Post by Brian ReayPost by tim...Post by Stephen ColeShould Corbyn set it at a rate designed merely to redistribute wealth or
should a more progressive level of taxation be applied to the robber baron
class’ hoardings, coupled with the introduction of rent control
legislation, in order to burst the massively over-inflated housing bubble
and collapse house prices back to nearer the true value of a pile of
bricks?
Um, let me think?
NO
tim
He’d do better to reform IHT.
Parents whose offspring have shown they are prepared to work etc, and have
actually established themselves- bought a property etc should be subject 0
IHT when passing to children. Even the, effective, £1m or so currently in
place isn’t really high enough, it is easy to exceed that. (Fortunately,
there are legal ways to avoid IHT even if you have more the £1m) £1m per
child would be more reasonable.
Conversely, if the off spring have obviously been sitting around waiting
for another hand out, moaning about how tough life is etc, tax it at 100%
and give it to the NHS.
No true socialist should complain at that. Reward the hard working, the
first case, help the masses and don’t reward the lazy in the second case.
Of course, those who fall into the second group- remember you need to have
bought a property- will scream it is unfair.
I'm not entirely sure about that. If you buy a house to live in, and
want to pass it on as an asset, fair enough. If you have bought it in
the hope of gains far in excess of inflation, then (arguably) you are
behaving like a charicature of the robber baron capitalist. Even more so
if you have multiple "buy to lets" with the same expectation.
And that's one of the things that IHT and CGT are after.
Call me an old cynic, but I sometimes suspect that the "simple working
class lad made good" who shouts about IHT is a bit more of a capitalist
than they claim to be.
I think the *real* problem is that government economic policy over the
decades has largely encouraged the housing bubble. This includes council
housing selloff and easing buy to let rules. The underlying problem is
that we have not been building enough houses to match rising prosperity
and (the reasonably) rising expectations. You might (or might not) blame
developers with their land banks but overall, governments have always
had levers that they could use.