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Post by Caranir Elmheart on Apr 17, 2010 14:50:56 GMT 1
I see what you mean about a tax on aspiration, although I vehemently disagree. I don't think one's income is a linear function of how hard one works, or how beneficial one's work is to society. Lots of people on something like minimum wage do long hours in tough jobs essential to the public good (care assistants, cleaners, soldiers), and many of the people with astronomical salaries have relatively cushy jobs that privatise profit and socialise costs (non-exec directors, senior managers, but also footballers, fashion models, pop stars, oil workers and financial workers - and don't tell me any of these work harder than those I mentioned in the first category). Really, a person's income reflects the marketability of their skills and experience; skills in high demand and low supply get paid more. That's how the free market works, and I don't attack it, but I don't accept the idea that people with marketable skills *deserve* their higher incomes relative to those whose skills are important but worth less money. They may (or may not) work hard, but fundamentally, highly-paid people are just fortunate. I see where you're coming from, I won't argue that salary level is a linear function of how hard someone works but the current system can penalise even people on relatively low salaries who take a second job or work more hours and find themselves paying more tax for the effort if they hit a new tax band. I'm going to have to vehemently disagree that people don't deserve to keep the money they earn if they're fortunate or intelligent enough to get into the right field, which is essentially what you're arguing now. Why not just propose a 70% tax on lottery wins and see how that goes down? If you want progressive taxes, I'd love to see a flat tax rate (with relief for the lowest earners) and a greater emphasis on indirect taxes on luxury goods, properties and such instead. If you want to tax the high earners, why not tax them for living in that manner rather than for just having the opportunity to? As a student right now I'm totally dependent my parents financially, I'm getting absoloutely no handouts and just the minimum student loan. My dad works in aerospace/defence in the private sector and the belief there is that they'd do better under the Tories than Labour. Furthermore, if the Lib Dems got in in May, there's no way they'd be able to afford scrapping tuition fees before I'd finished university so I wouldn't benefit there either, I'd just pay for it after I graduated. So you're right about voting in my parent's interests, because they're mine also for the next three years at least. I reckon it'll balance out now that people start taking a look at Lib Dem policies, I can't see an amnesty for all illegal immigrants being particularly popular among the electorate. Nor their stance on Trident, which is a thinly veiled effort to scrap the deterrent altogether when they don't have a strategy to deal with North Korea and Iran's nuclear agendas besides talking quietly about multilateral disarmament. You argued it was ridiculous to depend on an American system for our defence, but I'd argue that it's ridiculous to switch to depending on American political willpower and loyalty for our defence when we have no idea what the future's going to look like. The fact is that we aren't Germany or a Nordic country, we have a long history of stepping on toes on the world stage that's placed us firmly at number two on a lot of people's lists of enemies.
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Post by Aldrannath on Apr 17, 2010 15:29:11 GMT 1
Gosh, this really is fun. ;D You're right that the current system can penalise relatively low-paid workers who take a second job, for instance; the Lib Dem proposals would be much fairer in that respect. The ideal is to have a marginal tax rate (i.e. the tax you would pay on any *additional* income) that increases smoothly and gradually from zero (below the minimum wage) to somewhere between 40% and 50% as a top rate, counting capital gains as income. The Lib Dem policies approximate this ideal. Being intelligent is a matter of good fortune, too. Surely people unlucky enough to be unintelligent and unskilled are no less deserving than bright and privileged people like ourselves? It's not like I made myself intelligent, it's a combination of genes and privileges, none of which I have done anything to deserve. And the lottery IS taxed at around 50%, exactly as it should be. I'm not saying that people shouldn't keep ANY of the money they are lucky enough to get (whether in the intelligence lottery, the skills lottery or the national lottery), I'm only saying it's fairer if those who are luckier pay a larger proportion in tax. An incremental tax on luxury goods makes perfect sense to me, although I've no idea how it could be implemented. It does seem deeply unfair that a cheap loaf of bread is taxed at the same rate as a 100,000 dollar watch. VAT as a flat rate is an inherently regressive tax, in that poorer people (obviously) spend a much larger proportion of their income buying stuff - most of all basic necessities, but in fact also little luxuries - than people who can afford to splash out on trust funds, shares, university for their kids, and so on. I see where you're coming from vis-a-vis parents and your best interests for the near future. I think the amnesty is for *some* illegal immigrants, basically allowing them to earn the right to stay on a points system comparable to that for economic migrants - i.e. they have to fulfil at least the same conditions they would have had to in order to come legally in the first place. It's a practical solution to a very difficult problem; having met a number of illegal immigrants myself, I'm struck by how difficult it is (read: impossible) for them to regularise their status, and how deeply unjust and inhumane it would often be to deport them. Consider: people from Afghanistan or Iraq are automatically refused refugee status, even if our invasion of their country created a situation where they were in imminent danger of being murdered for their ethnicity or religion; people whose spouse and children live legally in the UK can still be deported (and permanently barred from returning) because of a technical error in their application for residency, or just sending in the application a few days too late. I think you misread my comments on Trident: I said it was ridiculous for us to pretend we don't depend on the US for nuclear deterrence, when in fact we do, always have done, and always will until nuclear weapons are abolished worldwide. The idea that the US wouldn't come to our aid if we were nuked is even more far-fetched than the idea that Russia or China would nuke us in the first place. As for North Korea and Iran, Britain's so-called nuclear deterrent makes no difference whatsoever to those threats; the realistic role for the UK is to do whatever they can diplomatically to support (and influence) the US and the UN in taking appropriate action. Trident doesn't give the UK any diplomatic clout, because internationally everyone knows it's a sham deterrent. Edited to add: This from J.K. Rowling on the tax break for married couples: www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7096786.ece
