Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr K
Nobody gets elected promising tax rises.
The public need to get real, always wanting something for nothing. The mess this country is in isn"t down to the last year, its down to the 14 years before it and daft decisions made by the electorate. Joe Public always want someone to blame, maybe they should look in the mirror...
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And this is true. But suppose a party campaigned on ‘we will tax the rich a lot more to pay for xyz’? Sounds good doesn't it, surely a majority of people will vote for that?
Except, what do you mean by ‘rich’? I suspect that most people will be think of Musk or Bezos, who could certainly afford to pay more tax and not even notice it. Or what about millionaires, they can pay more? But what if they are technically millionaires because they happen to have inherited a house from great-aunt Matilda which has been in the family for 200 years and sits in 4 acres of grounds in Wimbledon! So it’s not like they happen to have a few million in notes under the bed, or even in the bank - what do you tax? DO you demand three rooms from the house be handed over?
Now this might be an apocryphal story, but I do seem to remember a story form the Kinnock era, when he said just that, ‘tax the rich’, without specifying what he meant. Eventually pushed as to what ‘the rich’ meant, it turned out that some nurses in senior positions would fall into that category. Somehow ‘tax nurses more’ didn’t do it!
Basically the manifesto needs to say, unequivocally, 'everyone is going to pay more tax, you are all going to give the state more of your money’.
Despite the logic, it tends not to go down well.