Why the UK’s Tax System is Broken
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- Опубліковано 24 тра 2024
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Despite a recent National Insurance freeze, the country's tax burden has reached a 40-year peak, straining public services. But the issue may lie in the dysfunctional tax system rather than the tax burden itself.
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1. inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/m...
2. ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-...
3. obr.uk/box/corporation-tax-in...
4. www.newstatesman.com/politics...
5. www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/m...
6. theconversation.com/five-maps...
7. www.newstatesman.com/politics...
8. www.investopedia.com/terms/v/...
9. ifs.org.uk/articles/taxes-wil...
0:00 Intro
0:39 What makes a good tax system?
2:34 Is the UK’s tax system fair?
4:52 Is the UK tax system effective?
6:55 Sponsor
The tax system is not broken, it's working exactly as intended, and it's intention is to keep power and wealth in the hands of the already wealthy.
Exactly, it’s designed to be confusing so people can’t see it’s literally stealing from the poor and giving to the rich.
🎯
Not just that, London is a financial center, which requires favorable laws in favor of wealth
@@tomlxyzLondon is *THE* global financial centre...
Hehe, all taxation is theft.
As a note, Council Tax also is paid by the occupier of a property not the owner. Meaning those that do not have the wealth to own a home are also the ones paying that tax if they rent a home. All the tax, none of the benefit it's based on
I was wondering why this was not mentioned as is so obvious, and usually the occupier is poor as you say.
None of the benefit, you are living in that expensive house. If I lease a Aston Martin I would still have to pay the extra road tax as car worth more than 45k even though I don't own it.
@@leemactavish3104Wrong. Expensive doesn't mean better. Property prices are being artificially inflated especially in London.
So you live in a 1 bedroom flat on an estate in Islington and work as a paralegal or admin for the council you're pay 10% of your salary JUST on council tax
You recieve none of the benefits of the increased property value... the landlords is making the wealth and passing the burden of tax to the tenant whos ALSO paying for the mortgage + profit monthly.... So the person without wealth is being taxed based on wealth and paying for it out of income... the person with wealth is not being taxed on that wealth and is actually funding that wealth via the income of another..😂
@skp8748 No, expensive doesn't necessarily mean better ofcourse but they are other things to think about my bungalow with a very good sized garden would be cheaper than some flats in London but I don't have all the benefits of being within walking tube ride away from all that London has to offer. So the tenant is still getting all the benefits of living in that expensive house so be it that is more about location rather than the house.
Although I partially agree that the tennant gets some benefits from being in that house
It completely defeats the point of having a tax that is on paper meant to be *asset* based.
In a more well thought out economy the asset tax would tax the asset owner and then perhaps there would be a separate council 'charge' that might be maintenance based to pay towards bins etc
But in the point you make about "area benefits" like closeness the tube etc, they are already paying that in the rent which will undoubtedly take that into account and be higher due to closer amenities
Tony Blair avoided £312,000 in stamp duty by buying an offshore firm that owned the property. What a joke when even former prime ministers game the system.
red tories...
Honest question. If you were in his shoes and wanted to buy the same property, what would you have done?
@@doxologist The point is that he knows about it because he used it and therefore wasn't going to change it.
It was his choice not to do so.
@@doxologist
Well obviously everyone would have done it, but even more obviously it showcases a hole in the legaslation which would need a fix
@@doxologistThere are plenty of examples of pretty damn wealthy people going out of their way to pay MORE tax because of stupid things like "morals" and "loving your country". (Halli Thorleifsson as an example)
The most unfair thing is that even if you pay 40% of income tax (or correctly saying if you reach 40% tax band) you may still not be able to afford any flat in London :/
Incom tax band system needs drastic reforms 40% is simply not fair 😑
Your income tax rate was your capital gains tax rate the top rate until 2008, when Gordon Brown changed the rate to 18% for all taxpayers.[
And that is because of unrestricted immigration
@@Yawnymcsnore 😅🤦♂️
@@Yawnymcsnoreimmigration can explain literally ANYTHING for some people can’t it 💀
How's the Council tax a wealth tax? It's paid by the tenants and the landlords don't pay a penny! If you have loads of houses and all rented out, none of the wealth is taxed by the council tax.
A lucky few do own houses, and not all of them are over the age of 60! Nor do they all own multiple properties. I’d bet the majority is still people owning their own home, behind renters, of course.
(And even if they do fall into either category, they still pay something, no matter how little - unless the landlord is also renting themselves.)
You could do the same with buy to let. Why is that a bad thing?
I did have a place where council tax was included in the rent, but it then turned out the landlord was dodging paying it and went to prison.
I'm also going back like 20 years so maybe she's out now.
The tax bands are not progressive anymore. Someone with a standard house is paying the same amount of council tax as someone with a 30mil house.
Because it’s relative to the value of the home, flats pay less than mansions. It’s not a great one though, if you pay off your mortgage on a big house you still have to pay a lot when you retire even though your incomes dropped
It’s purposefully designed to be too confusing for the poor whilst it steals from them and gives to the already rich. It’s working exactly how it’s intended and it’s not going to change.
Well that is half-true, it doesn't give to the rich, the taxes are taken equally and then thrown into money-pits such as the NHS, police or more retarded paper-bullshit they call bureocracy or whatever.
A British fellow - Briton married to a member of my family - visited us in 2022. He is a well spoken, educated, learned guy. Has a good job but is not swimming in a pool of wealth either. When he told us about what % of his income gets taxed, we were shocked. In my country we like to complain about paying 10-12% of our income in taxes and contributions, but his was in the 40-45% range! There would be revolt here if we had to pay that much for crumbling hospitals and schools.
Blatantly clear that the UK has excessive taxation on middle class incomes and almost none on wealth/inheritance. Workers keep getting squeezed while CEOs and pensioners keep seeing their incomes rise, it's not a bug of the system but how it's designed to work by the Conservatives.
The pensioner part is heading for crisis. We set up a law known as the 'triple lock' in 2010 as a very transparent (and very successful) way to win the pensioner vote for the Tory party. It's a binding guarantee that ensures the state pension will rise, every year, at a rate that at a minimum keeps pace with inflation and often exceeds it. The government said "Vote for us and we will make sure you get more money!" and promptly upwards of sixty percent of retirees voted for them. The policy is unsustainable, though - after twelve years of the annual increase, that pension is now costing the government more than every other state benefit payment added together, and still going up fast. It's quickly becoming unaffordable, but the government dare not even suggest the possibility of removing it because without the full support of the retired or soon-to-retire demographic their electoral chances would be sharply reduced.
He can't be taxed 45%. That level only applies to earnings above £125,140. So if he earns 130,000 then he'll pay 45% of the £4,860 above that bracket, and 40% of the bracket below that and so on, and the net pay is £79,178 with £44,703 paid in tax. So he gets to keep more than 60% of his earnings
@@aceman0000099 You're forgetting National Insurance and all the taxes on spending. The government goes quite far into our pockets.
