Not that this is quite but:
Young people are hostile to income redistribution. It’s not because they’re rightwing – they simply pay too much tax already
Not that this is quite but:
Young people are hostile to income redistribution. It’s not because they’re rightwing – they simply pay too much tax already
Taxes are the price paid for living in a civilised society.
There has never been any evidence to support this claim, but the contrary position is certainly true: the worst war crimes, genocides and holocausts in human history were funded by governments using resources they stole from private owners.
I’d have thought this (age based taxation) would just shift the laffer curve question to an another age cohort. In fact you’d be concentrating its effects precisely on to those whose thoughts are increasing about shall i retire now or later.
I’m not saying that it won’t gain traction and actually happen. But this report is not a great basis for a policy (unless its the kind headline vote grabbing but in reality micro tweaking variety).
@Hallowed Be
Don’t be silly. We’re never going to be able to retire.
As we approach the looming population collapse, there won’t be enough people to earn money to support pensioners. So simple solution, remove pensioners by increasing the retirement age until there aren’t any.
@ Chernyy Drakon
They’ll start means testing them. This will be in the name of ‘fairness’. If a person has made wise choices and provided for themselves, it will be deemed fair to take the state pension off that person and give it to someone who didn’t provide for themselves.
She advocates taxing the old folks wealth as they are no longer a majority of voters and so can’t thwart the efforts as they once did, and lightening up on the millennials. Those millennials with parents rich enough to be subject to wealth tax just might choose to vote with their parents on this issue.
They’re coming here to
payvote themselves your pensionTaxes, of one sort or another, are the price paid for living in any human society.
The claim that taxes cause a society to be civilised is fraudulent.
“She advocates taxing the old folks wealth as they are no longer a majority of voters and so can’t thwart the efforts as they once did, and lightening up on the millennials. Those millennials with parents rich enough to be subject to wealth tax just might choose to vote with their parents on this issue.”
Yes, it wasn’t the actual oldies who were up in arms at the 2017 Tory manifesto that suggested the elderly pay more for their social care, it was the children of the elderly who saw their prospective inheritance vanishing in front of their eyes. The actual elderly just want decent care – if it takes their savings, well, they can’t take them with them. It was the next generation who were the most outraged, they saw their free lunch being taken away.
“If millennial pips are squeaking, that’s because, compared with previous generations at the same age – or older people now – many of them really do pay higher marginal tax rates”.
Rilly?
From Wiki: “The highest rate of income tax peaked in the Second World War at 99.25%. It was then slightly reduced and was around 90% through the 1950s and 60s.
In 1971 the top rate of income tax on earned income was cut to 75%. A surcharge of 15% kept the top rate on investment income at 90%. In 1974 the cut was partly reversed and the top rate on earned income was raised to 83%. With the investment income surcharge this raised the top rate on investment income to 98%, the highest permanent rate since the war”.
I seem to remember a Labour government increasing the tax restrospectively one year, making a marginal rate of something like 103%
And I’m pretty sure I will have paid more Income Tax, Value Added Tax, Insurance Tax, Airline Tax, Insurance Tax, Council Tax, National Insurance Tax, Vehicle Excise Duty Tax, Fuel Duty Tax, Fag Duty Tax, Alcohol Duty Tax, BBC Licence Fee Tax, Bird Chopper Subsidy Tax, etc. etc. over my near 64 years than the vast majority of people under 40.
they saw their free lunch being taken away
Nothing wrong with parents buying lunch for their children, is there?
“it’s not because they’re rightwing – they simply pay too much tax already”
__________
Ha ha. You can tell taxation has accelerated over the peak of the Laffer Curve when ‘I’m not a racist, but …’ gets replaced by ‘I’m not rightwing, but …’
@addolff: my sympathy for the young is not boundless but many are paying back student loans which are a form of graduate tax (and for some, presumably, non-graduate tax).
Still, they chose to go to university. Nobody made ’em. Bit like the alcohol duty I pay, I suppose.
