Andy Raynor - Beyond the Brief
Andy Raynor's blog
Wealth Tax - it's here, and it's paying for someone else's mistakes
After a particularly achy run yesterday I lay in the bath reading the Sunday Times, being careful not to drop the iPad (it'll happen one day). I didn't get past the articles on the new-found love-in between Labour and the Lib Dems about the "mansion tax", and how that looks like it will be in ALL the parties' sights before too long.
I'm not going to discuss what your politics may be, or what mine are, but to try to make it clear that the politicians are up to their old tricks again, drawing a smokescreen of reasonableness over what they are about to do.
What they are about to do is introduce a wealth tax.
The reason is clear - there's no way that this tax on houses is going to be effective. There will be outcries left, right and centre over the super-rich who can translate their assets into some other form, just as valuable, possibly far more portable.
Within five years - start the clock - the tax will be on all wealth over a certain threshold. Along with transfer or bequest taxes, to stop effective planning.
And how did you buy these assets? Out of taxed income. So these are all taxes on taxes.
We could debate the rightness or wrongness of this forever, so let's not bother, but at least let's make the politicians say what things are, so that we can all think about what we can do about it while there is time.
Some hope? Well, more hope than any admission of what tax is all about in the first place. Tax is part welfare, part society, part political.
Only the political part is now the biggest. Much of your tax pays for the errors of the politicians, spending money over decades that they did not have.
And they are about to take part of your wealth to pay for it.
Tell me what you think at andy@andypraynor.com
And take a look at what's been said before by looking in the archive:
© Andy Raynor 2013