Tax cuts

[Brewster's millions]

But they won’t, and don’t do they, it’s just a threat. The super rich already have offshore homes, accounts etc so they DON’T pay their fair share.

Think you’ve just just proved my point - the super rich they can live anywhere they want, and if the UK targets them and unilaterally applies disproportionately high taxes, then they’ll just shift their domicile elsewhere and the UK exchequer will receive less revenue.

On a broader point, this obsession with taxing a couple of hundred billionaires and curing all the ills with the public finances is frankly a bit silly and detached from the reality of the situation. How much would you seek to raise by hitting the super rich? A few billion, when the overall annual tax take is now over one trillion? Hardly touching the sides.

If you want to meaningfully increase government spending, then everyone has to pay. People on here won’t like to hear it, but the UK already has a very progressive tax system, and it’s actually got more progressive over the past 14 years thanks to the 50p tax band and the very large increase in the income tax threshold, which something Labour didn’t do in their 13 years of government.

 

[Rory Bluelow]

When i started working the tax rate was 33%, Thatchers Government cut it, then cut it again and again. I got an extra couple of quid each week, but public services were cut. Corporation tax was 52% now its 25%, we have become a corporatocracy.

The whole system needs rebalancing.

Whether we like it or not, the world is a corporatocracy.

 

[I'm With Stupid]

But the argument is that we should level the balance and put us on par with Europe. Not a single country in Europe has a corporation tax rate of 52%. The UK's 25% corporation tax rate is actually above average in Europe, it's actually more than the Nordic countries.

The difference will not be made by how we tax the rich, the difference will be made by how we tax everybody. This makes sense because there are only around 50 billionaires to even tax whereas there are 31 million taxpayers.

These conversations unfortunately require honesty and reality.

Taxing the rich is not about raising a few piddling quid in tax revenue, it's about addressing the rising inequality that threatens the cost of living for ordinary people. When a billionaire can make 50 million in passive income in a year, and use it to buy assets, that affects the cost of living for the rest of us, particularly when those assets include things like houses, utility companies and the like. It's more about preventing more and more public money going to the super rich than getting money back from them.

Having said that, it's worth mentioning that the "tax dodging super rich" narrative is as much a counter to the "benefit cheats" narrative as anything else. We're led to believe that the country is full of benefit scroungers, when every possible measure suggests that business tax avoidance and tax avoidance by wealthy individuals lead to a far bigger loss of tax revenue. It's a measure of the government's priorities that they dedicate an excessive amount of attention to one issue while ignoring the other.

 

[The Future’s Blue!]

The UK government's tax receipts were over 800 billion last year, compared to just over 300 billion at the beginning of the century, and 450 billion when the Tories first came into power. Those figures are 550 billion and 670 billion respectively when adjusted for inflation. This suggests to me that any shortage of funding for public services is very much an ideological choice and that huge amounts of public money are being wasted. The same increase (percentage wise) is there when you look at corporate tax rates, so it's not even like the tax dodgers of the world are having a huge impact overall.

Now obviously a big chunk of that is spent on servicing huge debts caused by covid and the 2008 banking crisis amongst other things, but how much of it is directly a result of the Tories (and the previous Labour government) selling off so many basic government assets that we are forced to rent services from their rich friends? How much of our taxes are going to private landlords' insane rents because we don't have any council houses? How much is going towards subsidizing utility companies' shortcomings while their shareholders still get a dividend? How much is being handed to hotel owners because we don't have a functioning asylum process? The Tories always like to bring up Gordon Brown selling the country's gold, but they have sold off literally everything else and now we're forced to rent them back at massively inflated prices. The irony being that in some cases, these assets that we're now forced to rent are actually owned by foreign governments.

All of this is the culmination of the Tories' insane "the private sector is always more efficient" ideology that they've been plugging away at since the 70s. We're like someone who has sold their house on the cheap and then was surprised that the new owner wanted us to pay rent to continue living in it. And put it up every year. And now it's too expensive to buy it back.

Oh, I’m with you, mate. I’ve long held the view that the Tories are a party of business subsidies, from subsidising wages, rent, etc. to big corporations such as Amazon, etc. who pay very little, or even nothing, into this country but take it all out.

Done by stealth, of course, and I’d like to see the next government taking it all back and leaving them to decent profits, not grossly disgusting ones.

 

[hcblue95]

Think you’ve just just proved my point - the super rich they can live anywhere they want, and if the UK targets them and unilaterally applies disproportionately high taxes, then they’ll just shift their domicile elsewhere and the UK exchequer will receive less revenue.

On a broader point, this obsession with taxing a couple of hundred billionaires and curing all the ills with the public finances is frankly a bit silly and detached from the reality of the situation. How much would you seek to raise by hitting the super rich? A few billion, when the overall annual tax take is now over one trillion? Hardly touching the sides.

If you want to meaningfully increase government spending, then everyone has to pay. People on here won’t like to hear it, but the UK already has a very progressive tax system, and it’s actually got more progressive over the past 14 years thanks to the 50p tax band and the very large increase in the income tax threshold, which something Labour didn’t do in their 13 years of government.

Everything proves your point if you're never wrong mate.

 

[inbetween]

Taxing the rich is not about raising a few piddling quid in tax revenue, it's about addressing the rising inequality that threatens the cost of living for ordinary people. When a billionaire can make 50 million in passive income in a year, and use it to buy assets, that affects the cost of living for the rest of us, particularly when those assets include things like houses, utility companies and the like. It's more about preventing more and more public money going to the super rich than getting money back from them.

Having said that, it's worth mentioning that the "tax dodging super rich" narrative is as much a counter to the "benefit cheats" narrative as anything else. We're led to believe that the country is full of benefit scroungers, when every possible measure suggests that business tax avoidance and tax avoidance by wealthy individuals lead to a far bigger loss of tax revenue. It's a measure of the government's priorities that they dedicate an excessive amount of attention to one issue while ignoring the other.

Addressing things like poverty directly are far more important than the inequality ratio. Inequality isn't a problem in countries like Norway for example because people there get paid really well and as a result there are just far less poor people. We need to bring the bottom up and not the other way round.

Most inequalities in the UK exist because the country is so poorly regionalised and that's because businesses are not investing in places like the north. The reason for that is the infrastructure is shite. If you owned a major tech business then why on Earth would you invest in the north of the UK? In some sectors why would you invest in the UK at all?

Manufacturing previously filled the gap up here but manufacturing has largely been replaced by automated foreign final assembly lines which require much less people. This is why poverty up here is a problem, which jobs are people supposed to do and aspire to when labour has either been moved abroad or humans have been replaced?

Sensible infrastructure spending, attraction of companies in new sectors and the resultant job creation is the method to fix regional inequality. None of these will happen though with direct increased taxation upon the rich and people who create the jobs. Another thing is you also can only tax profits but where are the profits? UK GDP shrunk by 0.3% last quarter.