@@paullarne I don't see VAT as a tax on my spending, it's more like a tax on selling that shops pass onto us
'EU regulates too much'... 'gingerbread men VAT differs based on the chocolate decorations'
This is literally a law that is created aby lobbying, for a particular company and particular products
VAT is an EU based tax, but many issues arise in the UK from historic zero rate exemptions derived from the previous purchase tax regime - food, childrens' clothes, rent, etc - that were implemented with VAT in the 1970s. The main one people see is the difference between confectionery (chocolate biscuits, etc) and Food (eg Jaffa cakes) which are standard and zero rated respectively. The difficulties come with certain types of transactions - primarily bank charges and interest, but many others which are exempt supplies - ie outside scope of VAT rather than zero rated - as if you make this type of supply you cannot recover input VAT you pay. If you make mixed supplies (standard, zero rated and exempt supplies) then there are some quite complex calculations on VAT to be done, however most organisations in this area are large enough to employ experts to help.
Then you can add in the complexities of EU VAT as it is quite normal if you are a business exporting to countries in the EU to have to register for VAT in one or more countries. Each country has different rates, rules and reporting requirements - all of which ensure you need help to get it right.
In the Netherlands, there was a debate about lowering the VAT on fruits and vegetables. To promote more healthy eating. That got postponed because of a bs excuse what we should label as fruits and vegetables. Is tomato on a pizza counted as a vegetable. Or apple syrup a fruit. Making what is a simple solution, deliberately complicated.
You're not wrong that the bs excuse is just that when they're thinking of tomatoes as vegetables or apply syrup as fruits in the first place.
The example with the gingerbread man was incorrectly stated as being exempt from VAT, but the gingerbread is taxable to VAT at zero percent. There is a big difference between exempt and zero-rated items.
What's the big difference?
@@dangriff12 In general you cannot reclaim the VAT you pay on the expenses used to create/provide exempt supplies unless the exempt part of the business is very small, but you can reclaim that VAT on expenses used to make taxable supplies (including those with zero rate). If you only have exempt supplies in your business you cannot register at all.
what the hell does that even mean?
@@campeador3812 that the tax system is confusing as fark
@@MattRyan1
But.... you cannot reclaim the VAT on your taxable supplies if they're rated at 0% tax, right?
So at the end of the day, it still comes down to the same amount of money?
The argument regarding smoking of “it encourages healthiness” vs “infringement of personal freedom” is void in a country with a national health service. You’re free to ruin your health of course! But not at the tax payers expense (for context I am a smoker but acknowledge that I shouldn’t expect others to pay for my mistakes)
Yes but why stop there?
Ban fatty food, to combat obesity.
Ban dangerous sports to reduce injuries.
Serious illness can be treated with death to cut costs.
And suddenly it's not really a good life anymore living in a padded room eating healthy slop to promote long healthy life's of absolute misery but don't worry we can give you cheap anti-depressants too.
Where's the limiting factor?
Many drugs are already illegal yet if you're dropped off at an A&E ODing they still treat you.
Yes, but people living in greater deprivation are more likely to smoke.
Therefore it is by extension a tax on the poor.
Same would apply to the sugar tax.
Same applies to playing the national lottery.
These are all taxes that tax the poor.
That is an excellent point, but I wonder how far the government would need to go with it. For example, people who don't exercise at least twice a week are at risk of more diseases than people who do; people who choose to play on a computer instead of doing another hobby are more at risk of eye diseases; people who eat generally healthily and are a healthy weight, but who choose to eat a lot of smoked food are at a higher risk of colon cancer.
There's a myriad of lifestyle choices that directly affect what diseases we could develop.
@@DoctorRetinatrue...but then why should everyone pay into this if they aren't going to try and keep healthy? It's like communism in a mini way when someone says well it's paid for, I can do what I want and doctors are all paid for...that's not exactly fair
@@DoctorRetina that's complete nonsense you can't opt out of taxes you can opt out of smoking and the national lottery.
You can't protect people from their own bad decisions, you wouldn't want national lottery winners to give their winnings back even if it does regularly result in the "winners" destroying their own lives.
My wages are taxed i am then taxed for buying the basics like food and cleaning products. Taxed for services i dont use, forced to pay national insurance when i wont even get a state pension when i am older. Taxed my car and taxed when i repair my xar because of potholes my tax was suppose to fix.
Yeah, the tax system is broken beyond belief.
And at the end of it all. You don't even get reliable puvlic services out of it
Your employer is also taxed to employ you then taxed on their profits they earn all whilst collecting tax for the government. Many don’t realise their employer pays a separate NI contribution as a tax to employ you and then has to pay your tax to hmrc as well as vat and the companies tax. They then have to pay somebody to calculate all this as they are fined if it’s incorrect.
"i am then taxed for buying the basics like food"
There is zero VAT on food, unless you eat junk or eat out.
@@DrBlack1987 huge tax breaks and subsidies though. That negates a lot of it.
So I get taxed to pay my own wages.
@@reheyesd8666 as does the employer they also get taxed on their personal income.
A personal allowance and a flat tax rate for everyone would work if everyone actually paid the tax and did not use countless loopholes. As somebody who clawed their way out of poverty by running a small business I have no incentive to grow and hire more people. It almost feels punitive. So I'll either move or optimize my business for taxes rather than growth.
It's ironic that the folk who make up the tax laws are some of the most wealthiest individuals. So wealthy in fact, it'd be a struggle to spend the money in few lifetimes.
A broken tax system such as this one is an indicator for a decades-long success of conservative policymaking. This is how hierarchy in society is most effectively being preserved.
I am an accountancy student that just sat a personal tax exam covering these topics (UK only). I believe a big issue is the jump from paying 20% to 40% tax at an income of just £37,700. In the current climate (cost of living, housing crisis etc), this is so much lower IMO than the band for 40% really should be! Especially as anybody earning like under 35k in the UK is classed as on the poverty line these days... but funnily enough then it only jumps another 5% for the super super rich. Why are we not taxing the rich MUCH higher than this, and increasing the mid rate band in line with inflation and wage increases? I dont recall seeing these bands increase for a while (correct me if i'm wrong)
as someone who moved abroad to avoid taxes, taxing the super-rich doesn't work, they'll just leave lol. any form of taxation is theft, its easy to try and pass the tax on to higher income people but when you get to that level yourself you'll be doing everything you can to avoid it too. its a poor mentality
ALL tax bands have significantly lagged inflation and ALL tax bands kick in far lower than they should.
How much higher do you want the 45% to be? At that point why are you even chasing income tax instead of wealth tax?
The 45% threshold just moved from 150k to 125k though. Also, are you saying half the country is or below on the poverty line?
37,700 @20% on top of 12,570 personal allowance @0%
125k is not 'super rich'.
If MPs have enough time to write gingerbread man specific laws... they have way too much time!
our MP is The Muffin Man he took cookie degree
Or maybe they use it incorrectly. There are big things going on in the world that could require their attention.
That is why humans don't make laws.
"If MPs have enough time to write gingerbread man specific laws... they have way too much time!"
Food is VAT free, treats and dining out are not. They are making a meal of setting the boundary between the categories. Meanwhile, across most of the EU, there isn't zero rate for food. Maybe we should do what the rest of Europe does?
@@NorthDownReader Why should we copy Europe? Even after all the food inflation that we've had we still have some of the cheapest food bills in Europe accroding to the BBC. Slapping 10-15% VAT on food would be a mistake that harms the poorest in society who spend a larger proportion of their income on food.
