Treasury officials are expected to push the Chancellor to consider a mansion tax on property sales as well as more radical options including annual levies that would disproportionately hit homeowners in London and the South East.
Abolishing stamp duty and – because of course tax cuts are right out – replacing with a property tax, a land value tax, more council tax bands, makes a great deal of sense. Would be hugely beneficial in fact. For transactions taxes are a really bad idea and repeated taxes on real property are the last bad of our varied options.
OK, so, everyone now, hands up for those who think that’s what they’ll do. Rather than another transactions tax on top of current stamp?
This is all moot as they will just go on pissing money up the wall on anti-British hate.
There really is little point in getting diverted into the merits or otherwise of this tax or that. Discussions on tax do have within them (well, used to have) the implication that the money taken from people and businesses will at least be spent in some sensible and rational way (laughable for the last few decades at least!)
What will they do? What are they “thinking” (if I must abuse that word)
1. Ideology (I’ll caveat this, it could well just be pure infantile hate) uber alles
2. Ideology uber alles
3. Farage is the antichrist
4. Farage is the antichrist
5. Trump is the antichrist’s puppet master
6. We’ll likely be gone in a few years so let’s try and create the biggest dump we can can:
Remind me again how you tax illiquidity?
No, you don’t have more council tax bands. And you certainly don’t have council tax bands that are identical for the entire country. Any sane property tax is a plain simple percentage of the property value.
My cynical view is that any reform of local property taxation will be with the aim of syphoning more money into Whitehall.
And OF COURSE any property tax will disporpotionately affect the south east. THAT’S WHERE THE FUCKING HIGH VALUE PROPERTIES ARE.
So not content with making older farmers worry themselves to death figuring out where the IHT money is going to come from, they are now stressing out old biddies in London who were lucky enough to benefit from the right to buy their council house……..
jgh @ 8.47, as with the one eyed Scotsmans’ tax raid on the bookies. Nothing to do with problem gamblers, everything to do with stealing more of the peoples’ money.
How do people with low incomes or fixed incomes pay property or land taxes?
Since Government owns huge amounts of land, will it pay taxes?
I have a better idea. Stop taxing, stop spending. Shut down welfare-state and that monster the NHS. Return public services whence they came, to the private sector which includes charity and mutual organisations.
Dustbin argument: we have to pay taxes to get our bins emptied. No we don’t, each household can buy refuse collection service from the competitive private sector as they can for phone services, electricity, water, gas. And yes it does work because there are towns in the US where it works successfully, after much resistance from their town council who saw it as their job.
The Grauniad claims that rises in prices of properties (not the value of the house, just the price) makes council tax “more unfair”. Utter bullshit! Those living in more expensive (as of 1990) houses are currently paying too much in council tax to subsidise those living in cheaper houses who get identical, or sometimes better, services (a fairly frequent route for my weekly training session includes a street where most of the houses are priced above £1m so they all pay the top rate of Council Tax and I still have to evade the potholes which are more frequent than in most of the streets of ex-Council Houses nearby).
I wonder if someone could crunch the numbers to see if there would be any difference in the amount collected by councils if the Poll Tax had gone ahead (har, har)?
All those homes of multiple occupancy only pay one council tax amount which, depending on the tenancy agreement, will be paid either by the landlord or the individual tenants.
John B
How do you avoid the Free Rider problem? 19 0f the 20 houses in your cul-de-sac paying and No.13 not? You just put up with his trash scattering everywhere?
Abolishing stamp duty and . . . replacing with a property tax, a land value tax, more council tax bands, makes a great deal of sense.
I seem to remember some excitement about land value tax replacing other taxes, or are you listing options?
@Recusant
“How do you avoid the Free Rider problem? 19 0f the 20 houses in your cul-de-sac paying and No.13 not? ”
It worked well for me out in the Mohave. City had a contracted trash service that you could join or not. County landfill was free for individuals, paid for by property tax assessment. Enforcement was through the health department, trash complaints were subject to fines and billing for government paid clean-up.
With millions of acres of empty desert, illegal dumping could have been a problem, but this method kept it to a minimum. In 40 years of living there, I never paid for trash service. I did however pay quite a bit in landfill tax.