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Err?

About which the Sage says:

Taxes on capital effectively disappeared during the twentieth century.

Which is odd, given that there’s that chunk of taxes upon income and wealth. And our man goes on to tell us that wealth – note not capital – must now be taxed more.

This is before even his insistence that corporation tax is in fact a tax on wealth as it is paid by shareholders.

4 thoughts on “Err?”

  1. What’s depressing is it doesn’t surprise me that there are instructions of ‘higher education’ prepared to employ this guy. Nevertheless, this kind of logic would embarrass a first year undergraduate. I think ‘TACS’ is likely to join ‘SCA’ and the ‘Fair Tax Mark’ as monuments to King Richard the Mad of Downham Market (latterly Ely)

  2. The yield on IHT, possibly the purest tax on capital, has slumped since Queen Victoria died for three reasons. Firstly the wealth differential between the rich and the poor has dramatically shrunk, secondly: wealthy families have undertaken IHT tax avoidance measures and even the “mass affluent” have revised their wills to minimise the effect of IHT by taking advantage of various necessary concessions that can be used by people outside the group for whom they were designed, and thirdly: Conservative governments have revised the rules to the the “mass affluent” outside the scope of rules designed to tax the mega-rich (it was only debasement of the currency that caused the IHT rules to be applied to the mass affluent).
    Other taxes on capital have increased – thanks to stamp duty on house purchase and CGT on purely nominal increases on asset prices (thanks to Gordon Brown one can pay tax on the sale of an investment at a lower value (monetary price adjusted for inflation) than purchase.

  3. Bloke in North Dorset

    Is it a coincidence that income from taxes on capital inversely correlates with income from NICs? Which way round is the causation if indeed they are linked?

  4. Isn’t it a nonsense graph anyway? All taxes, except taxes on rents, are taxes on production and ‘wealth’ in one way or another. Or by taxes on ‘wealth’ does he mean taxes on ‘rents’? What’s more the graph also ignores the rates of tax. Without that the ‘share’ is meaningless. Bizarre.

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