Letters to the Editor – 11/03 – Tax reform, Best of Twitter
Tax reform
[Re: Stop acquisitive politicians forever with a max tax guarantee, Thursday]
I wish I thought a max tax would work, but it would likely be far worse than useless, and open the way for a British alternative minimum tax. Recall the political grandstanding that accompanied the withdrawal of allowances from higher-earning income taxpayers, effectively creating a narrow 70 per cent supertax band close to the 95th percentile? The more obscure and complicated you make the tax system, the more scope it gives populists to claim to “squeeze the tax-avoiding super-rich”, while in practice hitting salaried professionals and small businesses hard, and creating extra compliance burdens for millions more. One predictable consequence of combining direct, indirect and property taxes to compute an individual’s total payment would be Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs demanding combined reporting of all income and spending. Tracking all transactions would suit its panoptic urge, whether practical or not. What we need is the reverse of this proposal – actual simplification and decoupling of the tax system, so that more people can understand how much they are paying, with less scope for high-tax hucksters to play on public misunderstanding.
Guy Herbert
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