UK Politics

4389 readers

104 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

tom@feddit.uk

GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk

flamingos@feddit.uk

frankPodmore@slrpnk.net

-4

What does the left want? A wealth tax. What will that accomplish? Very little | Aditya Chakrabortty (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) by frankPodmore@slrpnk.net to c/uk_politics@feddit.uk

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Saw someone the other day saying Labour is the only party that will acknowledge that trade offs exist, but also that they keep picking the side of the trade off guaranteed to annoy their voters, which seemed like a pithy summary of politics.

EDIT: I see we're once again failing the simple reading comprehension test.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This is all true! The thing is, you'd collect far more from the billionaires by introducing broad-based progressive income tax rises. The idea we can design a wealth tax that does a better job than such an income tax is a myth.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Most billionaire wealth isn't income though, it's in assets. I'm open to the idea that the proposed wealth taxes are an ineffective means of redistributing wealth, Richard Murphy told Polanski exactly this, but income tax changes wouldn't be effective either. All you'd be doing it taking more from the upper-middle to upper classes, not the billionaires.

[–] frankPodmore@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

So I agree that we should tax wealth. My point (and that of the article) is that there's no panacea where we tax wealth (or only 'billionaire wealth') and thereby achieve a progressive outcome. Billionaires are a tiny fraction of 'the rich'. Redistribution that only targets that tiny fraction will always be ineffective, not because there isn't enough money there but because there aren't enough people. I'm not saying this speculatively: successful redistributive systems always have steep progressive income taxes, with everyone contributing and the richest contributing the most.

You can essentially tax assets through effective taxation of capital gains and rents, which will also discourage rent-seeking behaviour in investors - which is also good.

So, yes, by all means find ways to tax wealth (just sensible council tax banding would be a good start). But on its own this won't achieve much.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 2 points 1 day ago

I think we agree with each other, but are kinda talking past each other. I was just trying to say that income tax is an ineffective way of addressing billionaire wealth in particular. Taxes in general should be higher for everyone, but especially the rich (I'd be a terrible politician). Any successful progressive regime needs to kill the idea we can have Scandinavian services with American taxes.