Comment by oliwarner
17 days ago
Yes. Progressive taxation. That's the point. Tax those who can afford it, fund equal opportunity and a basic standard of living for those who can't. Pull society up from the bottom.
As much as one can complain about specific inefficiencies or not being able to send young Jasper and Tabitha to private school because of VAT and tapered tax relief, I do think we don't take it far enough.
The reason it not working is that we have stapled our personal wealth and economy to housing. 60 years of financiers pushing for higher lending limits with looser regulation resulted in more people able to "afford" a £1m house. That drags up all the prices.
There's no simple way to reverse it this distortion but it had a knock on effect: the generationally rich, the landed gentry through to farmers have become insanely rich, through no work but HODLling all the land until they got planning permission.
I agree, wealth tax is scary but not addressing how wealth works won't fix things either.
For now only earnings are taxed.
Earn £300k a year, you pay 65% on more than half of it, and obviously 45, 40, and so on of the first half of it)
Get £3 million from the stocks? You pay 20% (above £50k threshold)
People are obsessed with workers paying all their taxes and letting off the wealthy avoiding the most.