There's surely an argument to say that income shouldn't be taxed anywhere near as highly as possessions anyway - if you're talking about "fair", inherited wealth by its very nature hasn't been earned by the individual in the same way that their wages have so it's far easier to argue about taxing it highly.

its doubtful many moved earnings around like this as many are employees and do not have this control. But lets say this is underestimated by a factor of 2, so there should be twice as much thats still 2bn which is very low still... and at the same time it is anti competitive with other places in Europe. Even at a low level have you ever seen the difference a good manager compared to a bad manager makes in a team? Now scale that up to decision makers such as CEO's and board executive members. If you dont compete on the same playing field for the worlds talent you will get the worse manager and industry across the board will suffer.

 

Mansion tax is a seperate issue but not everyone living in a big house has masses of wealth. In my view income is a better means as well as stamp duty and making it more robust (like the govt plans) by introducing a tax on buying through an offshore company (15%)

They may be employees but their employer is likely to be ready to accommodate their wishes. Where are all these high-paid people going to go? Most of them only speak English so their options are limited. Besides, if the likes of Fred Goodwin had buggered off years ago, maybe we wouldn't be in quite such deep doo-doo.

 

If someone living in a big house cannot afford to pay the mansion tax there are two alternatives. In some cases there could be the possibility of making a watertight arrangement to pay the tax from the sale of the property when they die. Otherwise they can move. After all, the government are expecting people on benefits to move to somewhere cheaper. Income can be hidden. Property can't.

If someone living in a big house cannot afford to pay the mansion tax there are two alternatives. In some cases there could be the possibility of making a watertight arrangement to pay the tax from the sale of the property when they die. Otherwise they can move. After all, the government are expecting people on benefits to move to somewhere cheaper. Income can be hidden. Property can't.

I thought the mansion tax had only to be paid when a property was sold making your two options more or less the same. So what you're saying is that if my parents work hard all their lives and pay their taxes and pay off their mortgage then when they come to sell it or the they die the governemnt should get a whopping great chunk of the money for.............

I though the mansion tax had only to be paid when a property was sold making your two options more or less the same. So what you're saying is that if my parents work hard all their live and pay their taxes and pay off their mortgage then when they come to sell it or the they die the governemnt should get a whopping great chunk of the money for.............

The tax they have introduced (or, rather, increased) only gets paid when the property is sold (by the buyer). The original Lib Dem policy is an annual levy. That's what should have been introduced.

They may be employees but their employer is likely to be ready to accommodate their wishes. Where are all these high-paid people going to go? Most of them only speak English so their options are limited. Besides, if the likes of Fred Goodwin had buggered off years ago, maybe we wouldn't be in quite such deep doo-doo.

 

If someone living in a big house cannot afford to pay the mansion tax there are two alternatives. In some cases there could be the possibility of making a watertight arrangement to pay the tax from the sale of the property when they die. Otherwise they can move. After all, the government are expecting people on benefits to move to somewhere cheaper. Income can be hidden. Property can't.

 

Precisely... We need a lot less of these banker-w*n**rs and a lot more people starting up small businesses and actually taking risk, instead of bankers who pass all the risk onto the tax-payer... The whole idea of "Private Profit/Public Debt" has to come to an end, it's unsustainable, and totally destructive.. Capitalism is destructive... Ordinary people doing business is positive and benefits the economy, the Corporations and banks do nothing but rent-seek and destroy wealth, "off-shore" billions in profits which means profits leave the economy, and in some cases like MF Global and JP Morgan, actually confiscate the wealth of their clients from their segregated accounts, basically that's STEALING, that's like me walking into a bank with a ski-mask, a shot-gun and a big bag with "Swag" written on it, what happned at MF Global was THEFT, but, hey, it's a bunch of rich guys in Italian suits doing it, so it's alright innit..? Ba Da Bing... People moan about the "Pikey" tax-dodgers.. Well, at least the pikeys would tend to spend the money in the economy and it gets circulated around, they dont "off-shore" it in the f**king Caymans where it benefits precisely no one except the particular individual....

 

There's a HUGE difference between Free Enterprise and Corporatism or Crony Capitalism, which is current system that we have and which is destroying the country, well, mind you, I say the country, more like destroying the entire Western Economy...

On a slightly different track, but as we're on the issue of taxation here on this thread, I thought this appropriate....

Growing Antitax Movement Shows Irish Stoicism Wearing Thin

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/world/eu...-thin.html?_r=1

 

DUBLIN — Throughout the European financial crisis, Ireland has won plaudits for the way it has handled austerity. But growth has stalled here once again, and an incipient tax revolt is being taken as a sign that even this most stoic of nations is becoming fed up.