I never understood the council tax
why funding the services like trash collection has to be tied to a value of the house?
there are so many off the shelf solutions to actually charge people for how much trash they produce but I guess that would mean a lot less money for the councils , and they don't want that
The idea is that the poorest households can’t afford to contribute as much to local services, so the wealthier will help out with a bit extra. Perfectly fine and reasonable, but of course in reality it just means bigger tax receipts for councils which then promptly get squandered on shite nobody asked for.
Mansions and second homes take up valuable living space when there are so many children in temporary accommodation.
So, I earn a dollar which I only net 60 cents of it in my bank. I then invest my sixty cents and turn it back into a dollar, but now you want to tax that too. Here’s an idea, reduce spending and make people pay their own way, then you won’t need as much tax. People need to realise they can’t keep on voting more and more of other people’s money into their pockets. Most people don’t mind paying an equal amount, but people can’t look over the fence, see someone with more and decide to take a disproportionate amount simply because they have more. If we keep this up society will start to break down and we will head for revolution, the west is unfortunately heading in this direction.
……..more like heading towards police state.
Remove all tax on business profits!
At first glance taxing profits seems like a no-brainer. However many large foreign corporations can avoid paying tax on 'profits' by arranging the profits to arise in territories with lower tax rates. Meanwhile a UK small business has to pay regardless. In addition it is easy enough to manipulate 'profits' with the use of provisions and many other tricks of the trade. So why not level the playing field and instead of taxing 'profits', tax the recipents of any form of wealth transfers and extraction, via requiring businesses to pay witholding taxes. The recipient of the wealth transfer or extraction can then make a case for why they may be eligible for a tax refund. There would also need to be a tax on idle funds - otherwise a business can simply store up the now tax-free profits, rather than distributing them, and prevent funds being used productively.
That doesn't work either - there are ways of avoiding those taxes too. Many of the exceptionally wealthy are actually near-pennyless on paper, or in constant debt, for tax purposes.
Let's say, for example, that you are a rich bastard and you want to buy a new super-yacht. Now, the obvious way to do that would be to take a big salary from your company, but that means paying income tax. Or you could sell those stock options, but then you're paying capital gains tax. No, taxes are for poor people! So, instead of having the money yourself, you move all your personal earnings via an offshore account. Switzerland is traditionally best-known for this, but the modern bastard might favor Panama. You can't use that directly, because then you'd be paying tax, but that's ok: You talk to your accountant, and they set up a new company for you in Bermuda, and 'invest' a chunk of your offshore money in it. That company then buys the yacht for you, hires the crew, and handles all the ship registration stuff. Then the company rents it to you! You pay a token rent or the use of the ship. But at no point do you own it, or use your own income to buy it.
All perfectly legal.
@@vylbird8014 its the 'move all your earnings' bit where witholding taxes kick in. Nothing gets 'moved' whatever it is without deduction of witholding tax.
Don’t get me started on the High Income Child Benefit Charge. Why does a couple with a joint income up to £100,000 qualify for full Child Benefit (also, as a father of twins my ‘second’ child penalised us with a 10% reduction even though we had little say in having multiple births unlike someone who actually plans to have more children) but I, as someone earning over £60,000 alone, gets nothing? I already pay enough taxes and my personal allowance has shrunk to about £3k. I’ve not always earned this amount so we’re hardly super-rich. One issue with the tax system is that it is based on the short-term. Why not a tax system that bases your tax on earnings over say 5 years, with tax returns completed every 5 years?
Why should anyone pay for your children at all? Child benefit should be scrapped.
@@tobsstone Childless pay astronomical amounts of council tax for other people children, adult social care and elderly care - roughly 66-75% of the budget. Birthrate is falling in 1st world so child benefit should actually be universal and not means tested.
Child benefit eligibility is not based on joint income. If either parent, living in the same home, earns over £50k then the High Income Child Benefit Charge (HICB) kicks in. If people want a state pension and public social care when they're older then I'd argue that it's important to financially incentivise parents to have children; they're an investment in the country's future
The main issue is that High Income Child Benefit Charge (HICB) is not weighted for London. £50-60k in London is quite an achievable salary, especially at a typical child-bearing age of 30+, with 10+ years of work experience. However many Londoners could do with the aid of child benefit at this salary, whereas those outside would be doing comparatively better.
This is getting fixed.
Very richest don't pay enough taxes. PM is a billionaire. Coincidence?
Picked by Tory MPs and voted in as MP by the Yorkshire constituents.
The richest are the backbone of the economy. We need the rich to grow the country.
@@archiemcberry7102 Yeah, Trickle Down Economics have *totally* worked out for... literally no one.
Stop parroting the lies of idiots.
@@archiemcberry7102The WORKERS are the backbone of every single economy. You do not gain anything from licking boots.
Very rich people are just clever with money. Why would anyone want to give their money away?
The problem with a wealth tax that includes the properties that people live in is that houses are not a liquid asset that can be used, in part, to pay an annual tax. Say, for instance, you have a low-paid family whose grandparents bought the house 80 years ago and whose parents finished paying off the mortgage 40 years ago. The value of that house will have appreciated out of all proportion to the earnings of the current generation occupying it, so if you suddenly hike up their taxes because their house makes them 'rich', where are they going to find the cash to pay the taxes from? Forcing them to sell up and move to a cheaper house is cruel and disruptive, and that presupposes that the cheaper house even exists in their area, which it may not do: after all, every house in the area will have experienced the same price appreciation as theirs.
Indeed, thankfully most proposals, while still flawed, do grant an exemption for owner occupied properties.
I don't agree forcing them to move to a smaller house is bad. If they can't afford the tax, so be it. We already have working class renters barely able to afford to live but I'm supposed to feel sorry about someone who inherited say a £800k house from thier grandparents? Why should they get an exemption when they didn't work for that house?
@@TheMajorpickle01 The chances are that most of the houses in their area are about the same price, so you're going to force them out of the area, into a poorer one, potentially affecting the parents' employment, their support networks and the children's education. Why should the kids be forced to go to a worse school because their parents inherited a house? It's a recipe for ghettoization and decreased social mobility.
@@TheMajorpickle01because their family worked hard for it? Why would I want to work hard for my family, and the government doesn't allow it? Inheritance tax needs to be abolished.
@@zenkrypt6577 Why should your kid work at all if they can just live off your wealth?
Of course I doubt you're in the category of people that are the problem. You probably are looking at maybe 50-100k you can pass along to your kids, maybe your house if you were around back when getting one was realistic.
You're not really the problem (and most inheritance taxes have bounds for exactly that reason). The problem is when Elon Musk leaves $100bn to his kids. Its bad enough that he's taken that money out of the economy for his lifetime, but without an inheritance tax its effectively removed from the economy forever. You start getting even a few dozen people in that sort of wealth bracket all hording their money for _generations_ and it does serious damage.
Money needs to circulate in order for the economy to function. Inheritance tax is one way to help that along even if it only helps once every 20-50 years.
But hey, if you'd rather accomplish that goal with a wealth tax then sure we can drop the inheritance tax - you'll be cycling your horded cash back into the economy every year rather than only once a generation.
20% income tax is too much for people earning in the low 20k's. Also council tax needs to be scrapped as the band system is complete bullshit, should be based on earning ability. We are also being taxed in effect with workplace pensions which previously didn't exist.
Tbh I think there's a really good case that people who earn less than the UK average wage shouldn't pay income tax.
