Friday, Jul 30, 2010
Another desperate attempt to keep house prices up...
Metro: Public to get right to veto council tax
Further to the previous post re scrapping the £22 charge, here's another corker from The Blue Wing of the Home-Owner-Ist Party - they'll happily hike VAT by 2.5%, costing each household £500 a year on average - but a couple of weeks later they'll continue chipping away at the only modest annual tax that we still have on residential properties, enabling each household to "save" about £50 a year or something. If it's local council waste we're worried about (which is not at the top of my list of worries), how about freeing them up from all the EU and Whitehall imposed directives and targets and just reducing central funding to local councils by a commensurate amount?
Posted by mark wadsworth @ 02:35 PM (932 views) Add Comment
11 Comments
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1. tyrellcorporation said...
'If it's local council waste we're worried about (which is not at the top of my list of worries)'
My council tax is £2400 p/a and goes up by 5% every year without fail so waste is really high up my list and I would imagine for most people.
2. mark wadsworth said...
Yeah, but council tax is only about five per cent of all tax revenues - local councils may well be wasting money, but it pales into insignificance compared to waste at national level or at EU level.
Why do people get so agitated about a small part of five per cent of tax revenues being wasted, but blithely ignore the fact that a large part of ninety-five per cent is being wasted?
That's not a rhetorical question, by the way.
3. tyrellcorporation said...
All waste is bad (agreed) but it really does smart when it's wasting my money; money that I've worked days, nights and weekends to try and accumulate. The weekends with my kids I've missed because I'm at the office, the sleep I've lost because I'm working through the night on a project and my general health toiling infront of a computer all day trying to scrape enough money together to buy a pile of bricks in a half decent neighbourhood.
To see some b**tard wasting my taxes on a half-baked vanity project or because they simply can't be bothered to do a job properly or efficiently because it's 'only tax-payers money' - a faceless benefactor - makes my blood boil.
I would absolutely love to be able to veto council tax rises.
4. icarus said...
MW is right in his intro. The burden of taxation has shifted over the decades over to work and consumption. Property gets off lightly and transnational corporations have all kinds of ways of paying less corporation tax with clever accounting on their global operations. The rich get richer and the poor pay taxes. And that's before we even talk about finance capital.
5. mark wadsworth said...
@ TC at 3, was that your answer to my question at 2?
Why does it upset you so much that some of the £2,400 you pay in council tax is wasted?
Does it not upset you far more that a vast amount of the tens of thousands you pay or suffer in income tax, national insurance, VAT, corporation tax etc is wasted??
6. tyrellcorporation said...
'Does it not upset you far more that a vast amount of the tens of thousands you pay or suffer in income tax, national insurance, VAT, corporation tax etc is wasted??'
Yes it does but up until now my 5 yearly chance to veto the government wasting my money has been overruled by people quite content to let the waste continue.
7. mark said...
what about the council (cant remember which one) which is spending £400,000 on a trip to china to promote their area!!!
8. uncle tom said...
Mark,
We have plenty of rotten boroughs (in the Private Eye sense..) and many senior executives are getting over-rewarded.
Given the era of austerity we all have to live with, it does no harm to have central govt. put the screws on, and force local govt to justify its expenditure to its electors.
However, until they were kicked out of office for running out of cash; my local district council (when LibDem run) signed up to a 'pay nothing now' deal for public toilets that will ultimately cost the local tax payers vastly more than they would have paid, had the said units been bought outright in the first instance.
Such deals to defer payment should be outlawed, or they will proliferate..
9. the number cruncher said...
MW - quite correct
Myself and Mrs Number Cruncher pay about £1,800 a year in council tax and about 45k a year in income tax & NI. Add Vat on top of that as well - say another £5,000
so lets say about 20% of my council tax is wasted on stupid ideas from my local and county council - that's about £360.
Also central government and EU waste is probably knocking on 30%, so that is £15,000 down the drain.
£360 waste verses £15,000 waste - I'm with MW all the way.
10. Fiscal said...
If council tax were levied fairly across all members of the public then hey, what the hell, my council tax would be wasted fairly.
But it isn't is it?
I have to pay additional taxes for local services used by people who contrbute nothing. (And I would argue are really not that bothered about wasted council tax because it's not their money anyway)
Why? Because I choose to own my own home which I paid for with money that I'd paid tax on and which incidentally I paid stamp duty on when I purchased.
There was nothing wrong wih poll tax. (Which incidentally many of the then middle aged people who voted against it during the 80s and who are now property rich and cash pore are beginning to realise)
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