The problem those arguing for a 'revival' of Centerism have (this morning Phillip Collins/Observer) is that they draw centrism wide enough to draw in Blairs' Labour & Cameron's Tories.
If that's the liberal centre then its been in power for decades & got us to the stagnating, unequal, failing juncture we have reached.... why would anyone think they now have the answers (other than their feeling of entitlement to govern?) as the are worried less by Reform than the Greens?
I was struck by this:
"In the 1950s about 70% of manual workers voted Labour and the same percentage of non-manual workers voted Conservative. Today, education and age both predict voting affiliation better than class."
It is an example, I think, of the myopia of centrist or 'liberal' thinking. It misses the point that the current association of education and age with political affiliation comes out of the expansion of higher education in the 60s and 70s, then the generational inequality perpetrated by the single-generation handout of neoliberal privatisation, that has produced a society in the UK (and to some extent elsewhere) in which lots of well-educated young people don't have any assets to fall back on - which is really what being working class means - rather than having a regional accent or liking chips, as 'liberals' would have it - and lots of older people living longer that are less well educated but have both assets and relatively generous pensions.
What is 'social class' supposed to mean if not the difference between having no choice but to keep working all hours for somebody else, or conversely receiving unearned asset income ?
But naturally 'centrists', 'liberals', whatever you call them, must never see this, because if they did they would have to admit the economic interests (in preserving the status-quo) that really lie behind their own supposedly a-historical 'ideas' and 'values'.
Yes, a really good point... and as you say what centrists are (wilfully) blind to
I disagree
(Not with the assessment of how we got here, but with laying the blindness on "liberals)
Every liberal who calls for a #WealthTax (a lot of them) understand the dynamic you mentioned.
Now, "centrists" - yeah they are probably turning a blind eye.
As implemented, with lots of holes, sure the few #WealthTax have barely moved the needle.
And yes, let's tax unearned income more
But the real problem is not income. It's the vast hoards of wealth that underwrite loans and favors - and create an exploitive rentier culture.
Just look at Musk. He has little income (of any type) while sitting on historic wealth.
Sorry, are you saying a #WealthTax is "confiscation of people's legally acquired wealth"?
Because lots of places already tax property, cars and boats based on the value of the asset. So, I don't see why that same principle cannot extend to stocks, bonds, art, commodities and other sources of wealth storage.
And yes, of course, we need to look at how great wealth was accumulated and where it is being hidden.
#TaxTheRich
@TCatInReality @ChrisMayLA6 @GeofCox Taxing an object every year after it has been legally acquired because you don't like the type of object it is seems pretty confiscatory to me. Taxing it at purchase is fine.
Property taxes are different, they are intended to fund the provision of local services
So, if we use a recurring annual wealth tax to fund public services (like property taxes do), then that must be OK too.
Let's do that.
@wyliecoyoteuk @rpluim @ChrisMayLA6 @GeofCox
And thank goodness local services receive funding from the national government.
Otherwise, it's a quick decent into a handful of wealthy enclaves and mass poverty everywhere else.
Well, much worse than it already is.
This exchange raises many issues. The article argues that 'liberals' and 'centrists' are different terms for the same politics (but prefers 'liberals' as 'centrists' are merely defined by their position in the left-right spectrum. Actually, it's the other way round - the centre is merely the political expression of the status-quo, and it's this that creates the left-right spectrum). What particular policies the centre advocates are different in different times and places. The great European Enlightenment philosophers, like Locke and Voltaire, claimed as the progenitors of liberal democracy, and indeed the US Founding Fathers, were apologists for slavery. So it should not be surprising that in some times and places centrists/liberals support a wealth tax (as, incidentally, does the extreme right here in France).
Having said that, the idea that tax is needed to 'raise revenue' or 'fund services' is another aspect of the false 'household analogy' Chris and I have been discussing in another thread - https://climatejustice.social/@GeofCox/116272097415626100 - ie. it is a centrist conception of tax (which should rather be seen as a mechanism for removing money introduced into the economy by government when it's no longer in useful circulation - as defined by political aims - for example when and where it's accumulation is driving up asset values, whatever the assets may be).