And I'm way over the average and wouldn't benefit from this at all but having been there it makes a lot of sense, but the flip side is how much cuts would need to be made.
This would incentivise the government to make policies which raise wages for people so that they have more tax money for their projects.
I'd argue that anyone working full-time on minimum wage shouldn't pay a penny in income tax, so I'd set the base threshold at £20k. Easy and instant boost to the economy by putting money back into the pockets of the people with the highest propensity to consume (i.e. if you give them an extra £100, they're far more likely to spend it than save it).
@@SaintGerbilUKmayb they should try smth like what the US has. Here there’s a bunch of different brackets. U pay less taxes depending on how many dependents u have claimed and there’s a bunch of tax credits and refunds for families. A good amount of Americans end up not paying income tax bc of it
No it shouldn't be on earning ability, it should be on wealth owned.
So how do you propose a retired person lives in their expensive paid off house with some high arbitrary high council tax rate and a minor pension? I don't believe people should be displaced from their home.
I'm glad young brits have waken up to this stuff, but it's still disturbing how unwilling they are to cause country-wide strikes. This govt is an unpopular authoritarian joke and their handling of Scottish matters should have been a wake-up call.
Peoples actual quality of life is not bad enough. The vast vast majority have high speed internet and enough disposable income to go out a few tomes a month at least. Also there are a lot of consumer friendly services and products available, even if some of them are not exactly the most legal( amazon firestick with all the channels). People have a better quality of life than when they grew up, so dont see the need to change.
The lack of trains every single bloody weekend says otherwise. My girlfriend is complaining that this country strikes too much and I'm starting to agree
Effective: "bring in as much revenue as possible"
Nope - Optimum isn't the same as maximum - ask an economist. Or maybe you are one of those who thinks that more of your money should be in the hands of the government, because they handle it so well.
> you are one of those who
Its got nothing to do with personal preference. We have data for these things. We can see where the optimum is (within statistical error bars) and - shockingly - it doesn't lie where the rich people who want to get richer at your expense tell you it lies.
Government is not the problem. They generally handle money just as well as anyone else. The idea that government is inefficient is a fiction brought in by the neolibs back in the 1980s in order to sell you (or more likely your parents) on the idea that if we give all our money to the already-wealthy, they'll be kind enough to give it back again despite having absolutely no incentive to do so beyond an appeal to ideology.
Guess what? They aren't. Turns out greedy people are still greedy no matter how much you give them.
Certainly the government isn't the most efficient at _everything,_ but they're at least as efficient - and often more efficient - at plenty of things. Primarily they're more efficient at things where money is not the sole important factor. Corporations are explicitly designed to only care about money and if you put them in charge of something with non-monetary interest (say, healthcare or education) they will entirely ignore that interest.
You can _force_ them to pay attention to that interest by paying them to do so (making it about money again), but that almost always costs more than just doing it directly. They have to make a profit after all so you end up paying a similar base cost for the thing in question _plus_ an extra 10-20% markup.
The only thing companies are consistently more "efficient" at than government is wages. Government jobs tend to always pay a livable wage with decent benefits no matter what the comparable industry standard is. Companies on the other hand will always find ways to ensure wages are as low as they possibly can get. Unions help counteract that but that's again just paying an extra markup on something the government would be doing anyway.
No one "pure" system is always right. Capitalism is no exception (and the modern "corporatist" rendition of capitalism even less so).
Yes, I think that's not well expressed. Effective, to me, includes things like cost of collection, difficulty of avoiding it, adminstrative costs of paying it. However there is a valid point that increasing tax rates beyond some point does reduce takings - which, arguably, might not always be a bad thing e.g. if high tobacco tax reduces cigarette sales.
Wait, you pay *more* tax in the UK if you have kids? Isn't that the opposite pretty much everywhere else?
The government spends more than ever yet public services never improve. Mass corruption in govenrment spending is the reality..
The current system completely does over both the working class and middle class. At the start of my career the 20% tax felt brutal, the past tax year I had some income scrape into the 40% bracket and it was extremely discouraging to see a huge chunk of hard-earned money just gone. As a self-employed editor it feels like I've hit a wall that the system has put up. What's the point in putting in the effort to advance further or do more work when 40% of it is gone before you've even had a sniff of it? Add on top of that %-based student loan payments, NI, council tax, and the advance on account that the Gov ask for, and it's quite simply taking the piss.
Exactly! It can be discouraging for people to aspire to earn more when a significant portion of their income ends up in the government's pocket. What's even more perplexing is that the government claims to have no money. Where has all the money gone?
This is the welfare state for your. Paying off the lower working class so they can escape hard work that is getting done by immigrants. That's what it is. So lower working class youth does not riot.
Yep couldnt agree more - I remember passing 20% tax, and when I hit the 40% tax threshold after years of working for the same company - I felt crucified.
What I cannot get my head around - my eldest daughter and her husband have two incomes that exceed by a fair bit what I earn, but they pay less tax. Whereas I earn more than the high tax threshold, and even combining my wives income we have less than their two combined incomes - but my tax burden is thousands more. Thats the unequal element that needs fixing.
I agree with Council Tax, VAT and even road tax - all about making money at the expense of the working and middle classes.
The other thing I dislike is that we have more hidden taxes than I care to count, and neither of our two main parties during period in government have even considered fixing this - in fact they tend to find new hidden taxes instead.
@@DS-cf1zcRoad tax was abolished in 1939.
As a part-time student beginning my first part-time job just at the standard rate(20%), I completely understand you.
Also, remember that it is not just the 20% income tax, but also the NICs, for a total of 32.6%.
And your absolutely right about the higher rate, which totally discourages upward mobility.
I believe we need a 20% flat rate income tax with a 20,000 tax-free threshold.
My dad told me the other day that since he doesn’t like paying taxes unnecessarily he often donates a large amount of his income to charity to go just below the next tax bracket. Since charitable donations are taken out of what is considered your income. Since what he earns can vary from year to year, and this year was a pretty good year for him. He ended up donating over 53.3% of his income to charity to get just below that line.
It’s a little quirk of the tax system in the country. So if I ever earn the ridiculous amount of money he does, I might do a similar thing.
Hi, my name is charity
@@Ag3nt0fCha0s Well it was a few specific charities not charity in general.
"He ended up donating over 53.3% of his income to charity to get just below that line. "
Fair enough. It's his money, so if he wants to give 40k to charity to avoid giving 20k to the taxman it might even do some social good. It's not as though the government spends money wisely or well.
your dad doesn't know how tax brackets work
@@user-im9zp4yp9x Well maybe he didn’t explain it well enough to me to explain it well enough to you. But it definitely works.
I live in Burnley and didn’t realise how much we got fcked by the council tax system
Highest band council tax in Kensington roughly£2850, highest in Burnley roughly £4480, council tax is beyond broken
Taxing weath is criminal. If you and I earn the same but you go on parties and trips and you save 0 and I am responsible and manage to save (and probably invest) 50% of my salary, wealth tax would be punishing how responsible I am and my contribution to society with my investments. It rewards people that does not save.
Nordic countries tax more on VAT, which is not progressive at all, and they do better
my father makes 100k a year and his take home ends up being slightly more then someone with benefits, this isn’t supposed to be a dig at anyone but it doesn’t make sense
This is BS.