 

Urged on by promoters of a tax boycott, fully 85 percent of Irish homeowners have yet to pay a $130 property tax that is due March 31. The latest official figures show that just 225,000 property owners out of 1.6 million have paid a total of $29 million — well short of the more than $200 million the government was planning to raise to help support public services.

 

The government has so far dismissed talk that the boycott is gathering strength, saying the Irish are notorious procrastinators on money matters.

 

“The Irish people are law-abiding citizens and will pay the charge before March 31,” a government spokesman said. “We are ready to cope with a late surge — Irish people always tend to leave it to the last minute to pay their bills.”

 

The boycott’s organizers see it differently.

 

“The reality is people are not paying for a reason — they are consciously using this to strike back,” Cian Prendiville, a prominent organizer in the Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes, said in an interview. “This is mass civil disobedience in the finest boycott tradition.”

 

This protest, initiated by nine left-wing opposition members of Parliament in December, has found resonance among “Middle Ireland” — an older, settled demographic made up of hard-pressed homeowners, many of whom would have voted for the mainstream government parties at the last general election just over a year ago.

 

Among them are Gerry McKeever, 56, and his wife, Annie, who moved to the Dublin satellite town of Kildare during the decade-long boom that began in the mid-1990s known as the Celtic Tiger era, and who say their home is now worth less than half of the purchase price. They have two young children, high mortgage payments, child care costs and increasing fuel bills for the 70-mile round-trip commute to work in the capital.

 

Home to many soldiers at the nearby Curragh army base, Kildare is considered a conservative town. Mr. McKeever says he has been surprised not just by the number of people attracted to protest meetings, but by their generally advanced ages — not the sort of people, he said, who are likely to take to the streets, Athens style.

 

“Many people are sitting tight rather than actively going out protesting,” he said. “This is sullen, peasant discontent in the finest Irish tradition. This is the revolt of the graybeards.”

 

The boycott organizers say resentment about austerity measures has been building for some time, and there is no shortage of reasons people are refusing to pay the new tax: a flat domestic economy, seemingly endless budget cuts, declining house prices and underwater mortgages, rising personal debt, higher charges for fewer services, the introduction of numerous other direct and indirect taxes, charges for rural septic tank inspections, an unemployment rate of 14 percent and emigration running at an average of 100 people a day.

 

Perhaps most significant is the coincidence that on the same day the household tax is due, Irish taxpayers will have to pay $4 billion to make good on some of the monumental debts run up by the failed Anglo Irish Bank. The household tax is also the prelude to a much bigger property tax that is being demanded next year by the so-called troika of lenders — the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank — under the terms of Ireland’s bailout deal.

The government has been increasing the pressure in recent weeks, promising that any “tax dodgers” will be tracked down through the use of utility bills. The government spokesman acknowledged that there “is no Plan B,” and it remains unclear what the government will do if the boycott succeeds.

 

The antitax movement seems to be gaining strength by the day, if the number of protest meetings around the country is any indication.

 

Boycott organizers say attendance at rallies now transcends class, the urban-rural divide and political party affiliation.

 

Daniel Doorhy, 36, a warehouse worker, said he had never been a member of a political party but had helped to organize meetings against the tax.

 

“Like a lot of people, I would have voted for whoever would do me a favor at the time. I don’t agree with this way of doing things, but I’m as guilty of it as the next man,” he said. “I am fearful of what is coming down the line in terms of a bigger property tax that I just won’t be able to pay and I will lose my house over it.”

 

Like many other Irish, he is well versed in the economic jargon that has become a part of everyday conversation here.

 

“I had never heard of bondholders or speculators or billions of euros in debts, but I know all about them now,” he said. “I also believe the government is lying to me when it says it will be used for local services, and that’s one thing everyone I’ve met agrees on, whether they’ve paid this or not.”

 

Like Mr. McKeever, Mr. Doorhy has also been surprised by the older profile of the would-be protesters.

 

“I would say the average age is 40-plus. These are people who have been through all this before when they faced down the property taxes and water charges during the 1970s and 1990s,” he said. “I think the government is hoping and praying there will be a huge surge at the last minute — I know people are afraid of being fined or worse, but what choice do we have?”

 

Mr. Prendiville, the campaign organizer, says that despite their efforts to play down the boycott, government officials are deeply concerned.

 

“It will be a real nightmare scenario for the government because it doesn’t have the resources to enforce payment,” he said. “They can intimidate and browbeat all they like, but they don’t have the wherewithal to collect what people are not prepared or cannot afford to give them.”

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Yes, very interesting that part about this tax being due on the same day that Ireland is due to make a payment of the debts of yet another bank... I dont believe for a second that this tax would be used for public services, and by the sounds of it, the people Ireland dont believe it either.. Good on them for standing up to this. This is a totally unjust tax made to hit ordinary people instead of punishing those directly responsible for the troubles Ireland is facing..

