Reader's Letter Of The Day

From today's Evening Standard:

Oliver Healey writes (Letters, 27 October) that "A London income tax could be used to eliminate the in-work poverty that millions of Londoners face because of high living costs".

The dividing line is not between high and low earners. It's between those lucky enough to have bought their own home more than 10 or 15 years ago and private tenants. A long-standing owner-occupier can live quite comfortably on a modest income, but private tenants lose half their income in rent and really struggle, even on above-average salaries.

What would bridge this gap is a London-wide property value tax to be distributed to all Londoners as a universal dividend. An average household in an average value home would break even; owners of "prime London"* would finally start paying for the privilege; and renters/recent purchasers would be able to use their universal dividend to cover half their rent or mortgage, thus reducing their living costs to a tolerable level.

Mark Wadsworth, Young People's Party

* With the benefit of hindsight, I should have included "BTL landlords". Ah well.

Nomination papers in, On the Ballot paper for the Folkestone and Hythe Constituency #GE2015

Dr Rohen Kapur has been officially put on the ballot papers for Folkestone and Hythe Constituency running against  Damian Collins, Lynne Beaumont, Claire Jeffrey, Martin Whybrow, Andy Thomas ( Andrew Thomas Emans) Seth Cruse, Harriet Yeo.

This was confirmed at 4pm on Thursday 2nd of April.

He would like to extend a big thank you to the neighbours and friends and total strangers that signed his forms.

He will be attending the Prime Time Hustings at St John's Church in Folkestone on Wednesday April 8th 2015 at 2pm  Doors open at 1.30 pm and the start is prompt.

I shall be speaking first so get there in time.  You won't want to miss this.

I shall be mentioning our Higher Education manifesto which will abolish tuition fees for Higher Education.

Anymore information please contact me through the link at the right hand side bar.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From the Evening Standard (8 July 2014, page 44):

Tony Travers is absolutely right (July 7) - London's land wealth could easily generate the revenue to fund all local services.

Rents are hugely in excess of building costs so councils could grant planning permission for built-to-let in exchange for [an] equity stake in each project, a common arrangement in parts of the EU.

Raising council tax to make London self-sufficient would also end the injustice of making the working poor in the rest of the UK subsidise Tube travel and (via housing benefit) rental receipts of the country's wealthiest landowners.

Joe Momberg, Young People's Party.

BBC publishes outline YPP manifesto

From the BBC:

Clive Menzies, Critical Thinking

A 2011 study in the New Scientist revealed that 147 "super entities" control 40% of 43,060 transnational corporations and 60% of their revenues. The study was based on shareholders and directors but doesn't reveal beneficial ownership and control hidden behind nominee companies, trusts and foundations. Evidence suggests power is even more concentrated than the study indicates.

This stateless power dominates politics, media and education. Financial capitalism seeks to monetise and control everything, influencing legislation and regulation in its favour.

Stateless power is drawn from three fundamental flaws in the economic system, evolved to benefit the ruling class over centuries, but these flaws have been expunged from economic discourse:

Flaw 1. Private capture of the value of land, resources and other commons (such as water, the radio spectrum, genes, nature and knowledge), gifts from nature (or God), the value of which is communally created. The value of these must be shared for the good of all to fund public services and an unconditional citizens dividend.

Flaw 2. Interest on money creates no wealth but systemically drives inequality, environmental destruction, conflict and exponential, unsustainable debt growth. Debt must be unenforceable in law and usury (lending money at interest) illegal. Debt must revert to a social construct rather than its current role of facilitating wealth extraction, exploitation and oppression.

Flaw 3. Increased mechanisation and technology has rendered full employment unachievable, unnecessary and undesirable. The means to life cannot be conditional on paid employment but is a right for all and must be provided in the form of an unconditional citizens dividend sufficient for a decent life.

I personally don't damn the payment of interest out of hand, it's a bit more nuanced than that, and clearly, a Citizen's Dividend could never be enough for nobody have to work any more; it's a safety net and the only way of equitably distributing land wealth, AFAIC.

But hey, that's still two-thirds of our manifesto right there, and Clive is not even a member (yet...).

Max Keiser - Episode #546

The first half is a great summary of how Home-Owner-Ism works and who is behind it. Replacing taxes on earnings, output and employment with Land Value Tax will sort all that out:

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From today's Evening Standard:

SOMETHING missing from the Lib Dems' case for higher property taxes is a comparison between London and other global cities.