Labour hasnt been in power in 15 years!
I had my own 1 man company - a situation long "known" to be a tax abuse, hence various legislative changes to crackdown on this abuse. A great generator of sound bites for chancelors.
As you move between categories the tax rate changes, the employed do worst, self employed can offset some costs, one man companies have control over company pension contributions and can take some income as dividends but to really take the biscuit you need to be a director of a public limited company, forget salary look at share incentives instead.
Glad to see child benefit mentioned but I would go further and classify all reductions in mean tested benefits as tax then the marginal tax rate at some low levels of pay becomes huge.
how the hell is it helpful to earn 60,000 and have three kids and pay more than 60% tax
"Good tax system" is a contradiction in itself
Their shouldn’t be a tax incentive for married couples but people who live together should be allowed to combine personal allowances because let’s say one partner is working full time earning £40k a year and the other isn’t earning at all, the one who is earning 40k is providing for at least two people and thus should be able to take advantage of the other persons tax allowance
Lack of dual/household tax options is a major failing of the UK. Other countries manage it.
Marriage Allowance? Marriage Allowance lets you transfer £1,260 of your Personal Allowance to your husband, wife or civil partner.
You can already do that actually
Marriage allowance? But it's still a tax with moral overtones.
If you were to make the standard 'living together' then you create a system which is very open to abuse. Suddenly a lot of people would want a tenant! And what of people who live with their parents into their twenties or thirties, that's common now days. But on the other hand, if you make it dependent upon a marriage or civil union (as is now the case) then the government is moralising. It's using the tax code to declare, "Pair up, everyone! We're a country with Christian roots and we believe in long-term monogamy, so no tax benefits if you're living in sin."
@@vylbird8014I see it as a move to incentivise children, because I would say that more children are born because of.marriage and I am not touching the question, what is the QoL of children born out of wedlock to people that are "hanging out"...
What is the point for the government to encourage "free living"if its not producing future tax payers ?
I’m a higher rate tax payer and it’s crushing… I work harder and harder but my extra effort gets taxed at 50% now (when you count NI + Income Tax).
I don’t have much wealth as I came from a poor background.
The Tories have basically screwed the aspiration class like myself big time.
Saving into the pension system in the way to save efficiently……although that comes with its own issues.
Add VAT on top of that too and given the near impossible aspiration of owning a decent home you certainly question what's the point of aspiring to work harder to earn more money.
I remember my first wage slip. Was earning minimum wage and ended up losing 40% of the salary to tax. My family said that can't be right, so i rsng HMRC and they said there were no issues or discrepencies.
I'm self employed now so I sort out taxes myself at the end of the year but my god was it demoralising, especially when most millionaires avoid tax entirely.
That was wrong, should have had a £12,000 tax free rate and then only 20% thereafter
@@WTFinancepodcast oh, to this day, I'm still convinced it was wrong. But there really wasn't anything I could do about it. But it was still demoralising as hell to be earning *minimum wage* and lose 40% of that wage to taxes out of my control.
I'm guessing that you were on an emergency tax code (something which doesn't make sense) basically you pay the most tax and should get a refund much later.
I got about £4,000 after about 10 years of working because of this. Honestly I could have used the 4k 10 years ago more than when I got it.
Also most millionaires do pay tax, you just don't understand the difference between income and wealth, or how wealth can be tied up in things which you cannot easily get the money back out again.
I don't know what your services are and how you sell them, but have you ever considered setting up a Limited Company and paying yourself a Salary Dividend split? Or do you have to be Self-Employed due IR35 rules?
@@gloriousrevolutionary2306 it depends on what you are doing if your services are separate from the client company and you are doing projects for them with your own resources then you're outside IR35. If you're using client resources, or if you're managing client staff then you're inside IR35 and it's almost not worth doing since you have the downsides of permanent staff with the downsides of being self-employed and the worse of both worlds.
However a number of contracts I've seen inside IR35 seem to compensate you for these issues the government has created.
According to Wikipedia's list of countries listed by tax rates the UK is one of the most overly taxed countries in the world.--
1) People on lower rate income tax pay the 7th highest rate in the world 32% combined 20% basic plus 12% NI contributions after earning £12.5k
2) People paying higher rate income tax pay the 4th highest rate in the world. A combined rate of 63.25% ( 40% + 20% due to loss of tax free band until £125k + ~3% NI = 63.25%)
3) 10th highest world rate for capital gains taxes at 28% for residential properties.
4) 24th highest for VAT 20% standard rate
Where we pay little is corporation taxes. 85th place at 25%
But we do have relatively high dividend tax. Corp tax is only paid on profit. After-corp-tax profit is used to grow business or can be distributed as dividends to shareholders. So, low corp tax with high dividend tax encourages businesses and business growth. Besides, you can't compare taxes between countries in any righteous manner unless you also somehow compensate for relative corruption and what the taxes are actually used for. e.g. DR Congo has 6th highest corp tax but is 12th most corrupt country while UK is the 18th least corrupt (out of 180). Also, these lists do not account for tax thresholds; it's too complicated to include them but, in reality, the thresholds for any comparison are very important.
@@jam99 Good point on Congo. I can't see the benefits of this dividend setup: penalise UK companies, give advantage to foreign competitors who pay the low corp-tax and zero dividend tax (e.g. US stocks). TBH UK companies are mucked and outcompeted by profit shifting anyways.
Also add in an extra 9% if you got degree post 2000. If you have children and degree you very quickly get into neagtive income over £50k and almsot certainly over £100k. UK economy is built on the wealthy becoming ever more wealthy, mostly with unproductive assets while taxing workers into the dirt.
@@bdorman009 What do you mean by negative income? Are you talking about the stupid quirks of the UK tax system at £50k (child benefit) and £100k (personal allowance reduction)? Without an incentive to work harder or cleverer for more gain, there will be more overall incentive for corruption and crime. Attempts at communism have shown us thus. Also, while people are permitted to lend any surplus wealth (savings) to others for some kind of reward, the wealthy can get wealthier. It is not just the UK economy that is built on money making money, it is the whole world.
I hate having to pay council tax when i don't own the property I live in and after I've already paid PAYE, NI, and VAT on my income. Surely my income tax should pay for all the services my council provide.
To be fair to the whole income vs. wealth tax debate, not only are wealth taxes harder to implement, they're also easier to avoid. Wealth is hard to calculate especially for the super rich, which means there's a lot of ways to undervalue assets or stick them in a trust so you don't own them "de jure", even though you do own them "de facto" both of which would reduce a wealth tax burden and would be difficult to make illegal. Concealing income is much harder and whether it's legal or not simply lands on if it's above a specific threshold HMRC needs to know about and therefore tax.
true and that's exactly why Sweden got rid of the wealth (along with inheritance and gift) tax in the 1990s. it seems fairer, but causes capital flight with little to no benefit in actual revenue collected. better to be pragmatic than moralistic.
@@echochamber1234Capital flight is a myth.
@@Blinks77 pre 90s Sweden would beg to differ
@@echochamber1234you mean when the banks were collapsing and there was a massive mismanagement of regulation?
So no, Sweden does not beg to differ.
