Latest mansion tax should be on top % homes locally not nationallu

Yes agree

Who do you think needs to be paying the increased tax?

It’s obvious that the money has to come from increased taxes. The trouble is that everyone thinks they shouldn’t have to pay it.

Where do you think the money has to come from?

Mansion tax won't bring in much.

People in London and the SE are being screwed to subsidise everyone else (who have similar incomes and lifestyle to them). That's unfair and bad taxation.

Ordinary people don’t live in £2 million homes. We need to spend more on defence and healthcare, the money has to come from somewhere. And this quadruple tax nonsense is ridiculous - every cost of putting a roof over your head is paid from money already taxed, whether you buy or rent.

The problem is if I sit on a 2 million mansion I am costing the Government. Because if I lived in a 1 million one instead and put another 1 million into savings, I would have to pay tax on those savings and with current returns of 4 per cent plus, the Government would make more money out of me. So partly it is to disincentivise people from investing all they have into property and potentially put it in savings? The Government is desperate to pay down the sovereign debt. They are stinging people for every bit they possibly can. Councils are broke and have installed cameras everywhere too. First round of appeals are being rejected like they are for SEND places.
Government has turned into a money grabbing business too. It is what it is. Hence people do and can adjust their behaviour both the rich and the poor are doing it.

Agree
@BIossomtoes Trapping people on benefits is waste. Supporting them into work isn’t. Labour does a lot of the former and very little of the latter. The also don't have any coherent pension policies. No Government has from what I can see.

Quadruple-taxing ordinary people for owning one home, not hoarding wealth or any other gaslighting nonsense, isn’t progressive. Income tax to earn it, stamp duty to buy it, council tax to live in it and now an effective mansion tax on top of this based on a made up value, not earnings or ability to pay. Its been mooted you can owe it until you sell with interest charged for the privilege...

It isn’t making the broadest shoulders pay more either, Labour won’t touch them. It will trickle down, snaring more homeowners, pushing up rents and inflating starter and second-step prices. Lets see who is still smug then.

So yes, its waste. If fact, I would go so far as to say that Labour has a PhD in waste and gaslighting.

TLDR: Mansion tax is asset-based extortion of ordinary workers and older people who’ve lived in their homes for 20+ years - to fund waste.

Cut all welfare benefits by 10%. The compound benefit to get to a higher overall saving will come from some of those people deciding that work is more attractive. The constant benefit increases the government gives are inflationary and self defeating. This would still be considerably more benefit per person than under New Labour.

The core driver of the cost of living crisis is housing pressure. I'd reduce the level of immigration which would reduce housing cost. I'd reduce it back to the levels seen under New Labour.

I'm not really sure what the point in responding to you is. You post the same types of question all the time but never seem to learn.

People over 60 account for 33% of Pip claims. Retirement age was still lowish under Blair and Brown.

Also Long Covid now exists which wasn’t a thing then.

So how would you do it?

Welfare is the main problem. We need to go back to the level of welfare support under the Blair/Brown government. This was considered left wing at the time. Now it has doubled. If it was taken down by 25% it would still be massively larger than the what the last Labour government got to after 10 years of centre left policies.

OK, so what is money being wasted on?

Why reference 2024? We all know the Tories were wasting lots of money too. The Tories were shit. Labour are continuing to the shitness. That that is why a third way is needed.

Labour need to be making improvements not just harping on about how it doesn't matter if they rubbish because the Tories were rubbish too,. Starmer has no ideas - his latest plan military gap year for under 25s is just recycling Rishi Sunaks National Service proposal.

Why? Am not being obtuse or argumentative, just genuinely interested as to why larger houses should pay more, unless you can show they use more of the services. I've never understood the rationale

What is money being “wasted” on now as opposed to this point in 2024?

They excel at wasting money, rather than being good at spending it.

You forgot spend. They are very very good at spending.

Apparently the mansion tax is to be £1m in Scotland - anyone could see £2m would not catch enough people! I expect it will be the same UK-wide before long. i foresee a full-scale property tax in the future, separate from council tax.

London councils already sting people for parking fines and high business rates left right and centre. That is how they make money. My neighbour got fined over Christmas for going into a bus lane to make way for an ambulance! She tried to appeal it and was told she got in the bus lane too early. That is what we are dealing with here now. You can barely leave the house without incurring some cost of some sort.

I was doing a bit of a Rightmove stalk on someone I know who lives in Putney. Flippin’ heck - even a manhole is almost £2m there. Quite modest semi-detached houses are in excess of £2m.

Obviously outside London not so many £2m houses, so don’t think they aren’t coming for all the schmucks sitting in £1m, or even £500k “mansions”.

Large houses should pay more but the amount is not going to make much difference to the care levels we get. Our area is well off but probably less than 5% of homes are over £2m , its not enough to make a difference.

All councils spend the majority of their money on social care. They're not providing extra services or making different decisions, even. It's just that poor places have more poor old people who need home carers on the parish.

https://www.local.gov.uk/about/campaigns/save-local-services/save-local-services-how-ps1-council-funding-spent

The pretence that councils are doing anything other than shovelling money into the quenchless maw of social care is absurd at this point.

Council Tax is a local tax. If your area has more expensive local services then of course you will pay more. It's the only fair way of doing it. We already have national taxes that are redistributed disproportionately to poorer areas.

At some point, areas have to take responsibility for their own issues. It's why we have a move towards greater devolution of power and local democracy. You can't do this on the one hand and on the other say that actually wealthier areas should be funding all your local services. It's completely undemocratic for a start. Local Councils control local budgets and manage local spending and yet they would be massively subsidised by people in other parts of the country with absolutely no say over how their money was being spent. Local councils could be completely fiscally irresponsible knowing that others areas will bail them out.