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Post by Caranir Elmheart on Apr 17, 2010 18:04:57 GMT 1
Being intelligent is a matter of good fortune, too. Surely people unlucky enough to be unintelligent and unskilled are no less deserving than bright and privileged people like ourselves? It's not like I made myself intelligent, it's a combination of genes and privileges, none of which I have done anything to deserve. I disagree on where you're going with that whole argument. There is a good degree of effort in putting intelligence to good use (i.e. to earn more money) and taxing people who've made that effort is grossly unfair. If the aim of a government is to redistribute all the wealth equally regardless of what someone actually does because we're all equally deserving of it, then why should anyone be motivated to be intelligent and innovative? I lose a little hope each time I read that. I guess you're arguing that we're compensating the unfortunate, but I'm seeing it as punishing the 'lucky'. There's no VAT on bread, but I get what you said and I agree. I was talking about this in the political sense, I'm certain I don't know enough about it to judge what's fair and what's not. I just meant that large numbers of the electorate have concerns about immigration and this policy could cost the Lib Dems ground if the other two parties pick up on it. We're obviously on different pages here. When I think 'independent' I think about who's finger is on the trigger and when I think 'deterrent' I certainly don't think about how efficient it'd be in a nuclear war because I don't think anyone's equipped to win one! As an aside, if you'd like to try to win one, Defcon is pretty good. When I heard Liam Fox talk about this (and he sounded like the usual evasive sort of politician on a lot of other questions) it was always in terms of nuclear threats from small nations and terrorists, not from the likes of China and Russia. Iran in particular he said is a state sponsor of terrorism and the US won't be invading it to put an end to it's nuclear plans. A nuclear deterrent of our own is vital because the political will of our allies to defend us from an attack (especially by a terrorist proxy) could easily be undermined. Hell, we're hardly respected on the world stage. I think you're wrong in believing that the deterrent carries no diplomatic weight, especially when dealing with the states that actually might just be unstable or insane enough to attack us if we were unarmed.
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Post by Caranir Elmheart on Apr 17, 2010 19:13:00 GMT 1
A yougov poll yesterday put the Lib Dems a little ahead of Labour and the Tories with nowhere near enough support to form a government alone. In that situation, Labour would still come out with more seats than the Libs due to the skewed system and they'd probably form a coalition. Because Labour would be the stronger half of that unholy alliance, they'd provide the prime minister and we'd have five more years under a man who came last in the total vote (at least somebody will have voted for him this time). In that situation I'd be rooting for proportional representation too!
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Post by Caranir Elmheart on Apr 18, 2010 23:59:26 GMT 1
It was the Tories' proposal, a few months back, of a tax break for married couples, that really convinced me they hadn't changed at all since the Major years. They talked about helping deprived families by encouraging them to stick together, but there are any number of better ways to do that; what it blatantly IS is a tax break for the affluent, who are of course far more likely to be married than the genuinely poor. I came across a little more detail about this proposal now, because the way you put it here definitely didn't sound like how I'd heard it presented elsewhere. The tax break proposed in the manifesto allows allow a person to transfer £750 of their tax free allowance to their partner, provided the higher income partner is a basic rate taxpayer. That takes it from being a 'blatant tax-cut for the affluent' to making it advantageous for deprived families to stick together, which is how I understood it in the first place. The other pledge was to review the household system of means-testing for tax credits that can cause low-earners tax bills to actually rise when a partner who also works moves into the household. Contrast this with the Lib Dem proposal to raise the tax-free threshold to £10,000 and you've got a strange situation where the Tories are ignoring the middle-classes and the Lib Dems are ignoring the very poorest who were under that band to start with. There's a slightly humorous irregularity in the Lib Dem finances in their manifesto too, though it's good they've given more numbers than the other parties to illustrate what they intend to do. Their tax on the banks has been listed as a 'saving' rather than a tax, I know they've been accused of playing to populist sentiment before but I think that's a step too far even for them. Furthermore, the way they've costed their tax cut is rather optimistic. Besides the very sensible changes to capital gains tax, they've pledged to attack tax loopholes and tax avoidance by the super-wealthy. This sounds good in principle, but it's very much on the Labour agenda too and they've had thirteen years trying to collect these taxes, which suggests there isn't an easy way of doing it. If the Lib Dems set the expensive accountants of Inland Revenue, hampered by the inherent unwieldiness of being in government, against the expensive accountants of the tax-evading rich buggers then fairness might well be achieved in the end but I'd be seriously surprised if we see any decent profit from the plan for a long while.
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