@@Blinks77 just the banks collapsing? lol the whole economy was gradually going to shit since folkhemmet started 30 years prior. the overregulation and confiscatory tax model of the time led to talent and wealth fleeing and avoiding Sweden, during which period Sweden did not create a single net job in the private sector. magically all those economic problems went away shortly after taxes were reduced from 70 to under 50 percent of GDP (with most of the cuts benefiting middle to high income earners, capital, and corporations), many state owned enterprises were privatized and/or exposed to market competition, and labor market liberalized. tell me, why did all of a sudden, things get better?
IR35 alone shafted working class contractors. Imagine thinking its okay for contractors forced to work under umbrella and losing approx 40% of their money every payday.
Capital gains tax is a rip off because it doesn't allow for inflation. At current levels, a 8% rise in an asset means that you have just about broken even, so it shouldn't be taxed.
My dad had to pay extra tax for "care in the community" for months meanwhile there are still homeless people on the streets.
Robbery by coersion
Inheritance tax doesn’t get the deserved focus when discussing wealth taxes.
Council tax is obscene.
What's that? You want to live in a property you own?
Isn’t it the town maintenance kind of things that are being payed for? canadian asking here.
@@lookforward2life it gets wasted on pet projects of town councillors. Our politics is rotten from top to bottom (there are also better ways to raise it).
Across the country roads are getting worse, bin collection less frequent but council tax keeps going up.
Uk tax system is very punitive. As a pensioner I can't pay their penalties and interest. Any advice on how to get them to reverse this. Contacting them is difficult and their statements of account make zero accounting sense..
Ban companies moving off shore, you do business here, you pay tax here.
and thats when peope take business elsewhere
then let them go.
@@QuartermasterReviewsthen the economy plummets and unemployment spikes…people then become depressed, do drugs, and start voting for wars… it’s a delicate system
@@willstokes7266 so you're telling me that if the UK required any company trading in the UK to be registered in the UK for UK tax that they would just shut up shop and go? How's that going to work for Starbucks? Or amazon? Or Google? They legally wouldn't be able to operate in the UK. Would they just leave the market? No chance! They would comply to keep their market access. Your argument that firms would or even could move is a fallacy.
@@QuartermasterReviews where is Starbucks going to go? They going to move all their shops to Luxembourg or Ireland? It's going to be difficult selling brits coffee from there
This is the first TLDR News that seems politically biased. Did I miss something in the other videos, or is there a shift in the channel? "The UK tax system is bad because it's not progressive." - "Taxing wealth is progressive." - ergo, the UK needs to tax wealth. No counterpoint, no analysis of pros and cons, just a straight line dividing good and evil, right and wrong.
Depending on the topic, TLDR can be very biased. This is very apparent whenever they cover US news.
Yeah, I got this too. This was the first time i've noticed it during the video and gone, huh, that's a bit of a political take.
Like sure yeah they'll occasionally miss a facet here or there just to make the video shorter, and some of their discussion on what's "Far Right" could do with some better definition, but this was something different.
Yep, he said that a good tax system should be progressive because people believe the wealthy should pay more in tax (which a flat tax rate already achieves).
Also, you pay Council Tax on the property you live in, regardless of whether you own it. Renters pay, landlords don't.
Taxing the mega wealthy at rates of 80% or more is stupid. Either they find loopholes to avoid it or they simply relocate their income to other countries to avoid paying it altogether. All these ultra taxes do is chase the 1% away. Now, you might hate them, but most of them run the biggest employers in the country. If you look to Ireland as an example, they have large companies using the ROI as their European HQ. This is because Irish corporation taxes and such are low. Really low. So, yes, people like Zuckerberg, Bezos and whoever make a killing on it. In return Countries like Ireland have tens of thousands of people working in high end well paid jobs.
Can you do a part 2 taking about fiscal drag please. More people need to know about what it is.
Raising tax thresholds would actually help just about everyone, so of course Sunak & Hunt couldn't possibly do that
most people don't know that you have a capital gains allowance which is currently £6kpa it used to be £12k the same as your personal tax allowance.
You can avoid it with an ISA, the annual limit of which keeps getting raised for obvious reasons.
Most people here do not have to worry about capital gains whatsoever. You'd need to be exceeding £20,000 in a Stocks & Shares ISA every year or selling a properties you don't live in.
Really interesting and helpful. Thank you!
Taxes is not cheap among all overall the world. we just pay tax in different ways (direct tax/rent/transportation fee...etc).
But UK seems the worst among the world!!!
The problem is always Corruption, and the efficiency and competancy of the govenment!!
Why some other government can do more things with less money while here in the UK do less, that lead to charging higher taxes to the residents here??
Corruption? competancy of the govenment?? there must be some problems with thme?
Honestly why the fuck do we even pay for council tax? And why is it so much money? What does it actually pay for?
Roads, bins, police etc. 😂
@@techtinkerin Can't regular taxes pay for that instead?
66-75% is schools, adult social care and elderly care
@@Starstung But it's the same or goes up even though average children now is 2 whereas before it was 4? Why can't regular taxes pay for it? They wasted 100billion on HS2 already and got nothing from it.
@@gamewithadam7235 I think there could be a good case to centralise education, social care etc. Current system has very rich councils where business rates and footfall are high (Westminster) and councils struggling with the costs above in high population areas (Wirral).
Government would need to halve Council tax and raise income taxes to pay for it. Then figure out some sort of distribution formula.
You completely glossed over the fact that in rented properties council tax is paid by the tenant, having no effect on the wealth of the landlord who actually owns the property.
One thing you've missed is the loss of tax-free or free childcare if you go over £100k. Someone earning £100,001 that has a two year old loses the £2k contribution ("tax free") towards child care, this is on top of the withdrawal of the personal allowance, so earning between £100,001 and about 105,000 leaves you worse off than if you're earning £99,999. The 45% rate now applied from £125,140 now though, so that dip back to 40% is old.
The UK pretends to have tax benefits for marriage, but its so tiny they may as well have not bothered.
Gingerbread man thing is stupid. Can we just rewrite our tax code to make it simple instead of thousands of pages? Should be less than 10 pages honestly.
It's because staple foods pay no VAT, but luxury foods do. Where is the line? For the gingerbread men, it hinges on decoration. The amount of decoration is the difference between a ginger biscuit (no tax) and an item of confectionary (tax).
You can put VAT back on food, drink and other items, thus eliminating the endless number of exemptions. This would increase revenue and allow the government to reduce the overall VAT rate from 20% to say 15/17.5%. It also reduces compliance costs for businesses because it reduces complexities of administration, especially for SMEs.
@@vylbird8014 Why do we need VAT in the first place?
@@philm625 15% VAT is better than 20%. I'd support that. Plus when grocery stores put items on discount does that also include VAT or exclude it at that point?
We'd waste a lot less food if the VAT was lower.
@@gamewithadam7235 as long as the product is not exempt, the store would still have to apply VAT at the discounted price.
National Insurance Contribution has a similar impact as council tax. NI seems nominally progressive, but distortions arise when you factor in people with very very high salaries. There are also categorisation issues - contract for service vs contract of services.
NI needs binning altogether, another regressive tax that disicentivises productivity. Replace it with wealth or higher CG tax
@@NoJusticeMTGit disincentives all income going to few people, which is good. If someone already earns enough to live well why do we want that person to work more and take away work from others?
National Insurance should be abolished and incorporated into income tax for simplicity. Same with car tax just include it with fuel duty. Streamlining and efficiency should save money. Plus don't make the employer pay national insurance it discourages them from hiring more workers.
