Should 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?
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.
Clearly, Brian?s still deep in that funk he fell into after our mutual acquaintance told him about what my inheritance is going to look like. He?s got the green-eyed monster, big time. Poor Old Brian.
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.
That, of course, is the historical complaint of mine owners, plantation owners, chimney sweeps, brothel keepers, bookmakers, mill owners, and, more recently, medicinal cannabis growers. The usual answer is that on the contrary they understand it only too well.
High house prices are caused by excessive demand. ie the 3 million migrants now in this country. They are all living somewhere. Bliar started it off. (Importing votes)
Your usual shit-fer-brains. The reason for high house prices is migration. They're all living somewhere. ie, cheap housing that would normally go to first time buyers.
So how do you decide whether someone has spent their life "sitting around waiting for another hand out..." or has been productive? It's not particularly easy and one man's 'lazy git' is another man's 'hard worker' (... 'hard work' doesn't necessarily mean earning lots of money).
One way of tipping the balance back in favour of the common man would be Right To Buy for private tenants. Labour are looking into it, so fingers crossed.
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