Inheritance tax is paid by the poor not the well to do and the rich. Currently 40% tax is due on any part of an estate over 350,000 (pounds or euros, there's no difference now). That's not a lot of wealth to leave after a lifetime's work, it represents a modest dwelling and some savings before even considering a small business.
And no matter what class based politics say, normal people do not expect to pay all their lives for health care and then be required to pay again for it at the end either; and included in their commonsense notion of health care is nursing care and assistance with the extra costs of being old. So pre death wealth taxes on the poor are even worse.
Labour's pretence that there is some kind of moral, equality, redistributive stance that justifies removing the fruits of a family's labour at every passing of a generation is well understood in its dishonesty except by the Labour rump. People who have worked and saved and provided for themselves all their lives, who have paid their very stiff taxes into state provision and often not used it much until the end, but recognised the justice of providing for all, are not going to accept the final grab by vindictive class politicians and their client supporters.
There are complex technical arguments about the effects of death taxes and intergenerational wealth distribution, but the democratic political arguments are very clear and simple: families are the building blocks of our society and their cohesion is in part determined by family wealth generated and administered within the family acting in its own members' interests, so naturally set above those of the wider society. Labour doesn't like that. They have atomised social relations and abused their political power to break up family life. They have made the poor rat run through morally hazardous, mean- tested benefit and tax systems.
Just as raising the level at which income tax becomes payable at all releases the working people from their benefits dependencies on the Labour state, removing ordinary people from subjugation to death taxes helps families not to require tax-funded benefits in the first place.
Assisting members of the next generation who have no family resources to fall back on is not furthered by confiscating the resources of those who have.
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2 comments:
And I hear the Lib Dems suggest an extra tax for anybody with a property worth over £1 million, which seems to me as though it might force poorer people or those with less income out of their inherited or hard-earned dream houses.
There's the assumption also, C, that people sell houses their parents 'owned'. No notion that families own houses - not just the nominal owners who are merely generational caretakers and that the actual building is held for many generations. Lots of people do sell their parents' house, but lots wouldn't dream of it, they live there as much as they always have. This is not just about 'grand' houses either. An ignored, brushed under the carpet problem for many ordinary families is that people cannot afford to live in the places they grew up, close to their relatives and in their own surroundings.
Socialist have a template for every situation and ram it down over the heads of diversity in the name of equality.
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