The gingerbread man is a weird example. Clearly whoever wrote the script has never seen one, or they would know the smile is made of icing, not chocolate. (So too are the eyes, typically, but chocolate-filled sweets are not unknown.)
A more comprehensible example would be chocolate biscuits, which do incur VAT. But there is a highly artificial tax avoidance scheme where a thin sliver of caramel is inserted between the two, so the biccie and choccie technically do not touch. This fiddle is, for obvious reasons, marketed as 'millionaire's shortbread' and I must admit is surprisingly tasty.
Of course, a key issue for VAT purposes is whether a gingerbread man is a biscuit or a cake. This indeed turns out to be a crucial plot point in Jasper Fforde's nurseryland crime novel The Fourth Bear.
You mention the Laffer curve and the fact that business move off-shore in one sentence, but they describe separate phenomena as far as I’m aware.
There needs to be a tax on economic rent, wealth (over 5M so owner occs in London are not hurt), and capital gains and returns. Income tax and VAT are the worse forms of tax unless you have the wage of a PL footballer. Also we need a proper fuel duty. But towns need to be given a public transport system. Which would reduce the economic overhead for employees to help their businesses produce goods and services.
Income tax is good. If properly done. Though I agree. Fuck VAT.
Might be important to note that despite its official-sounding name, the Laffer Curve isn't really a thing. It was sketched on the back of a cocktail napkin and never really got any more advanced than that. It makes intuitive sense, but it's a thing in the same sense as Hanlon's Razor or Sturgeon's Law. It is in no way an economic principle supported by data.
Proud kool aid enjoyer I see 🤡
I mean as a demonstrative point it’s kinda true, if u upped tax to 100 % everyone who could would just leave and ur overall tax revenue would decrease. It gets murky in the fact it’s not rly a bell curve like commonly shown, also laffer himself is a major republican economics advisor to both trump and Reagan 😬
It ignores the kinda obvious fact that taxes don't just disappear into the void. It assumes taxes can only be used to maintain certain necessary services and cannot add new wealth. Of course that is nonsense. Even outside of direct government run economic activity, things like infrastructure add again to the overall wealth. Which invalidates the fundamental idea of the curve. I am sure this relation exists to a limited degree but the idea that it is the primary factor in government revenue is absurd. Something that is true for many if not most neoclassical concepts like this.
@@XMysticHerox the words of a true Lower Bracket enjoyer. Salud, campai (soy milk latte)
@@alanb9443 how would they leave? walk naked into the sea?
I just learned that a person from liverpool is called a liverpudlian. Where on earth did that ‘D’ come from?
Thank you for breaking this down in a way I understand.
Why save, why invest, why build wealth if you’re going to be taxed until the pips squeak. These wealth taxes also directly attack the symbolic and crucial concept of individual sovereignty.
Can you do a video on examples of wealth taxes in other countries (and why they don't work)
Great video guys 👍 well done
0:29: 📊 The UK's tax burden is at a 40-year high, but the real problem lies in the dysfunctional tax system.
2:47: 🏠 The video discusses wealth taxes and property-related taxes in the UK.
5:28: 📊 The UK's tax system is complicated and not as progressive or effective as it could be.
Recap by Tammy AI
I'm always a little puzzled why a personal tax system needs to be 'progressive' to be seen to be fair. A flat rate of income tax applied equally (no opt outs) will mean someone on £100k will pay more tax than someone on £50k who, in turn will pay more tax than someone on £20k. To help the lowest paid the zero rated banding can be used to good effect.
Rather than income and wealth taxes, it might be better to look at earned vs unearned income, what is the reason for unearned income being taxed at a lower rate than earned income? There is an argument that says if you can afford to speculate (which is essentially what capital gains are the result of) you don't need a lower tax rate to help you.
On the flip side you can't effectively reform tax without also significantly reforming health and welfare, they're so interlinked which most likely adds to the problem of complexity. Each of these strands would be much better as a stand alone.
For health and pensions replacing NI with specific gov't controlled health insurance (more like the French and/or German model?), that way at retirement, the income stream doesn't completely end. In parallel, how we fund old age pension needs to be much more about effective, compulsory saving now to fund our own retirement rather than live off the currently shrinking working population taxes.
All welfare should be means tested to allow support to be focused on genuine need.
The more complex and interlinked a system is, the more it costs to run (making it more ineffective), the more loopholes there end up being (reducing actual take) and ultimately the main winners are the accountants, lawyers and the rich who can afford their services.
It will take a long time, possibly a generation and some very brave and honest politicians to really make our tax, health and welfare systems fit for a 21st century UK. Such a change would need ongoing and consistent majority public support as changes of this nature can't just be done to 'them', we also have to accept it will affect 'us'.
Simply put, it's like this because lower earners outnumber higher earners, and thus can demand higher earners to be taxed more due to "democracy". This will never change due to this population pyramid, as anyone who proposes such a change will never win an election.
That said, the wealthiest could do with paying more tax, as self-admitted to by multiple billionaires. However inevitable
Well you could pretty much change every occurrence of "British" with "Italian" and you'd pretty much have a new video to publish
from what I heard the UK pays between 70% to 80% of there income in direct or indirect taxes isn't that enough how much more can you tax
2:37 what about taxes covers government spending? What is the source of this criteria? Is there an index or ranking about good/bad tax systems?
You should do a video on land value taxes
Capital Gains Tax was the same as income tax until 2008, when Gordon Brown changed the rate to 18% for all taxpayers.[
This is why rich people are flooding Labour with money
It’s also assessed to be the 2nd most damaging tax to economic growth, after the corporation tax. And in a country already dealing with a chronic lack of investment, if anything should be lowered or abolished.
What if the gingerbread man has a frowny face?
Trust the UK to tax smiles.
LOL - I was just thinking this while watching the video!! 😂
There's nothing regressive about the current Council Tax bands when you consider how the money is actually spent. You might be surprised to learn that approximately ~50% goes towards "social care", yet those who pay the most Council Tax are unlikely to ever make use of such services.
The reason the tax bands remain frozen is because successive governments are well aware that while property prices have increased, incomes have stagnated, so current home owners aren't wealthier, because they don't benefit from the price rise until they actually sell their property (until then it's an unrealized capital gain), at which point they need to buy another property at the current market price! Houses aren't a liquid asset like shares. Selling your house means losing your home.
Arguably, Council Tax should be reformed, by separating it into a Social Care Tax and charges for actual council services, such as garbage collection, infrastructure maintenance, libraries etc.
I'm so happy I made productive decisions about my finances that changed forever. I'm a single mother living in Vancouver Canada, bought my first house in October and hoping to retire soon if things keep going smoothly for me.
Am looking for something to venture into on a short term basis, I really need to create an alternate source of income, what do you think I should be buying?
@@ningyen1444 Cryptocurrency investment, but you will need a professional guide on that.
Facebook 👇
Evelyn C. Sanders
@Agent_evelyn_fx
28% CGT is what is paid on residential property that is not a primary home, but you don't seem to mention that.
VAT calculated at every stage of business transfer value is crazy & expensive for businesses to keep track of. AS WE ARE NO LONGER MEMBERS OF THE EU IT CAN BE RESCINDED. Tax should be charged at the retail stage of purchase of goods and services and let businesses take care of business. Retail Tax should be progressive based on value AND the nature of goods; basic necessities taxed at a lower rate than luxury goods.
