Lib Dems unveil radical tax package
Lib Dems unveil radical tax package
… the package would benefit “Middle England” - taking one million people out of the higher rate of tax and dropping the party’s former plans for a new top rate of 50p on incomes over £100,000. A further two million people on low incomes would be taken out of taxation altogether, while the 2p cut in the basic rate would benefit people across the spectrum.
Not one to normally discuss politics, this kind of caught my eye (I know the possibility of it happening is somewhat remote). Tax and government help is something that really gets me. Being just slightly in the higher tax bracket means we get taxed loads and also we get no help from the government in terms of benefits, etc. In this country you either have to be poor or unemployed so you get thousands in benefit, and/or have lots of kids to get support from that or be extremely wealthy and not be taxed at all.
It’s just not fair !
Tags: news, politics
June 8th, 2006 at 11:35 am
Tax is much easier to bear once you accept that it’s not even supposed to be fair.
It’s pointless heavily taxing poor people, as they don’t have much money, or much to lose by avoiding payment.
Even if you tax rich people to the hilt, there’s not that many of them, and they will just leave a high tax country anyway.
Which just leaves the middle income earners - lots of them around, not very mobile, and they have a reasonable amount of money.
I do think that there’s a lot to be said in principle for what the Lib Dems are proposing. It will be interesting to see what the various analysts make of the detailed figures.
June 8th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
Hmm. As a tax regime, it’s nicer to tax things that harm the environment than income. Fair enough. But as an environmental measure… I can see that it’s a way of selling the green taxes, but I’m sceptical about how effective the green taxes will be at changing people’s behaviour. I don’t think, for example, you will get people out of their cars unless you have both a huge increase in petrol duty and truly enormous investment in public transport. It costs over £200 for a standard class return ticket from Newcastle to London at peak times, and the trains are still full most of the time. So cutting rail fares won’t do it - you need to put on more trains, which probably means more railways to carry them. Then there’s getting all those huge windfarms built… I just don’t see any effective solutions being politically acceptable until most of central London is already under the Thames.