@GeofCox @TCatInReality @ChrisMayLA6 I reject the household analogy at the national level, but local taxes fund local spending in many countries, and thus the local books need to balance.
Wealth taxes are an example of what I call "management ideas", where the action is easy to describe "just take 1% of the wealth of people worth more than $x", but the implementation is very difficult, since establishing the value of property, art jewellery etc is both difficult and subjective.
I reject the notion that #WealthTax is too hard. It is made hard with opaque markets, tax shelters and lack of proper registries.
All can be resolved and any disputed valuations should be appealable (based on comparators)
It is only a question of political will. And saying "too hard" is defeatist.
@KimSJ @rpluim @TCatInReality @GeofCox
Great example with Rembrandt... because as the current scholarly discussions around hi autograph works play out your wrk bought for $200m, having been rejected from his catalogue & now worth only $20k, might well find its way back into his autograph works & thus gain its value back... so very convenient to time the 'valuation' when the work is in doubt.... which underlines the point about the difficulty of valuation
@ChrisMayLA6 @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
Kim, Prof May
I fear we are debating edge cases and ignoring the much greater potential, but OK...
In your Rembrandt example:
1) valuation could be tied to insurance cover. If you want to insure your possible-Rembrandt for £20k, go ahead
2) Tax auditors will look at patterns (as they do now). If an art collector devalues a dozen paintings, that gets investigated as tax fraud.
Like all laws, it works 99% of the time.
#TaxTheRich
@TCatInReality @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
I think 2) is the key issue; we need trusted tax valuers....
but yes, of course, the Rembrandt thought experiment was not the central issue, I agree; but did provide a real world example of how values shift & change
@ChrisMayLA6 @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
Yes, of course we should game out all the scenarios.
But we should also be clear when we are talking about edge cases (eg, I'm a billionaire with a Rembrandt that may be a fake)
A #WealthTax is imminently possible (with political will) and (like all taxes) an industry will grow trying to find/make loopholes. But if we don't start, we'll never get anywhere - and trillions will sit, untaxed, in hidden assets.
1/2
@ChrisMayLA6 @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
To me, the far bigger obstacle to a #WealthTax is the startlingly large number of ways to hide assets
- Freeports
- Corporate ownership
- Tax havens
- Multiple shell companies
- Lack of registries
- Intermediaries
- Noncooperation between countries
That's the real obstacle - and one that should provoke outrage amongst the public and a demand for action.
One estimate has $21-32 trillion in hidden money. #TaxTheRich
2/2
An $21 to $32 trillion in financial assets are sitting offshore in tax havens. Due to the secrecy that pervades the tax haven system, precise numbers are hard to come by so estimates can vary. The Tax Justice Network estimates that $427 billion is tax is lost every year to tax havens.
@TCatInReality @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
Yes, all good points & completely concur - the myriad ways of (legally) hiding assets from the taxman is the biggest issue....
@rpluim @KimSJ @ChrisMayLA6 @GeofCox
💯
There's an old video of Musk on a podcast explaining several ways he avoids "income". Loans against his assets is a big one.
@KimSJ @ChrisMayLA6 @TCatInReality @rpluim @GeofCox no, that's not the problem at all. Taxes on landed property — which is a significant subset of wealth — are extremely easy to implement and extremely hard to evade.
The problem is that political parties rely on the ultra-rich for their funding, and the ultra-rich don't fund parties that talk about wealth taxes.
https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/posts-output/2014-12-09-me-and-you-and-the-duke-of-buccleuch/
I've written before about an exponential land tax. Rather often in fact... Here I want to give a clear account of how it would work, with a computer program (in Clojure) so that you can fiddle with it yourself.The code on this page is live: you can edit it. I recommend that (at least at first) you change only the constant and the exponent.
