Whaaattt?

Agree - if you tax wealth unfairly, then folks will either not bother or leave. Same applies to tying people and businesses up in acres of red tape/taxes/fines etc. It is abundantly clear that recent governments haven't a clue about the Laffer curve, that is for sure.

 

How much of your income currently goes on tax? All that 50% is doing is slamming them all into one heap so you get rid of the cost of collecting them and removing the dishonesty in the amounts they are currently collecting. Maybe 45% would make more sense, but it would have to be somewhere around that.

If you earn £50k, at 50% then you pay tax on £30k, so you pay £15k tax.

Council tax is £2k for a start, so that leaves £13k adrift from VAT, fuel duty, IPT and so on.

That leaves you £35k after tax which I'd wager is more than someone on £50k currently has... Plus, with everyone on a minimum of £20k, especially pensioners, think how much more money would be slushing around in the economy, especially if VAT is 10%.

 

Either way, it is not a council thing. That is what is killing council budgets currently.. or at least that, plus debt interest is.

I'd also ban councils from owning, purchasing or building any property that is not for council or public use, or housing in their area. A lot of councils have accrued a lot of debt (and therefore interest payments) on property not in their area.

 

I sort of agree... so the situation where we've got celebs and rich folks zipping about in private jets, yachts and Bentley's or shooting off to the edge of space and back for giggles whilst you and I are getting clobbered for daring to run our petrol car to get to work, is perverse to say the least. However, surely the biggest issue there is the utter nonsense that we are being fed (and believing) which in reality is only a way for more generation of wealth by those rich folks?

We saw it through the pandemic - many folks knew they were being lied to.. could see that the data or information they were being given was utter tripe, could see that the rules being imposed upon them were also utter tripe, and yet they still went along with it because those folks 'above us' were saying it...

My concern with curtailing all of that sort of thing, however, is that without someone with deep pockets and a slightly mad mind, there is a lot of technology we may not have or ever see. Things as simple as memory foam that we all use in beds, shoes, slippers and so on -- that started life in a NASA lab. Without heavy investment in space travel/exploration, that technology wouldn't have been needed. Sure, the US government bankrolled the space program back in the 70's, but not so much now - - that is why it is taking the likes of Elon Musk to pay for the research that ends up with rockets that can return home and park up somewhere.

Limit that sort of madness and research and you limit the possibilities of tech and advancements that fall out of it and eventually make their way into our homes.