Is a wealth tax the only way?

[Cuppasoupmonster]

…of raising capital for proper public service reform and not just sticking plaster ‘solutions’. Just interested to hear others thoughts.

YANBU = yes it is
YABU = no it isn’t

of course a one off cash injection is not what’s needed. What a dumb thing to say.

systemic changes are needed.

Easy, anybody richer than me.

Ding ding!

'Extremely wealthy' people will just move countries.

What exactly do you get for paying even more tax here?

Crime ridden cities, ineffective police, ineffective healthcare, you can't even rely on an ambulance to come and get you.

England isnt the place it once was.

You would do better to have a land value tax (nb not property value) applicable to all freehold land in the UK with rebates for land in active agricultural use.

Otherwise how do you value everything? Council tax is woefully out of date because property hasn't been revalued since the 1990s so would the value of any properties (including investment properties) be last sold price, or some other price? if it has never been sold?

Pensions and cash savings are reasonably easy to tax (except final salary pensions for public servants - conveniently) but they are also something which still needs to be hugely encouraged.

I'm guessing you're not wealthy? (whatever you consider that to be).

We only train half the number of doctors we need, we need to be training more doctors rather than relying on 'stealing' them from Africa and Asia. We also need to train more nurses so we have enough and aren't relying on agencies to provide them at ridiculous cost. We need long term planning rather than doing things like refurbishing a whole unit one year and then selling it off for next to nothing the following. We need to stop centralising everything because it's a complete disaster when something like the pandemic hits.

What would be the threshold though? If someone has a house that is worth, for example, £1million, which is also their only asset, how would they pay the tax without selling? Would they be expected to take out a mortgage?

Unless you're prepared to throw good money after bad, any reform of the NHS must start with a complete spending audit and examination of the staff ratio between frontline and backroom staff and medical capability re demand and supply.

I would eliminate the woke non-jobs. Eg Barnet Enfield and Haringey Mental Health Trust is recruiting an Associate Director of EDI at £84.7k -£96.9K and ask instead how these services can be delivered within existing HR departments.

I would want an independent, forensic audit of supplier contracts, looking at value for money.

Only after this is done can money be allocated. Shortfalls in finding can then be done by clawing back from other budgets, or gov't borrowing, or an increase in income tax.

I'm just a housewife now, but even I can see that people who are truly wealthy will find ways to shelter their assets, leaving the middle classes to once again bear the brunt of taxation.

I used to work in the public sector and was so angry about how money was being wasted, that on a couple of occasions I was severely tempted to go to the press with evidence. I felt very strongly that as a tax payer, my employer was wasting money that I had worked hard for.

penalise people who have worked hard enough, saved hard enough etc. to hold assets and funds. And let people who routinely blow all their money off the hook?

This is an ignorant comment.

Redistributing wealth so that there is a more equal spread is the only way to reduce inequalities and create a "fairer" world.

But you'll get a load of people on here who mistakenly think they're the "rich", who will tell you yabu, and who will resist any and all changes so the puppet masters who pull their strings remain untouchable.

No, there will be a mass exodus, rich will go to places with better tax laws. Very few headquarters will want to have their business because it will be hard to find employees who want to be heavily taxed. So not only would we lose individuals we would lose half of canary wharf.

This. A friend of mine is an Italian resident this year because she has sold a company and made a one-off large amount of money. Better to buy a property in Italy and pay the one-off 100,000 Euro flat rate of tax as opposed to give the UK government 50% of it.

Another world from my life haha

So say for example I've got a 500k house (I don't), a pension that I don't know whether it will be enough in old age and nothing in the bank. How would I pay the tax?

What about a couple with one moderately decent pension between them because it made me financial sense to play into one than have two separate ones. Is it taken into account that it has to support two people?

I'm more understanding how this can work unless there are savings, shares etc that can be raided?

We need to stop paying for everything through the State. We need to spend less.

Working people need to stop funding social care for the rich elderly. Property wealth should be released for elderly care.

Young people need to show up to local planning meetings.

We need to move towards taxing proportionate wealth more
effectively in this country. In many EU countries for instance, council tax is a proportion of your house’s value. Charging 0.5-1% of house value would be a much fairer way of raising tax than our current menthol of banding.

but wealth taxes won’t pay for EU standards of services. For that we ALL need to pay more via increasing the basic rate of tax. Not as attractive now is it…

For the most informed and unbiased tax research, the institute of fiscal studies publications are the place to start. The IFS is an independent non-political body that is respected by economists throughout the UK and beyond for their gold-plated levels of impartiality. They are in favour of moving more toward wealth taxes while conceding that it is politically unpalatable and so unlikely to actually happen.

Because from experience we know which demographic is an easy target. It's not the rich.

Really wealthy people own nothing, it is all in offshore trusts and companies. The richest person I have encountered, multi £billions, has moved to Switzerland for this reason. They money is all in Jersey, Caymen islands etc.

Yep. You’ve got to extract tax without just leaving all those who don’t pay much anyway.

As much as they want to tax more and more being left with the tax bill isn’t going to be fun for them either.

I don't need my 'puppet masters' to tell me that a wealth (term undefined) tax won't stop at 'the rich.' That's why 'wealth' and 'rich' can never be pinned down to actual figures when they're proposed.

How about companies?

That's the place to start - start taxing large cooperations. Of course they hide behind expensive lawyers, so it's loads easier to go for Trader Joe who hasn't declared his taxes properly.....

Taxation needs to be efficient and effective, not just fair.

The biggest practical problem any tax collection process faces is pinning people down and taxing them when they actually have the cash available to pay it. That is the main reason why transactions are taxed more (PAYE and NI; VAT; Stamp Duty etc.). This tax is levied at a moment where at least one party to that transaction literally has their wallet open.

In the realm of potential wealth taxes it is quite easy to imagine wealthy people simply not having any cash at all when the tax collector comes calling, perhaps even by design. There's a lot of inheritance tax avoided in this way. Whereas, if you levy taxes when an asset is sold, there's no arguments over the value, and someone already has their wallet out.

All youre going to do is force the rich to move assets.

The same companies who give not very rich people jobs, either directly or indirectly, you mean? I wonder how that will turn out.

France tried this, it didn’t work.

Yes, those companies. Who often put people on zero hour contracts and pay them fuck all while they make obscene profits. Exactly those companies.