Council tax is s a terrible burden for so many people. Its effects warp and control lives in far too many ways: creating benefit dependencies; creating real poverty among vulnerable population groups, particularly the old; creating opportunities for unacceptable levels of snooping by local authorities' employees; enabling many working- age people to pay nothing for local services. Having a beautiful house does not necessarily signal having a high income, it is a choice to devote more wealth to housing than to other consumption.
A local income tax would remove all these disadvantages. And a flattish tax would be straightforward to collect and distribute the costs of local services onto all their users.
Scotland is going to abolish council tax and have local income tax. It already has free care for the old, no university fees, greater availability of health service treatments, no hospital car-parking charges, small class sizes in its schools, and a high level of satisfaction with its government. Which is not surprising given that all this has happened there since Labour were voted out of office.
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3 comments:
dont be such a wind up.
scottish Lab brought in several of these policies up there.
one thing i was wondering though. if as it seems the SNP are capable and sensible (and fair?), what would happen if their westminster MPs began to argue for these kind of policies for all of the UK
Did they Roym, which?
I don't think the SNP Westminster MPs are rest-of-the-UK oriented really. And if I am doing them an injustice and they are, there is a great deal of playground behaviour by Scottish Labour Westminster MPs, not least Gordon Brown and Douglas Alexander and Alistair Darling, in refusing to play with them.
Poor England.
What about Westminster English MPs standing up to the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and whatever that weirdo Alexander is (International Development? We could do with a bit of English development first) and arguing for sensible, fair policies capably delivered?
If you have a big house that you live in the UK tax system treats you extremely favourabley compared to having your wealth in practically any other form. You are given special exemption from Capital Gains Tax, and since the abolition of Schedule A income tax on the imputed income from living in the property you do do not have to pay Income Tax. Abolishing Council Tax would make this bad situation even worse. We already have a very distorted market in which far too much savings are tied up in housing assets.
I fail to see how replacing Council Tax with a local income tax would make local councils any less likely to snoop.
Surely benefits create benefit dependencies, not taxes?
Flat taxes are a great idea, but a local income tax is no more flat than any other income tax.
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