@simon_brooke @KimSJ @TCatInReality @rpluim @GeofCox
However, property taxes come up against a couple of issues - firstly, politically, a lot of people in the UK, owning their own houses, always feel a tax on property will see thresholds reduced until they come into the tax-band... and secondly, there is also the issue of finding the 'beneficial owner' unless we re-jig how property ownership is legally recorded.
Which is not say either is insurmountable
@simon_brooke @KimSJ @TCatInReality @rpluim @GeofCox
Hmmm.... such (temporary) appropriation of land might well see the UK end up in a but of a legal morass; but I'm assuming you'd expect a change in tax law first, and getting that through a political system dominated by landlords (used tossing political creep on laws) seems unlikely
@HighlandLawyer @ChrisMayLA6 @simon_brooke @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
Now we're thinking solutions
Love it!
@HighlandLawyer @TCatInReality @ChrisMayLA6 @simon_brooke @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox I did once mutter a threat of a CPO as chair of a planning committee meeting when the developer was asking for yet another extension to the planning permission for their temporary fence round the site on which they *still* hadn't started building yet.
I was bluffing, of course (the powers do exist in theory but are impossible to exercise in practice) ... but the development did then start before our "final" extension of the temporary permission expired, and there are now people living in the houses.
@HighlandLawyer
Seems fair
Will sort out those delinquent landlords
@TCatInReality @ChrisMayLA6 @simon_brooke @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
@HighlandLawyer @ChrisMayLA6 @simon_brooke @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
For vacant buildings and land with planning permission, that seems to make sense.
But for greenfield space, I think something else is needed. We need green space and shouldn't create a perverse incentive to build something/anything that generates money. Of course, there needs to be some tax and a way to avoid land hoarding.
@HighlandLawyer @TCatInReality @ChrisMayLA6 @simon_brooke @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox @timrichards
This country was developed using Squatters rights.
Squatters and “Speculators” feature heavily in history and AB Patterson and Henry Lawson poems.
@HighlandLawyer @simon_brooke @KimSJ @TCatInReality @rpluim @GeofCox
Very neat thinking - thanks - I salute you
@ChrisMayLA6 @HighlandLawyer @simon_brooke @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
The breadth and depth of experiences on Mastodon is inspirational.
@simon_brooke @KimSJ @ChrisMayLA6 @rpluim @GeofCox
Amen!
And that political money is crucial to blocking the political will for a #WealthTax
But some day, it will come down to taxes or pitchforks. And their private islands will eventually run out of supplies.
@TCatInReality @simon_brooke @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
I think I'd like a T-shirt that said:
Tax or Pitchforks
or perhaps:
Tax or Guillotine (for those with a stronger stomach)
A great political summation TC!
thanks
@ChrisMayLA6 @simon_brooke @KimSJ @rpluim @GeofCox
Love the T-shirt idea 😃
@KimSJ @ChrisMayLA6 @rpluim @GeofCox
Taxing "income" has been the strategy for a century.
The wealthy know that and have very refined ways to avoid taking income.
It's time for a 21st Century approach to tax - and that is #WealthTax
In the UK at present it's true that council tax funds local expenditure, but this is not true in other countries and easily changed (as we see by the fact that newly created central government funding makes up varying proportions of that local expenditure in the UK too).
The difficulty of implementing wealth taxes is of course a live debate among tax experts, and Richard Murphy for example takes your view. I don't find it convincing - all assets are valued, for example on purchase, for insurance, when a notional value is needed for CGT/IHT, etc...
@GeofCox @TCatInReality @ChrisMayLA6 What's the value of a Picasso or a van Gogh? The only way to find out is to sell it. You can set a value on it when someone inherits it, but then what is it worth 50 years later? And if it turns out to be a fake, do you refund 50 years' worth of wealth taxes?
Taxing earnings is just easier to do, and much easier to justify and explain.
@jimmynohands @rpluim @GeofCox @ChrisMayLA6
Love this creative thinking
@jimmynohands @rpluim @GeofCox @ChrisMayLA6
Also... a great many of these assets are insured for ... Checking notes ...a determined value.
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
GeofCox
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