Sobers unleashes a torrent of primo Homey bleating under the previous post:
Your calculations will work as long as you assume that everyone lives in a house their current income can afford the 80% mortgage on. Then income will be largely in proportion to house value and the amount they lose in LVT will be offset by the amount gained from tax cuts.
I made no such assumption, I used a middle-of-the-road case as an example to show they are - as you'd expect - modest winners if we had LVT instead of Employer's NIC, Council Tax, SDLT, IHT and the TV license fee, and stated quite clearly that it's easy to think up categories of winners and losers.
However many people live in houses that they couldn't afford to buy on their current income, and not just the widows in mansions you always decry as a straw man.
I am perfectly aware of this; it is irrelevant. Many people couldn't afford to buy their current homes - I wouldn't get a mortgage any more (now over 50) - but most of the people in this category could afford to rent their current home - as I did for six years before the LL and I both got bored and he sold it to me. And LVT is actually based on rental values. I just use % of current selling price as an approximation.
I can think of several people in my own social circle and family who are not that wealthy, certainly not in income terms, well below the average income, and live in houses that they could not afford to buy today.
Anecdotal and repetition.
Mainly because they have either received small inheritances they have put into property...
Not hard work then? And that's incorrect and lazy use of the word 'property'.
... they bought houses cheaply many years ago when house prices in that area were relatively lower, or they bought their council house at a considerable discount...
Exactly, the Baby Boomers helped themselves while it was still government policy to keep rents and prices down, and then pulled up the ladder.
... or have paid off their mortgage and downsized their jobs to match their outgoings. So they are not 'rich' by any stretch of the imagination, yet they would be clobbered by an LVT. Mainly because they have managed to build up some capital, which is located in their houses.
They clearly haven't "built up capital" by his own admission . They have ridden a government-sponsored house price bonanza and are now resting on their laurels. Why the incessant use of the word "clobbered"? Why is it OK for younger people to be "clobbered" with VAT, NIC and rent?The actual 'capital' they own (the building) is largely unchanged.
He sneaks in a diagonal comparison as well.
The fair comparison is: younger tenant on £25,000 a year is paying additional tax to fund the public services which benefit Sobers' semi-retired example, also on £25,000 a year, but living in a £500,000 home.
How the fuck is that 'fair'??
Thus they are exactly the one who will scupper any LVT - politically speaking its not a pure balance between winners and losers that determines which side wins, its how many winners actually side with the losers, because they feel its unfair whats happening to them. Hence why tobacco taxes are politically fine, because the winners don't care a jot about smokers, they just think 'If you don't like the price of fags, don't buy them, and you won't pay the tax'.
If you don't like paying LVT, then downsize.
Whereas if significant numbers of ordinary people with below average incomes are hit by LVT, then many more people will vote against it, even though they might be winner themselves, because they consider it unfair on someone else
Sobers is proposing continuing an unfair system on the grounds that is 'fair'. Well it's not; why should working tenants 'with below average incomes be hit with [VAT, NIC and rent]' pay for their upkeep?
The Boomers are pleading poverty (entirely self-inflicted, having 'down-sized their jobs' entirely voluntarily. What the Homeys really want is socialism for land speculators; I don't like socialism and I don't like land speculators, sorry. Younger people just have to learn to be as selfish as the Homeys.
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