 

The Irish Govt should be going after rich, tax-avoiding bast*rds like U2, not threatening ordinary Irish folks... Bono, surely the biggest hypocrite on the planet, being all concerned about the "poor people" in Africa, and not seeming to really appreciate the growing abject poverty in his own country and the victimisation of his own people by the Troika and the Crony Captalist Neo-lib system... He should run for political office he's such a c**t..... <_<

^ You get no argument from me on the merits (or otherwise) of Bono.I know you like bandy words like neo-liberal conservatives around like they're swear words, but folk like Friedman actually advocated as small a state as possible and for the state to stay out private business as much as possible and had that been followed it's quite possible that a government would not have had the power or the money to intervene in the banking crash making the banks that had acted recklessly fold. Part of the reason they carried on is precisely because they KNEW that governemtn's would intervene if it went tits up.

 

I'm not saying I'd prefer this (and indeed that would have created other issues) but simply that this situation is not "neo-liberal" at it's heart, the government (and by extension the people) have been saddled with this debt but not through the following of strictly neo liberal policies. It relied quite heavily on the belief of state intervention.

^ You get no argument from me on the merits (or otherwise) of Bono.I know you like bandy words like neo-liberal conservatives around like they're swear words, but folk like Friedman actually advocated as small a state as possible and for the state to stay out private business as much as possible and had that been followed it's quite possible that a government would not have had the power or the money to intervene in the banking crash making the banks that had acted recklessly fold. Part of the reason they carried on is precisely because they KNEW that governemtn's would intervene if it went tits up.

 

I'm not saying I'd prefer this (and indeed that would have created other issues) but simply that this situation is not "neo-liberal" at it's heart, the government (and by extension the people) have been saddled with this debt but not through the following of strictly neo liberal policies. It relied quite heavily on the belief of state intervention.

 

This is surely the fundamental flaw in the Neo-Liberast argument though... The problem with those so-called "Free Marketeers" is, that they dont want Govt intervention in the form of Regulation and they bang on about the "integrity of the free markets" if Govts try to impose too much regulation (or, as I like to call it, Safeguards to prevent the sort of catastrophe we've just had) they start whingeing about how it'll affect the "Free Market" (even though there's no such thing, it's all heavily manipulated to suit the chosen elites like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and JP Morgan), but my dont they squeal and holler for "intervention" when it all goes tits up... They're worse than children, at least children learn the hard way that putting their hands in a naked flame hurts and they dont tend to do it again. These idiots haven't learned from the mistakes of the Wall St Crash in 1929 and the resulting Depression. Or any of the other "boom and bust" cycles we've had since the 1970s when the Glass-Stiegal principles started to be eroded.... What is necessary is the immediate re-imposition of Glass Stiegal, and the banks being split up into Retail and Investment... Banking needs to be "boring" again, and actually return to the Old-school Mercantile principles of prudence and good business sense... "Exciting" banking has led to a bunch of Cocaine-addicted brain-dead gibbons running the show and flinging shit everywhere.....

This is surely the fundamental flaw in the Neo-Liberast argument though... The problem with those so-called "Free Marketeers" is, that they dont want Govt intervention in the form of Regulation and they bang on about the "integrity of the free markets" if Govts try to impose too much regulation (or, as I like to call it, Safeguards to prevent the sort of catastrophe we've just had) they start whingeing about how it'll affect the "Free Market" (even though there's no such thing, it's all heavily manipulated to suit the chosen elites like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and JP Morgan), but my dont they squeal and holler for "intervention" when it all goes tits up... They're worse than children, at least children learn the hard way that putting their hands in a naked flame hurts and they dont tend to do it again. These idiots haven't learned from the mistakes of the Wall St Crash in 1929 and the resulting Depression. Or any of the other "boom and bust" cycles we've had since the 1970s when the Glass-Stiegal principles started to be eroded.... What is necessary is the immediate re-imposition of Glass Stiegal, and the banks being split up into Retail and Investment...

I agree you have to follow the logic to the end, governmnet goets out of the way and you're allowed to run your business as you see fit but if you make wrong decisions then you have to take the consequences, that in itself would make you more responsible if you knew no bailout was coming. The banks that you mention are interesting as they started out as small business's that grew and became market leaders and thus massive corporations but they manage to manipulate the market in part, (again), because they know they are too big to fail. If banks were failing then there would be a turn around at the top and other more responsible lenders may get a chance but it's stagnanent in many respects with state support.

"But growth has stalled here once again, and an incipient tax revolt is being taken as a sign that even this most stoic of nations is becoming fed up."

 

I would hardly call the Irish as the most stoical of nations either, a country which has been torn apart by violence and religious rivalry for over 25 years, Home rule and independence and troublesome to the English/ British royalty stretching back for hundreds of years. :lol:

"But growth has stalled here once again, and an incipient tax revolt is being taken as a sign that even this most stoic of nations is becoming fed up."

