Happy Birthday to the politics of envy
Break out the champagne, put on your party hat, and blow one of those annoying squeaky things, because Inheritance Tax is 21 years old today!
This jolly jape, by the government, takes assets over £285,000 and slaps a 40% tariff on them, as punishment for being prudent. You can avoid this tax by pissing all of your savings up the wall, not being an evil house owner, or by spending your life as a lazy, work shy bastard. It is also more likely that you will be able to avoid it by living somewhere where the houses are cheap, because there are no employment possibilities, which is also a good thing, because all of those enterprising people who work in the city raising huge tax revenues for the government are also to be discouraged.
Although originally designed to replace capital transfer tax, or whatever it was called; a tax designed to punish the rich and successful for wanting to take care of their own children ( tut, tut, that’s the states job, don’t you know), by refusing to up the ‘take’ point in line with inflation, specifically house prices, our wonderful socialist masters have also managed to extend its powers to reign down financial punishment and justice on the eeevilll middle class, and the home owning working class in some parts of the south east. These working class traitors especially needed a dose of redistribution ~ the enterprising home owning bastards.
The fantastic thing about this tax is the great way in which the government gets to fuck you up the arse twice, sometimes even three times! How fucking socialist and cool is that? Slap ~ rape one, income tax and national insurance. Thrust ~ rape two, tax on saving income and capital gains tax on asset increases ( yeah, take that, you capitalist pigs). Plunge ~ rape three, thought you would get away with it by being dead, did you? Not on Brown’s watch you proles ~ gimme it, gimme it now…. mine mine mine mine mine.
What’s that? Property rights? Pissing property rights? Where the fuck do you think you are sunshine ~ some kind of economically liberal paradise? Nose back to the grindstone, pleb, we have an economy to plan….
Filed under: Liberal lefty nonsense
I think you have called it on that one. It’s the moral equivalent of taking a few notes out of the wallet of someone who has just keeled over dead in front of you.
Except – Bonus! It’s not illegal because you say it’s not…
The dead can’t pay taxes. It’s a tax on the living, who receive money. As far as I am aware it’s the first time they have paid tax on that money.
Err…
The current nil band rate is £300,000 and will rise to £350,000 by 2010.
Oh, and there has been a tax on succession/estates since 1796, of which Inheritance Tax, introduced by the Thatcher government, is only the most recent variation.
So far as the main developments of this form of taxation are concerned, only one - Capital Transfer Tax - occurred under a Labour government (Wilson, 1975). Of the rest, one can be put down to the Whigs (Duke of Portland, 1796), one to last of the Peelites (Earl of Aberdeen, 1853), two to the Liberals (Gladstone/Earl of Roseberry, 1894 and Asquith, 1909) and, of course, one to the Thatcher government of 1986.
>It’s a tax on the living, who receive money. As far as I am aware it’s the first time they have paid tax on that money.
Then you’re aware wrong, any tax liabilties on an estate are settled during probate, before any money is released to the beneficiaries of the will.
Errr….
According to the HMRC website the £300k rate doesn’t come in until 2008.
I pointed out that Inheritance Tax replaced Capital Transfer Tax. The Thatcher introduction was in fact a tax cut from the insane levels that CTT had reached in the ’70s
All previous taxes were structured to catch money that would otherwise never see the exchequer.
Only under labour has this been extended to tax assets on which tax has already been paid at least once, by not increasing the allowance to keep up with house price inflation, so that it now effects a fair swath of ‘normal’ PAYE tax payers. Never, in the long history you refer to, has this happened.
No it doesn’t, it says it begins in 2007 tax year, which is now.
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/cto/customerguide/page15.htm
And here it states it is £285,000.
However, I will stand corrected. I would still argue that it makes no difference to the point of the argument.
Even taking Unity’s figures, that (£350,000, assuming it is £300,000 now) gives a ~16% increase in 3 years. House prices are increasing at a nationwide average in the region of 9-10% pa, so even more people will be raped by the government, not less. In fact in one area, this increase could be wiped out in less than a year.
It’s great that we have these estate taxes. We wouldn’t want people being thrifty during life to help their children live a better life.
You are the center of the universe, and be sure to suck all the pleasure you can out of life. Sure you may leave your children in a miserable little heap, but hey, the government should take care of them anyway.
It just irritates me that if you want to spend all your money on gambling and whores, the government is fine with it, but you’d better not try to leave any to your children.
Good post. Whenever I think about how taxes are slowly but steadily becoming more egregious in the U.S., I think of the U.K. and thank god that I don’t live there.
Raise inheritance tax to 100% and use the money saved to cut income tax: taxes I don’t have to pay until after I’m dead are the best sort by a country mile!
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