To be scared of Labours Land tax

[Dragongirl10]

Just read about this, Labour are proposing a Land Value Tax on any land owned, could cost thousands a year for anyone even with a small house, not just the rich....they have not publicised this at all.

People with modest homes could be forced to sell or go into debt, or be repossessed...

squishy - but i've got more confidence is torries spending my money wisely. labour tends to just redistribute on principle.

Labour is very socialist at the moment and taxing people's capital value - assets is not surprising for a socialist party. They propose to abolish council tax entirely so the 50% of peopl;e in the UK who already pay not a penny of income tax would foten not now even pay council tax. More and more of them will be living off the fruits of the fewer and fewer of us who pay a lot of income tax and pay a lot into the system.

If the tax burden is moved from council tax to landlords then rents would have gone up except that Labour has said it will cap rents so Landlords would sell and property prices would drop and we migh5t get back to the isuation I remember at the tail end of the rent acts in the UK where there was just about nothing to rent and people had to sleep on floors and with parents on sofas. The assured shorthold tenancy eventually came in which meant you could evict tenants and give fixed terms. Before that there was very very little property to rent in the UK. There is much more now although it is expensive.

The land value tax is interesting.

1. It would mean single house owners suffer. I don't get the 25% council tax idscount even now as a single mother because I let an adult non working son live here but I hope to recover it in the Autumn. I pay over £3000 council tax a year.

1. It would be hard to calculate. Eg I have a big plot around 3/4 acre with my house on it and no one can build in gardens (conservation area, covenants etc etc). Some neighbours have same size house but half the size of plot and obviously just as much council services bins etc as I have. So would they pay half what I pay because their land size is less or would you say one house one plot no chance of planning to build in the gardens so different sized plots pay the same?

1. Do those with a 95 year lease pay anything or just the freeholder?

1. Also in some parts of the country the plot is more expensive than the building cost of the house on it and in other parts it is exactly the other way round.

Be afraid, be very afraid. Labour want to confiscate assets and savings to ensure everyone is equally poor along the lines of pure socialism. They want to ensure hard work does not pay

Vote Labour if you like that principle, otherwise vote May.

Will you have to sell your garden

A person who bought a house for £250k twenty years ago and earns £36k isn't rich (they aren't poor either but they are far from wealthy) just because their home, despite no improvements to either the house or the local area, is suddenly deemed to be worth on paper some astronomical amount

So you think it's fair that someone who accumulates an astronomical amount of wealth should be able to do so entirely tax free?

janet

Re number 2

My understanding is that it might be worked out on 55% of the propertys value

Thats just what someone posted on another thread

by using their favourite trick of double counting and ignoring inconvenient facts

yeah, because labour never do this. how many times did diane abbott think she could spend the reversal to tax cuts (which is hardly a figure you can fix anyway)?

More and more of them will be living off the fruits of the fewer and fewer of us who pay a lot of income tax and pay a lot into the system

Again how you feel about this depends on whether you think a state should help all of its citizens or just the lucky. Those "them" you refer to are someone's family and may be children, or disabled, or elderly, the filthy scroungers

See, I think that many of the spending cuts introduced over the past few years have been counter productive, and are costing far more in the long term than they save in the short term. (I could give examples, but would be a longer post).

I worry that this will continue. I am not a die hard Labour voter, and certainly no Corbynista, but I don't trust this Conservative government with the economy! Especially if it all gets pissed away into the financial black hole of a cliff edge Brexit.
I am not against criticism of actual Labour policies, but I find the panic mongering and exaggeration over one reference in their manifesto to "a review" in which LTV will be "considered" utterly ridiculous.

Be afraid, be very afraid. Labour want to confiscate assets and savings to ensure everyone is equally poor along the lines of pure socialism. They want to ensure hard work does not pay

I think that might be bollocks

Are we going back to when we had rates? So the people who actually own land/property pay not the ones who rent? Seems fair.

I'm more scared of the Tory cuts to education and what is happening with the nhs tbh.

Its, yes I do. I am capitalist and not a socialist. Plenty of people agree with me and I expect the nation to vote in support of those capitalist ideals next week but we wait to see.....

Remember some of us have paid tax on every penny of equity in our houses - I have. Not everyone has huge equity gains on a house - we sold our last at a loss - will labour be compensating me for that capital loss inthe same way it wants to confiscate the capital gains?

Secondly even if people have increase in value it is no use unless you ever move. I will leave this house in about 35 years' time in a box when I die so it is not capital I can in any sense use.

