'Wealth Tax' hoves into view. Discuss.

The green-left has long hankered after a 'wealth tax', using Gary Lineker as their human face / shield.  Gary Stevenson - a rum cove if ever there was one - happily works himself up into a semi-coherent rant-frenzy on the topic at the drop of a hat, as every TV producer knows: he's a form of walking click-bait.  And now all these people are (like so many lobbyists) projecting their fantasies on Young Andy.

But for all the charlatanism and carnival nonsense, there's something in it.  There's nothing clever about passively allowing the entirety of the new economic magnate class to blag and bully its way into global personal tax immunity - not to mention immunity for their hi-tech rent-seeking enterprises.  We all know these people have the best lawyers, own most of the meejah of all kinds + a large number of venal politicians, and are ruthless with it.

Before opening the floor to y'all, I have a couple of random inputs to offer.

1.  HMRC:  a badly underpowered, broadly unaccountable, ramshackle organisation that fosters an opaque world of thriving tax evasion on the one hand (sheer inability to get to grips with the complexities of 2026, and the depth of fraud it can only sit back & ignore), and injustice on the other, meted out to an unlucky sub-set of taxpayers it randomly does get its teeth into. 

It is my strong contention that the sheer complexities inherent in a tax on total assets, would defeat HMRC right from the get-go.  In the process, however, the opacity, fraud and injustice would multiply several-fold, with the high likelihood of serious political and even economic fallout.

2.  Real estate:  the one taxable asset class that doesn't suffer from crippling complexity is of course Land.  Our good friend, the very much lamented Mark Wadsworth, spilled much virtual ink promoting Land Value Tax, the high-level theoretical attractions of which are really obvious.

This thing is as long as a piece of string because we have a low-level form of land tax already - the Council Tax[1].  It has long been my contention that George 'Boy Genius' Osborne (who is as much to blame as Gordon Brown for the present state of our economy) missed a massive trick when, in his first "all in it together" budget, he failed to create a dozen new Council Tax bands.  At a stroke[2] he would have raised a bunch of £££ and injected a bit of justice at the start of his destructive "austerity" regime.  And all for near-zero effort: it would have leveraged a pretty efficient existing tax structure at minimal cost and next-to-no unintended consequences or evasion.  In 2010 he could do whatever he decided; but from the word 'go' and over the following 5 years it turned out that he was indeed as useless a chancellor as we've ever had.  

Big topic, to which I reckon we'll be returning quite soon.  Over to y'all.

ND  

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[1] Recall that Heseltine invented and implemented it in just a few months.  Him and his instantly available army of estate agents.

[2] see [1] above.  Implementing new bands would take even less time.

Wealth Tax on the List of Demands

My crie du jour just now is: "what are the demands?"   The BLM thing was the proximate cause, and "they" still haven't got remotely near Marcus Rashford's stunning, tangible achievement in terms of coming up with something of all-round practicability.  "Defund the Police and dismantle capitalism & the patriarchal system" allow Kier Starmer to snort with dismissive ridicule for the cameras, and counter with his deep and abiding support for the police.  So - not much traction there.  

But it's broader than just BLM's amateurish flounderings.  Starmer's Labour, and in particular the signally unimpressive Anneliese Dodds, are always coming up with silly anodyne lists of things they'll be holding the government to account for, ("Our 4 tests for Covid Economic Recovery") which are always modelled on the Brown/Balls tests for joining the Euro - designed as a cunning trap for their enemies disguised as something constructive and clever.  (Does this clever-clever political stuff ever really work?)

Anyhow: it hasn't taken long for that old Corbynite favourite, the Wealth Tax (- everything can be paid for by smashing the 1%), to hove into view.  Here's nervous little Dodds again; and here's ... Polly!

Cards on the table: though I'm no LVT obsessive, I've always reckoned the Council Tax is a masterpiece and case study in practical politics, and that Little Git Osborne missed a massive political, fiscal and economic trick in 2010 when he failed to take the simple step of extending the bands upwards very significantly, thereby rectifying a grotesque anomaly.

But WT in the way Polly intends it (and she writes of all manner of serious work being done on the subject) we're talking a lot more than recognising the stupidity of a banding scheme that stops at 'H' ('I' in Wales).

What do we reckon?  Open WT thread below.

ND 

We will never run out of land to sell....

The Government is to try, a little bit harder, to cut the deficit. As always, the old chestnuts are brought out, dusted off and ritually burnt to impress us.

Mainly that oldest of old wheezes, the great land sale. The Ministry of Defence owns 1% of UK land dontchaknow, plenty to be sold. All the other departments too - also we need 150,000 new houses.

I am sure I have heard this before somewhere, oh, yes, from every Government ever elected in living memory. There is always a big land sell off that will raise billions in any budget.

The thing is, rather weirdly for Politicians, it turns out to be true, there is always more land to sell off. The Government owns a lot (the Queen too, another story for another time....) and can grant planning permission for anything on its own land.

Hooray - all our problems are solved.

Except of course, if you are one these holy Land Value Tax believers, then you have to have limits to land - otherwise your plans to tax everyone solely on the value of their land has big problems  - either incessant inflation as land comes to market or, more likely, huge deflation as the value of land decreases as more is released to the general market.

Either way, the evil Tories are no doubt int he gamer for killing LVT as a concept once and for all....