Keir Starmer dovrebbe essere audace e considerare una tassa sulla ricchezza, Neil Kinnock dice | Lavoro

Completely unrelated to the topic of the article but

> Kinnock was scathing about the move by Jeremy Corbyn and other former Labour MPs to set up their own leftwing party. “I understand the difficulty of thinking up a name, and in a comradely way, I’d suggest one: It would be the Farage Assistance Group.”

Surely he knew what the acronym would be when he said that? Kinnock does a little trolling

LAND VALUE TAX:
Easier to implement, basically impossible to avoid

Imo I’d rather see a new income tax band aimed at those making upwards of a million or so. The fact that it’s 45% whether you’re making £126,000 or £1,260,000 a year just seems absurd to me.

No, we need huge cat cuts and huge spending cuts. Benefits, gone. Pensions, gone. We need to halve government spending at a minimum, tax is theft snd the state is basically a large organised extortion racket. No one benefits from it, it just makes us poorer.

That’d be nice. But man, it’s deeply ironic coming from the guy who instigated the rightward shift that still affects Labour to this day. A lot of people blame Blair, but he merely entrenched it. It was Kinnock who initiated the first major move to the right after the success of Thatcher. There’s absolutely zero chance that Reeves, McSweeney, or in particular Mandelson would ever back a wealth tax as party policy.

I see he hasn’t learnt much and I’m guessing he’s worth 5 million since he wants the limit to be £7million.
If you take 2% of some asset like a farm, then over 50 years you’ve likely confiscated the lot.
Also people will break assets up into arms length companies to avoid the tax.
Why would someone with a house worth 500k not pay £10,000 on it btw, other than it won’t be popular?

That would mean he has to tax himself and his cronies, not happening

I think a great opportunity for a Land Value Tax, would be the opportunity to use penalties to incentivise productive deployment of land. A property developer buys up a bunch of land, gets planning permission on it then sits around not doing nothing? Cool, ramp up that tax rate until they build or sell it on to someone who will. People buying farmland and not using it for agriculture? Same deal.

There’s a reason barely any countries have percentage based wealth taxes – they are highly impractical and nearly impossible to enforce. I say this a tax adviser by profession and therefore somebody with a vested interest in a wealth tax – as I would be paid lots of money to calculate it, mitigate it, or dispute valuations with HMRC.

Outside of my pension, S&S ISA, and premium bonds my main assets are chattels – e.g. hopefully around £5,000 of Pokémon cards. Just think about all the problems with the government taxing these, for example:

* How would HMRC even know I owned these Pokémon cards? A wealth tax return would entirely rely on me being honest – which would be naïve for anyone to assume.
* Even in good faith people won’t always remember what they own. I personally didn’t know of [my rarest card’s value](https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nkw=pokemon+center+promo+40+2001&_sacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m570.l1313&rt=nc&_odkw=pokemon+center+promo+40&_osacat=0&LH_Complete=1&LH_Sold=1) until 20 years after I got it for free in New York – and what would happen [in situations like this?](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/27/renaissance-painting-cimabue-found-kitchen-france-sells-24m-euros-auction) or basically any episode of Antiques Roadshow – Would she have committed tax evasion because she didn’t know of her rare painting? Otherwise surely pleading ignorance would be a “get out of jail free” card.
* How could I ascertain their open market value? Even if I were to go to great expense and get all my cards professionally valued, their market value may still differ – [see this instance last year](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-68969058).
* Do you honestly thinking HMRC disputing Pokémon card values (hypothetically going all the way to the Supreme Court) is a good use of public money and resources?
* My Pokémon cards would already be liable to Income Tax and NIC (if I sold them piecemeal as a business), Capital Gains Tax (if I sold them one off as a capital asset), or Inheritance Tax (if I kept them until death). Is taxing them annually really necessary?

And just to pre-empt anyone arguing this is a strawman argument and that a wealth tax would only apply to people richer than me – each of the above still applies even if I were the richest man on Earth. Additionally, most or all the above apply to any kind of personal possession, not just Pokémon cards – whether it be paintings, NFTs, privately held businesses, racehorses, antiques, etc.

The only country that can be seen to have a wealth tax than “works” in Switzerland, but that’s only because they lack a Capital Gains Tax, certain cantons lack an Inheritance Tax (e.g. Obwalden), exempts many chattels, is a very low percentage, and is often subject to a cap. Doing that in the UK would be unpalatable to most people on the Left calling for a wealth tax.