New York City does not have a cap as there is with Band H and as a result some property owners willingly pay bills of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Forty three per cent ofhte city's revenue comes from property taxes.

Similar arrangements exist in Hong Kong and Singapore.

High taxes on labour and business are far more damaging to Londoners than those on property. The challenge is to sell any new tax as a replacement rather than a new one. Stamp Duty is an ideal candidate to scrap.

Joe Momberg, N3.

Readers' Letters Of The Day

From The Evening Standard:
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Allowing London to retain Council Tax and Business Rates revenues* would be a huge leap forward, encouraging the GLA to focus investment on transport and housing and increase the tax base.

Can Boris Johnson now resurrect Herbert Morrison's 1939 Site Value Rating for London Bill? An annual levy on some of the most valuable land in the world should sort out the capital's spending constraints nicely.

Mark Wadsworth, Young People's Party.

* My original list was much longer and also included Stamp Duty Land Tax, the Mansion Tax Lite (known colloquially as the "Annual Tax on Enveloped Dwellings") etc.
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And lower down the same page:

Economist Danny Blanchflower recently published a study demonstrating that high home ownership is strongly correlated with higher unemployment.

How timely of the Nimby residents of South Bucks to provide an example of this by obstructing the creation of jobs at Pinewood Studios.

Joe Momberg.

Occupy Occupy

A couple of us will be dropping in on this:

Occupy economics working group
Land Value capture discussion
Friday, 1 February 5pm to 7pm

Friends House
173-177 Euston Road
London NW1 2BJ

Directions

"London's poor now subsidise its rich"

Simon Jenkins in the Evening Standard:

In addition, every year central government tries to win electoral credit by demanding, pleading, chiding and bullying local councils not to increase [Council Tax]. The result is absurdly regressive. The “spread” of tax payments under the old rates — the gap between the highest and lowest payments — was 1:100, making it reasonably progressive. The spread of council tax bands today is just 1:3. The effect of this has been a steady rise in the council tax burden on the poor and middle-income and it plummeting on the rich.

In the late Eighties, houses in Maida Vale, Mayfair and Kensington were paying £5,000-£8,000 a year in old rates. The same people now pay little over £2,000. Central government policy has led to a huge tax bonus for the London rich. In capitalist New York, residents of suburbs such as Westchester county pay $15,000-$20,000 a year in property taxes.

Back in the 1980s, Domestic Rates raised considerably more than its eventual replacement Council Tax, and Stamp Duty was only one per cent.

Would it really be so terrible if we turned the clock back a bit and reinstated these rules? If you index up the figures given for inflation, what Domestic Rates would amount to is a flat annual tax of something under one per cent on the market value of each home (like they still have in Northern Ireland). If the owners of multi-million homes in "Maida Vale, Mayfair and Kensington" end up paying £20,000 or £50,000 or £100,000 a year, would anybody really care? If the current owners can't afford it, then there'll be plenty of French tax exiles and Arab and Russian oligarchs happy to step in.

The more of these people we can encourage to come to London the better; even if the whole of central London became a playground for millionaires, so what? If we had another half a million of them spending half a million pounds a year each, that would turn our trade deficit into a massive surplus and increase our GDP by a fifth.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

In today's Evening Standard:

Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander are barking up the wrong tree. A wealth tax, and land-value taxation, which many Liberals have long called for are quite simply opposites.

We already have enough taxes on the private creation, exchange and consumption of wealth (income tax, corporation tax, VAT) and it is very difficult trying to raise much revenue by taxing people's savings. Evasion and avoidance would be rife as people registered assets abroad. Not only that, it would clearly be retrospective double taxation.

Conversely, a tax on the rental value of land is purely prospective as people choose to own or occupy those plots which benefit most from public services, public spending and community activities or the state of the economy. There is no scope for evasion or avoidance as you cannot move land abroad and the amount that could be collected is huge.

Business Rates - a kinf of land-value tax on commercial land and buildings - raise nearly as much money as corporation tax and collection rates are nearly 100 per cent. Reintroducing domestic rates at similar levels to business rates would generate enough revenue to replace council tax, inheritance tax and income tax* in their entirety.

Mark Wadworth, Young People's Party.

* My original list was much longer than that, but it got edited down.

The next letter was pretty good as well:

There is no need for a new tax to get the wealthy paying more or give hostage to fortune by setting a single limit over which this extra taxation is paid.

The designer of council tax left enough letters of the alphabet free so that many new bands can easily be slipped in above band H.

In a progessive society, council tax would double with every rise in band over H.

Professor Danny Dorling.