Chris Brown

@trevgoes4th @DanNeidle Not really. Your income tax goes to fund defence, NHS etc, services that are national and that can be used by you everywhere in the country try by and large. You can’t use your local library in another part of the country.

@mrchuckbrown @DanNeidle Well that’s income tax anyway

I 100% agree on this from Max Tax @DanNeidle We need to let land values trend to zero in order to attract inward capital for renewal

@trevgoes4th @DanNeidle Fair point. As it stands it’s not centralised and wages still need to be paid. Budgets for local services funded by local council tax. Why should someone in Hammersmith pay for someone in Durham?

@mrchuckbrown @DanNeidle Not really Most of it goes on care costs and pensions these days which should be centralised Of course some funds will be collected for local services as not all land in a county wil be zero rated

@trevgoes4th @DanNeidle Also I said it’s worth less not worthless

@mrchuckbrown @DanNeidle So if it’s worth nothing, why do they have to pay tax on it?

@robprogressive That’s literally not how it works.

Council Tax is one of the strangest taxes in Britain. Two neighbours can live in homes worth millions And pay almost the same as someone in a property worth a fraction of that How is that logical?

When it comes to tax in the UK, a lot of people are deluding themselves, thinking the government will just go after the wealthy to pay for the ballooning commitments they’ve made. The truth is, the real target is the middle class. And the reason is simple. The middle class is the only viable option for the kind of revenue the government wants. Start with who’s off the table. A third of British adults pay no income tax at all. The bottom half of earners take home about a quarter of the income in this country and pay roughly a tenth of the tax. There’s no pot of gold buried down there, and every party has spent years promising to protect “working people.” Squeezing them is politically radioactive and would raise next to nothing anyway. The rich are off the table too, whatever the Channel 4 documentaries say. The top 1% already pay 28% of all income tax. Their money is capital, dividends and gains, so they’re mobile, and they’ve already started leaving. One widely quoted forecast has Britain losing half a million millionaires by 2028. Push the rate on these people much higher and you collect less, not more. Threatening them polls brilliantly, but relying on them for a tax bonanza is pure fantasy. Which leaves the middle class, and the middle class can’t run. Most are on PAYE, taxed at source before the money touches their account. They can’t turn a salary into a capital gain. They can’t declare residency in Monaco, because the job, the kids’ school and the mortgage are all here. Their wealth is a house they can’t hide under the mattress and a pension they can’t reach. Numerous, visible and immobile. The perfect target, and in some ways the only one. And here’s how it’s already being done. They won’t raise your headline rate of income tax, because they promised not to. But the threshold freeze, the one that sounds like a non-event on Budget day, is quietly hammering you, and it’s now been extended to 2031. Took out a student loan since 2012? You’ve been paying the graduate tax in all but name. Hold investments outside an ISA? You’ve watched CGT climb to 24%, and it’s likely to be equalised with income tax next. Sent your kids to private school? That’s the VAT charge. Saving into a cash ISA? That shelter just shrank from £20,000 to £12,000. And from 2027, your pension gets pulled into inheritance tax, so the pot you spent a career building can be taxed again on the way out. There’s more coming. Mansion taxes, higher CGT, property levies, dividends. Most of the taxes we’re told will hit the ultra wealthy will actually land on the middle class. And in most cases they’re not sat on fortunes, they’re sat on assets they spent a working life building. What’s worse, the burden grows with every Budget, because of the compounding commitments this government keeps making, and that nearly every other party has pledged too. So who pays for the past, present and future spending of the UK government? The middle class. And there’s not a thing they can do about it. Debt-trapped, stuck in place, with nowhere to turn, and the government knows it. If any of this resonated, you’re likely in the taxation crosshairs. I wish you luck.

@omgsidewalks The reason they became billionaires is because they created likely thousands of jobs. The jobs the created, created their billions. How are people this dim?

Billionaires don’t create jobs. Stop repeating that myth. Without billionaires, people would still build, design, teach, produce, sell, and buy things. Billionaires don’t create human productivity, they capitalize on it and concentrate the profits.

@breadandposes To zero as they become uninvestable. Congrats you’ve killed entrepreneurship and jobs.

@mrchuckbrown Exactly. They would be valued very different under a wealth taxed system?

If an asset netted £0 to its owner it wouldn't be worth £100m would it?

@breadandposes @Moshe_89 Right, so taking my arguments principal, if you think a 100m asset that makes no return won’t be worth 100m, what is it worth? How do you tax an unknown? Especially in the private market. You haven’t thought this through at all.

@Moshe_89 @mrchuckbrown By the market? Which will behave differently under a wealth tax regime than alternative? Amazon wasn't a top priced stock when it was losing money nevertheless it had investment from those who believed in the fundamentals of the stock?

Bring it on. We need to go through the pain to recover

Yes, being highly numerate and market-literate I understand the first, second and third order consequences of the “ideas” Gary has. The deep, deep, irony is that his ideas would impoverish the British people even further than the policies he critiques. I agree the state has let down working people for 30 years. We have had zero productivity growth for 18 of them and we spend £1.4TR a year for the (dis)pleasure. As would Zack Polanski’s ideas (e.g. open borders and endless welfare) - ironically human QE only benefits capital holders and business owners. So if I am the nasty miserly capitalist pig-dog you likely think I am then I would be all in favour of inviting as many people as possible to drive wages lower and profits higher - because capital always chases the lowest labour costs. But I’m not. Because it prices working class Brits out of work. Then they become dependent on welfare. Which is no good for anyone. Gary, Miatta Fahnbulleh (Labour’s Minister for Energy Consumers), left-wing author Grace Blakeley and so-called “migration expert” Zoe Gardner (effectively an open border lobbyist) all received media training from “The New Economy Organisers Network” (NEON) owned by billionaire Hedge Fund legend, George Soros. If I was George and didn’t care about Britain this is exactly what I would do. It’s really smart, actually. Anyway since you wonder about my motivations, allow me to share a more fulsome rationale on Gary so you can understand better: open.substack.com/pub/anglofutur…

In many ways I want these idiots to win and get everything they want. Then I want the country to suffer. I want the country to collapse under the weight of the shittery. Then a Milei type can come in and do what is necessary with a massive mandate as the middle classes wake up

@JGreenCrypto It stopped being a good idea a while ago. Inflation takes most of the price rise away from you and the faff involved and cost involved in running a house takes the rest. So long as you get a good landlord, renting is better

There seems to be a UK 🇬🇧 debate ongoing. With average house prices at £270k and rent at £1,383/month — has "get on the property ladder ASAP" stopped being good advice? Yes or no?

@andybrown755 If I didn’t have a family I’d be moving abroad. I do wonder if this country can be saved with how deeply entrenched some of the shittery is.

Can’t wait to pay more for the same / worse services.

@dontdelay I’m on your side but that in and of itself is not a moral argument. It’s a logical one.

We tax wealth. Taxing wealth, even if we tax it more, doesn’t mean we need a wealth tax. We tax wealth when it’s spent (VAT) When it’s earned (income tax) When it’s received (dividends) When it’s realised (capital gains) When it’s invested (stamp duty) When’s it’s inherited (inheritance tax) When it moves, or when we want to do something with it. Not when it’s just sat there. That’s the moral argument.

You know what they say. The average person is thick and 50% of people are thicker than that.