I've not done one of these for a while as I hardly see any I haven't already done. There was a mildly original one from the comments at LibDem Voice last month.
He warms up with a couple of standard-fare KLNs...
William Fowler:
Any tax not based on personal income or company revenue is going to be unfair, if you want to get at wealth an inheritance tax levy and sales tax on property/land/leases would surely do it.
Bollocks.
1. Land Value Tax is not about "getting at wealth", it is about, er, taxing land values. that's why it's called "land value tax" and not "wealth tax". The clue is in the name.
2. We already have IHT, CGT and SDLT, which are pretty much at the top of their own Laffer Curves, and between them, they capture less than one-tenth of the annual rental value of UK land.
Council tax makes up a small part of the council’s income and if you are going to replace govn money with local taxes then does this mean a massive increase in taxes for the home owner or is all the burden going to be on companies with business rates replaced by LDV. Neither of which will have a very nice outcome.
Most LVT proponents say it will be a replacement tax. If you replace the worst taxes, home owners who are working will see "massive falls" in their tax bills, the same goes for the total taxes paid by businesses and their commercial landlords (how they share the spoils remains to be seen).
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... and then launches the Exocet of Home-Owner-Ism hypocrisy:
As Liberals, who believe in freedom of the individual, surely putting a huge burden on home owners, making them slave away at work forever or go on benefits to avoid it, would not produce much liberty?
As mentioned, working home-owners will be the group which benefits most (insulated as they are from rent increases) if Council Tax, SDLT, VAT and NIC were replaced with LVT, that's just a mathematical fact. And clearly, for pensioners there would be a deferment option.
So presumably he is talking about the semi-retired people in fairly valuable homes who do not wish to contribute to society, neither by working nor by paying taxes.
So we could turn this back at him:
As Liberals, who believe in freedom of the individual, surely allowing the semi-retired in valuable homes to opt out of working and paying tax puts a huge burden on 'everybody else', making them slave away at work forever, as well as paying all the taxes to support the lifestyles of the self-same semi-retired, would not produce much liberty?
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