In relation to the Laffer Curve, there is a singularity around a certain unimpressive end-terrace in Ely, where the normal rules of logic, space, time and curvature break down. So, at that single point (perhaps it’s the model railway room) the Laffer Curve ceases to exist.
Canada has devised a solution to this problem of caring for the elderly. It’s acronym is MAID.
“ Unusually, this generation isn’t getting more rightwing as it ages, with only 21% willing to vote Tory at the next election.”
Why on Earth would you want to vote for the current incarnation of Tories if you had gotten more right-wing with age. They are probably to the left of the SDP at the moment.
Jim, the entire estate planning industry caters to wealthy people who don’t want their assets going to the government.
MrsBud and I have planned our retirement on the premise that we will receive nothing from the state. Anything we receive from the state will be a welcome bonus that we can spend as we please since it is not necessary to meet our entirely self-funded retirement expenditure.
On the wireless this afernoon I caught somebody asserting: “young people are depending on inheriting from their parents to get on the housing ladder”.
What sort of “young person” is somebody in their mid-60s? The typical age somebody is when their parents die. And what sort of life have they left if they’re trying to get onto the housing ladder in their mid-60s? When my Grandad died it didn’t help my Dad get on the housing ladder, he’d been on it for 40 years, and had no mortgage at all by then.
Are people really thinking people in their 20s are predicating their lives on their mid-40s/early-50s parents popping their clogs?
The fact that people nowadays die at about 80 means that their fifty year old children grew up knowing they needn’t put anything by for the now twenty year old grandchildren because Granny’s money should see them on to the housing “ladder”.
What about grannies who don’t own a house? Well, there you are. Not everyone will own everything. If things go badly wrong for us we might not own a house; everything might have been spent on the cost of “care”. Lap of the gods.
We don’t have kids, but I’ve got 9 nieces and nephews ~40yo. They all own their own homes, and none of them work in the City or are drug dealers (AFAIK). But they were all brought up to understand the virtues of hard work and the importance of saving.
PS When my mum (their gran) died 18 years ago, her house (a semi outside Blackburn) went for £140,000. So that didn’t go far between them. My wife’s mum lived to her 90s, so the value of her home mostly went in care home costs.
@Jim
Spot on. As somebody in my 60s trading my accumulated wealth for decent (yes,yes, I know “decent” being a big ask these days) care to see me out is not a deal I would automatically balk at. As you say, I can’t take it with me.
This whole idea of “the inheritance” as some sort of god given right – outside of the old aristocracy – is something relatively recent, but I know quite a few younger people for whom their “inheritance” is the centre of their lives going forward, and outrage at even a hint that the folks might spend some of it on himself.
Well, hell hath no fury and all that. When there is talk of “intergenerational warefare”, this elephant in the room never seems to get mentioned.
“It’s not because they’re rightwing”
Oh, no. Heaven forfend. And notice how it’s become one word now? It really does just mean “Not one of the cool kids” now.
I sneeze in threes: See what I mean? The Tories aren’t “failing-to-follow-socialistic-policies”; they’re uncool, boring, squaresville… “rightwing”. QED.
The graduate tax is the price paid for attending a British university (or even a “university”). When I was at Oxford that included living in a civilised society, and we were *not* subject to a graduate tax. Sadly the left-wing mob (this year it calls itself LGBTQ+, last time it was “antiracist”, but in neither was it interested in those things merely to destroy or silence freedom of thought) means that undergraduates can no longer feel safe in a civilised society.
So it is clearly false that taxes are the price for living in a civilised society.
FYI When the gradute tax was introduced by Vince Cable my stated view was that it would be acceptable IFF it applied equally to Vince Cable and myself (and our generation of students, nearly all of whom were significantly subsidised) as well the much later generation whom Vince Cable targeted.
@Steve – “There has never been any evidence to support this claim”
A civilised society needs things like courts and police. Things which must be paid for. A society can only pay for things through tax, as it is nothing more than a collection of people, so if it pays for something, then that money comes from its people.
@dearieme – “The claim that taxes cause a society to be civilised is fraudulent.”
That’s because you have it backwards. Taxes don’t cause civilisation – civilisation causes taxes. You can also have taxes from other causes.