocks here, so just tax those. It’s very hard to move a supermarket out of the country.
Yeah, stocks, very significantly. It’s really not hard to move that wealth by selling stocks.
It’s not hard to sell the factory you own to a company that isn’t owned by any individual.
It’s not just my uninformed opinion; the forecasts find this too, as does history looking at other wealth taxes. That’s why the idea of the one off tax comes up - experts aren’t necessarily opposed to the idea of teaching wealth in principle.
It’s not hard to sell the factory you own to a company that isn’t owned by any individual.
Sure? It’s not like companies are immune to taxation.
experts aren’t necessarily opposed to the idea of teaching wealth in principle.
“Experts” also tend to be neoliberals more concerned with balancing the budget and increasing GDP than with feeding living breathing people, so I’m not too concerned about what they say.
It’s very simple: tax the rich fucks who currently don’t pay their fair share of taxes and you’ll get plenty of dosh to make poor people noticeably less financially stressed out and less willing to vote for extremist shit, is what I meant by my Musk comment.
So, you could do that on income or on wealth.
On income, the “rich fucks” could be defined as the top 1% of individuals with an income over £160k. Call the average income of someone in that bracket 200k, and tax them every penny they earn - that’s about £68 billion, which is net 40 billion once you subtract the tax they already pay. This is not a marginal rate of 100%, this is leaving them with no income. £40b is a decent but not massive amount, equivalent to 3% of the current budget.
That maximum shrinks from 40b to something like 20b once you decide on a marginal rate instead, and probably to something like 10b once behavioural change from those high earners trying to pay less tax.
So wealth then. The commonly touted version (I believe that’s 1% on everything anyone owns over £10m) is projected to earn 24bn a year, but then rapidly be avoided by people stashing their money elsewhere. A one off wealth tax might work much better, and would work well from the point of view of “wealth inequality has increased massively, we need a once in a generation rebalancing” but this would raise 160bn once only.
If we can optimistically raise £44bn per year for a while, that works out at £1500 per household, or £30 a week. That is not nothing - many households are desperate for that much. But that is not an amount that just fixes poverty for the entire country. It is not an amount that pays for every school with RAAC to be renovated, or every GP surgery to have enough appointments, or every town to have a bus service that isn’t shit.
This doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. The country does not tax the rich enough, and fixing that will help equality. But it will not turn the country around. It will also have knock on effects that make its practical efficacy even less.
You could also apply the only truly fair tax: VAT.
Sales tax are great because they don’t care where the money is coming from: if you can blow a lot of it, you pay a lot of taxes. If you can’t, you don’t. Very fair.
As for imported goods and services, apply duties to collect the money as if it was sold locally.
Finally, if you think taxing rich people enough will drive them away, consider this:
Wut. Poor people spend more of their money so have to pay a higher proportion of their income in things subject to vat.
You can raise far more money from taxes than what a set out, but it involves taxing “ordinary people” more. This is exactly the current debate in the UK. The point is, if you want to raise a lot of money to truly solve poverty, you can’t just tax the very rich; you also have to tax the merely comfortable.
I actually agree that this is probably the right thing to do, but it’s extremely unpopular, because the merely comfortable are taxed quite highly by historic UK standards.
The idea that rich people will just “move their wealth elsewhere” fundamentally misunderstands how rich people’s wealth actually looks like. We’re talking businesses, factories and stocks here, so just tax those. It’s very hard to move a supermarket out of the country.
Yeah, stocks, very significantly. It’s really not hard to move that wealth by selling stocks.
It’s not hard to sell the factory you own to a company that isn’t owned by any individual.
It’s not just my uninformed opinion; the forecasts find this too, as does history looking at other wealth taxes. That’s why the idea of the one off tax comes up - experts aren’t necessarily opposed to the idea of teaching wealth in principle.
Sure? It’s not like companies are immune to taxation.
“Experts” also tend to be neoliberals more concerned with balancing the budget and increasing GDP than with feeding living breathing people, so I’m not too concerned about what they say.