 

I would hardly call the Irish as the most stoical of nations either, a country which has been torn apart by violence and religious rivalry for over 25 years, Home rule and independence and troublesome to the English/ British royalty stretching back for hundreds of years. :lol:

No that's NORTHERN Ireland, this is about the REPUBLIC of Ireland. Two very different countries thank you very much -_-

No that's NORTHERN Ireland, this is about the REPUBLIC of Ireland. Two very different countries thank you very much -_-

Yes I'm aware of that but then it's not exactly as if the republic was completely uninvolved in it (anglo-irish agreement etc) but perhaps that's for another thread.

Getting back to "Pasty Gate" for a moment.. The PM today tried his hand at some kind of attempt to claim some sort of spiritual kin-ship with the "Great Unwashed" and said that he eats pasties too, and the last time he got one was at the West Cornwall Pasty shop in Leeds station.. One problem, as Newsnight pointed out, there is no West Cornwall Pasty shop in Leeds station..... :lol: :lol: Next time you're gonna tell porkies Dave, keep it simple, just say "I got one in Greggs", bit harder to disprove...... :rolleyes:

So the latest row over the Budget is about tax relief on charity donations. When charities complain about something my natural instinct is to support them, particularly when they are arguing against the likes of Osborne. However, on this occasion, I think they are wrong.

 

The issue is this. At the moment people can claim tax relief on donations to charity. For basic rate tax payers it is a simple matter of ticking the Gift Aid box and HMRC will top up the donation. Higher rate taxpayers also tick the box then declare the donation on their tax form to get further relief. The coverage has focused on charities that most people are happy to support such as cancer charities. However, it applies to all charities, big and small.

 

Let us assume that I am very rich and am paying 50% tax on some of my earnings (if only). Then assume that I want to give £1m to a local cats' home. First of all I only need to write out a cheque for £800,000 and tick the Gift Aid box. The cats' home can then claim the remaining £200,000 form HMRC. Then, when I fill in my tax return, I declare the contribution. That means I can claim the difference between the basic rate of 20% tax and the top rate of 50% so I reduce my tax bill by £300,000 (possibly meaning I get a rebate). Therefore, the donation has cost me £500,000 and the government has paid the rest. That money could have been spent on extra teachers, nurses etc. but instead it has gone to a small cats' home that might take years to spend the money.

 

Effectively the current system means that some very wealthy people can dictate how some government money is spent. Bear in mind that public schools are also charities so the same method can be used to get the government to contribute hefty sums to Eton College.

 

Naturally the people who benefit from this are putting out two contradictory messages. They are saying they may reduce their contributions to charity while also claiming that they are not using this scheme to reduce their tax bill.

 

Cameron, Osborne and Clegg have defended the change. Vince Cable has suggested that he is having second thoughts. For once, Cameron, Osborne and Clegg are right and Cable is wrong.

So the latest row over the Budget is about tax relief on charity donations. When charities complain about something my natural instinct is to support them, particularly when they are arguing against the likes of Osborne. However, on this occasion, I think they are wrong.

 

The issue is this. At the moment people can claim tax relief on donations to charity. For basic rate tax payers it is a simple matter of ticking the Gift Aid box and HMRC will top up the donation. Higher rate taxpayers also tick the box then declare the donation on their tax form to get further relief. The coverage has focused on charities that most people are happy to support such as cancer charities. However, it applies to all charities, big and small.

 

Let us assume that I am very rich and am paying 50% tax on some of my earnings (if only). Then assume that I want to give £1m to a local cats' home. First of all I only need to write out a cheque for £800,000 and tick the Gift Aid box. The cats' home can then claim the remaining £200,000 form HMRC. Then, when I fill in my tax return, I declare the contribution. That means I can claim the difference between the basic rate of 20% tax and the top rate of 50% so I reduce my tax bill by £300,000 (possibly meaning I get a rebate). Therefore, the donation has cost me £500,000 and the government has paid the rest. That money could have been spent on extra teachers, nurses etc. but instead it has gone to a small cats' home that might take years to spend the money.

 

Effectively the current system means that some very wealthy people can dictate how some government money is spent. Bear in mind that public schools are also charities so the same method can be used to get the government to contribute hefty sums to Eton College.

 

Naturally the people who benefit from this are putting out two contradictory messages. They are saying they may reduce their contributions to charity while also claiming that they are not using this scheme to reduce their tax bill.

 

Cameron, Osborne and Clegg have defended the change. Vince Cable has suggested that he is having second thoughts. For once, Cameron, Osborne and Clegg are right and Cable is wrong.

 

Interesting stuff. I'd assumed that if you declared donations to a charity on your tax return that it's solely the money that you've donated that can be written off. I had no idea that it could be abused to avoid paying the tax in the first place.