Income tax should be phased out. Higher earners have more perks and tax breaks than low earners. A tax based on retail consumption, as above, would ensure that higher earners paid more tax. No business should be paying full time workers a rate that requires Benefits top-ups. The Public Welfare Purse should not be supporting private industry wages, people should decide how their income is spent.
A 40% Inheritance Tax rate, that is also mostly avoidable is crazy. The rate should be a straight 2% (3% on offshore holdings) irrespective of the value of the estate, excluding only the value of the main residence. To avoid IHT all people would have to do is give their excess liquid assets to their children or other relatives BEFORE THEY DIE. But most aren't going to do that, so...
... a 2% IHT rate on the value of most average estates would not stress inheritors unduly to pay out of the proceeds, while roughly DOUBLING the HMRC revenue, based on current estimates of individual wealth vs the amount usually collected.
I don’t see how you can encourage both a progressive tax rate and a wealth tax; wealth taxes are by nature progressive (and also double taxation), since your ability to accumulate assets/wealth is progressively easier when you have excess income after paying for essentials. If you have a progressive wealth tax on an already progressive income tax, you end up with an exponential tax relationship, and a very unattractive country to do business. The result is to discourage building wealth for those that stay or emigration to somewhere else for those that still want to build wealth.
Furthermore, people who accumulate wealth are less dependent on state hand outs and services, so why would you discourage that? (Also applies to the proposal of removing charitable status on independent schools).
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00:21 Yep. Compared to a lot of countries, our tax burden is not that bad. And in terms of benefits we pay our citizens the lowest rates in the western world. So all those blaming benefits claimants for our problems are talking out of their arses!
Wouldn't say the benefits are the worst lol. Obvious example of somewhere thats worse, America
@@nicolasmarkham9656 He said Western world, not third world.
@@nicolasmarkham9656Americans still earn a lot more while having lower cost of living (outside massive cities).
Who is to say Truss wasn't right? The ONS has one job and got it so wrong that it undermined her whole grow the pie plan. I also think the left doesn't really understand wealth, they can't get beyond the concept of taxing it. Wealth should be viewed as the golden goose, in just the same way a dead goose can't lay eggs, removing wealth will impact income. There is an enormous amount of UK wealth invested in overseas entities generating income that if taxed in the matter suggested would stop bringing back that income, which would devastating, where do you think the foreign currency is coming from? Tax is too high in this country and by that I mean it's more important for a wealth generator to be tax efficient than it is to generate actual new wealth. On a different note, the US tax system is way worse, for example if TL;DR has US viewers then I suspect the IRS is going to be expecting to tax your advertiser income, better check. Sooner or later the IRS is coming to check and because of the way banking system works being in the UK or Europe is no defence, when the IRS says jump all banks no matter where they are domiciled simply ask how high.
I have had a restaurant in the UK refuse my tip because they didn't want to deal with the complicated VAT situation.
Land Value Tax fits all 3 of the 'good tax' criteria in the video, I wish people talked about it more. Though it seems to have been gaining a bit of traction recently. It's honestly the best tax reform possible, for any country but especially for this one.
Agree. I only heard about it recently and can't believe I hadn't heard people talking about it sooner.
We have to consider what behaviours it would encourage or discourage. And how exactly we'd determine the value of said land.
@@Croz89 You're right to think in those terms. LVT would discourage land speculation - sitting on an empty lot is less profitable when you have to pay to do it. Meanwhile it would encourage productive use of land, since you have to make a profit off of it. It would also increase the supply of housing since 1. unused housing would be freed up due to the need to be used productively (i.e. lived in), and 2. higher-density developments would be more encouraged in cities for the same reason (the increased need to make a profit on highly desired land).
As for determining value, that's the hard part. The more free-market solution is for an action-like system, where whoever is willing to pay a higher tax for it gets it. Though I've heard people saying that the assessment of land would actually be easier than assessment of property (which wouldn't be required following abolishment of property tax), and that there are techniques that would make it doable (though there'd always be some issues no matter how good the assessment).
@@Rndm9 There are a few issues that make things more complicated. You might want to preserve land for agriculture even if it would be more tax efficient to do something else with it.
Would be nice if we had a political party that wants to make changes instead of making empty promises about building a stronger economy
Council tax is way too high, and it doesn't surprise me that my town (Burnley) was at the worst end of that data.
0:22 But that’s an average, no? I’m sure the wealthy in the uk aren’t taxed much. Can you compare what someone on - say 35,000 - gets taxed across those countries?
I think it's a bit misleading to say that corporations just move elsewhere. You can go after them; the US does. You just need to fund revenue services properly. This is why rich people try to get people to hate them.
The US can only really do that because of their immense global influence which gives them a lot of ammunition to issue threats (though in the case of individuals it generally just encourages renouncing US citizenship). Try that as a smaller country and the response will be something along the lines of "fine, see if I care".
Where can I buy a gingerbreadman cookie without a mouth? 👩🍳🍪
The solution to all of this is a Single Land Value Tax. It would solve all these issues brought up in this video. Georgism is the way.
An interesting tidbit on the requirements for a good tax system: the “neutral” part doesn’t really apply in every culture. Take for instance Germany, the German word for tax is “Steuer”, which also happens to be its word for steering. Taxes in German speaking regions (granted, hundreds of years ago) were originally put up to “steer” the population towards wanted behaviours. Taxes purely for government income instead had the name “Zehnt”, or Tenth, and were just a tenth of everyone’s earnings
The idea of progressive tax to increase rates rather than accept higher amounts discourages very successful and driven people to do more. We’ve tried 90%+ tax rates…
Maybe it's me that's missing something but when talking about capital gains tax one thing that I have never (and I literally mean never) seen mentioned is the fact that indexing was removed many years ago so capital gains tax isn't just taxing a real-terms capital gain, it's also taxing inflation. For instance if someone bought an asset at the start of a period of high inflation and sells it many years later when its nominal value has doubled but overall inflation (presumably measured by CPI or RPI) would have caused that asset to double anyway then you haven't really increased your real-terms wealth at all, you've just kept up with inflation, yet you'd still lose a percentage of your investment to CGT anyway.
I would have no problem with CGT rates being aligned with income tax rates provided that it was actually a real-terms gain that was being taxed since that is a genuine wealth increase whereas simply keeping up with inflation isn't.
CGT is fair in the sense that most capital gains are the result of a risky investment. Less investment is maybe not a positive thing for an economy, but perhaps it should be different for housing sales.
Could someone please explain to me, why doesn't my landlord pay my council tax out of my rent, given that the house is their property?
Because you're the one living in the house and using local services.
Even of they did, they'd only pass the cost onto you through rent.
@@rustynail1194 yes, but if they charge the landlord instead of the tenant then they can seize the property if it's not paid. Whereas what can they really do to the renter other than try to garnish their wages?
@@shadowninja6689 In theory that's already coming in 2024. The OECD is planning on imposing a 15% global minimum tax rate. I certainly have questions about how they're going to enforce that given that the OECD only covers 38 countries (and those countries all have vastly different tax codes and priorities), but they're making the attempt at least. Just have to wait and see what comes of it.