Thirdly when I die the state take about half the value or 40% in IHT even if teh equity is from income taxed at 40 - 45%. so it is not as if the state never gets a cut. If I die tomorrow the children are homeless because of inheritance tax.
DD I saw that link earlier - it's very helpful:
"The Economist noted the risk that “urban homeowners with gardens” would lose out, since “the tax will encourage them to build on them, which is good for the housing stock but bad for the environment”.

Media reports this week also cite a study by Oxfordshire County Council, now over a decade old, which found that “normally, the winners are those plots that have little or no garden and the losers are those where houses stand in large grounds and where maximum development is permitted by the planning regime”. The report also said that the balance of winners and losers from switching systems could be altered, depending on how the system was designed."

None of that comforts those of us with much bigger gardens than neighbours where the garden can never be built on and we u se as many council services as the neighbour with the bigger house but smaller plot!

Probably been linked already but here is the bit of the manifesto with the reference to LTV:
www.labour.org.uk/index.php/manifesto2017/leading-richer-lives
Not so scary from the horse's mouth.

@TotoToe But Labour's numbers on this (NHS and education) have been shown to be farsical so they aren't really the better option on these fronts, are they?

I agree with Rufus and am having a good laugh

Interestingly, if you go to the conservative home website there are a number of articles there (or were yesterday ) talking about how great a land value tax would be.

Just because it's mentioned in the labour manifesto and isn't in the conservative one (or at least not clearly - remember "no top-down reorganisation of the NHS"?) doesn't mean that all parties aren't looking at this - it is easily calculated when the rates are fixed and hard to avoid unlike offshore bank accounts.

The tax is perfectly fair. Many home owners have benefited from huge amounts of tax free unearned gains due to the rise in house prices under NuLabour and the Tories. This is just adding a bit of balance. And most of it has happened in the already rich South East and London. Besides LVT means the eradication of other more unfair taxes such as council tax and business rates. It also means the very richest owners of multi-million pound land and property will finally pay a decent amount instead of the paltry couple of thousands of pounds a year they pay at the moment.

I am capitalist and not a socialist. Plenty of people agree with me and I expect the nation to vote in support of those capitalist ideals next week but we wait to see.....

What does that even mean? We don't have a free market economy in the true sense for example. Look at the banking bailouts etc.

They want to ensure hard work does not pay

Actually sounds like they want to ensure that hard work does pay, rather than inheritance or property value increases that nobody works hard for. The hard work argument is bullshit. Absolute bullshit. People can and do work extremely hard and yet still earn very little. Some people who earn a LOT of money, or just get given money or assets, don't work hard at all.

have been shown to be farsical

By whom?

The tax is perfectly fair. Many home owners have benefited from huge amounts of tax free unearned gains due to the rise in house prices under NuLabour and the Tories.

Many also haven't.

It also isn't going to help people onto the housing market either is it.

Secondly even if people have increase in value it is no use unless you ever move. I will leave this house in about 35 years' time in a box when I die so it is not capital I can in any sense use.

But this is your choice. You can use that capital. You can up sticks, move to a cheaper area, a cheaper house, a cheaper country. You could blow the lot on a 5* round the world trip. You are rich (you constantly tell us how well you're doing). You have choices. There are people that don't, through absolutely no fault of their own.

It also isn't going to help people onto the housing market either is it

Well, if the scaremongering is right and everyone is going to go bankrupt then there should be lots of cheap houses for sale...

@AliceTown IFS.

Do the Conservatives even have a manifesto? The only thing I have heard is the social care thing and the 'strong and stable' line. I hate spin. I know what can be afforded depends a lot on Brexit, but that is at least 2 years away. They seem to want people to vote for them blindly. Really foolish if you ask me as I don't think voters think about Brexit every day. I thought Theresa May was meant to be moving away from George Osborne's agenda, but I haven't seen any evidence of it. And she seems to have completely underestimated how much people hate Jeremy Hunt.

I can't stand Jeremy Corbyn's 1970s agenda either. I know other people are worse off than us and work just as hard, but that doesn't mean we can comfortably afford to pay more tax. What does he expect us to do when he rises taxes - stop paying for our kids' after school activities or stop giving money to charity? Either way someone other than us also stands to lose if the state decides to spend our disposable income for us. I am probably guilty of living vicariously through the pleasure of seeing my children enjoy their extracurricular activities and gain life skills from them that will serve them well in adult life. If we can't afford to give them those opportunities here then we will emigrate. We have the sorts of jobs that make us pretty desirable elsewhere.