Tax the Rich!

If you really are worried about money collected egregiously by the wealthy, you should take a closer look at SRB's land posts. Your insistence that wealthy people are doing something wrong by not giving as much as they can to government seems silly in comparison.

As a proportion of GDP, taxation in this country is still much lower than in many other often far happier countries....

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio

Those appear to be 2020 figures but we are unlikely to have raced to the top of the league since then. That taxation is as high as it can possibly be is a mantra and assumption beloved of the right but it is not supported by international comparisons. Of course, which taxes increase, which taxes are reduced, and which new taxes are levied on what new things makes all the difference.

In essence we should be aiming to reduce or at least not increase taxes on income except possibly to a limited extent for the very wealthy. And even there the better option would be to tax wealth rather than income. Taxation on income is a disincentive to hard work at all income scales. I see all around me how it discourages hard work at the lower end of the scale, with many people already caught in a Universal Credit benefits trap. And the false notion in my workplace, even believed by managers. that once you hit the tax brackets everything extra you earn is taken as extra tax so it is a waste of time is a widespread one. In vain do I try to explain to them that income tax and NI combined are only 32%, so they should still keep two thirds of every pound they earn and that if this doesn't happen they need to take it up with the pay office. Fact is though that our hourly rate of just over £11 an hour drops to an effective take home rate of only about £7.50 an hour once you hit the tax brackets. So in a very real sense the more hours you work the less you get paid per hour after a certain point in terms of what you take home. Many colleagues are reluctant to earn much more than £1000 a month because they then start getting clobbered by the tax man.

Higher up the pay scale the same disincentivising process is at work, with people reluctant to work extra hours if they are going to find themselves clobbered by the 40p rate when they do. My wealthy friend who works at a fairly high level in the pharmaceutical industry is reluctant to work for more than about £100k anymore, since at that point what she regards as punitive rates of taxation kick in.

Of course these disincentivising aspects of taxes on income are simply being reinforced with the planned years long freeze on thresholds, especially when inflation itself is so high. The disincentive to hard work at all levels is being reinforced by this, which is economically retrograde. As many as one on five of the workforce could be hitting the 40p threshold by the end of it, and many millions more low paid people will be finding themselves hitting the basic rate threshold, or losing a greater proportion of their pay to the taxman as a greater part of it becomes liable for tax with every pay rise they get.

We should also be wary of added taxes on productive investment income. We ought to want as a nation to encourage productive investment in British enterprises.

Where taxes should be increased is on unearned wealth and unproductive and often economically damaging investments, particularly in immovable assets like land or property. This is the area where a wealth tax in the form of a land value tax would be most beneficial to us as a nation, any revenue raised then being available to help plug the funding gaps in our broken public services for the good of us all, or reducing taxes on income for hard working people, or a bit of both.

I disagree. I don't think tax has reached some potential ceiling. And while you keep emphasising its the highest since ww2 you constantly ignore its comparison to today in other countries (Which I consider far more relevant.)
Whenever I ask you which of the hundreds of services government provide today that they didn't in 1945 you shy away. The NHS represents a huge amount of that difference and as I point out again and again we can treat a million things that would have killed yo in 1945. Which of those things would you be happy to die of? 
Would you be happy to see the average life expectancy to fall back to 73 years?
Or do you actually want to have your cake and keep your happenny? 

Ok i see what you mean. The thread was of course aimed at the sort of people who Healey hit with his 98% tax so it was an easy mistake to make to assume you meant what i thought.

I suppose it's inevitable the left envy the wealthy and desire to steal all from them.

Well I'll give you a personal example - last year my income rose by circa £20k. On that I paid a marginal tax rate of 70%. 

If you think that I am just going to sit around and accept higher taxes without changing my behavior to reduce that burden you are very mistaken. 

But good luck if you want to give it a bash.

By far the largest group sucking at the teat of taxpayers are pensioners. And I am not simply referring to state pensions which were a lifelong promise linked to their NI contributions and thus would be wrong to take away. I am referring to all the other freebies like winter fuel payments, free bus travel and various random benefits like attendance allowance which is paid to those with gammy legs or other mobility issues. My mum worked hard and struggled all her working life, but at age 78 she has never been as well off as she is now, with more money coming in than she knows what to do with. Her current account now contains over £4k and there seems to be more in there every week, which fact I know because I do her shopping for her with her debit card and she asks me to get an account balance for her every week. And believe it or not she is one of the poorer pensioners. The rich ones are getting the same loads of taxpayers cash thrown their way. Which they clearly don't need. So for them to criticise others for sucking at the teat - as they picturesquely put it - of taxpayers in light of all they are getting from them is hypocritical in the extreme. And hypocrisy truly is an ugly thing to behold.

And that working people at the lower end of the pay scale are increasingly dependent upon in work welfare top ups, that is due to low pay or insufficient hours combined with extortionately high living costs, particularly rent and energy costs. Do something about those costs and the welfare bill for working people will decline.

If we are going to stop paying taxpayers money out to people, we should not start by further impoverishing low paid working people and quite possibly forcing them out of their jobs in the process. We should start by ceasing to give handouts to those who are already well off and don't need them. Because we live in a society now where millions of people engaged in productive work already still need welfare support. Whilst many of those doing the most moaning about it are retirees no longer engaged in anything resembling productive work whilst sucking on the teat of taxpayer largesse themselves. They should be more grateful to the hardworking taxpayers of this country and not expect constant handouts from them that they don't need whilst calling for everyone else to supposedly be weaned off any support, as if people are poor enough to need welfare as some kind of choice.

If as you say taxation can only ever raise so much and there is never going to be enough to meet the demand for funds, then surely the last thing we should be wasting money on is in handouts to those of any age group, including the elderly, who don't actually need them?

It is in fact far from inevitable, and the very notion you spout is just the typical right wing failure to understand us. Whilst I would love to win the lottery and be wealthy myself - who wouldn't? - I do not  envy the wealthy at all. Nor do any left wing comrades I have ever known. We are not motivated by envy at all, but by a sense of social justice and a desire for a more equitable distribution of wealth that derives from that. The notion that all can earn what they are really worth, and everyone can earn enough to live decently. We tend to believe that most people left to their own devices would seek to maximise their incomes and that those in positions where they can get away with it will end up commanding far higher incomes than they can possibly be worth whilst millions are underpaid. The inherent imbalance of economic power involved, the overt exploitation of the poor that is often involved, the prioritising of greed over need that is often involved is distasteful to our sense of social justice. And it is something that works against the economic interests of the working millions whose cause we seek to champion. In short, we believe that some people simply have too much at the expense of millions who have too little. And envy has nothing to do with it but social justice and a desire to see an economy that works for the many rather than the few, and the obvious fact observable throughout Europe that less unequal societies are far happier ones, is what motivates us.

One of my best friends is a wealthy millionairess and I am not the least bit envious of her. 

But right wingers prefer not to even try to understand our motivations and prefer, falsely and dishonestly, to interpret them as envy because it suits them to do so and requires less intelligent thought.