David Blunkett wants a death tax.
- Thread starter Danthus
- Start date
This is a disgusting policy. I will do everything in my ability to provide for my children when I am gone.
My wife and I own a house in an expensive area. Yes we are lucky but to afford that we have gone without a lot. We never have new cars. We can rarely afford to have family days out. We have been on one holiday in the last ten years (a week in Italy). Both of our jobs are constantly under threat of redundancy and the stress in our life is high because of the impact it would have. Until recently we still had an old fashioned CRT TV. We never buy new toys and even our phones are second hand. We have no savings as we spend every penny we earn on keeping the roof over our heads.
We managed to buy the house from a combination of investments and a mortgage. We took risks with the investments and they were paid for with money that had already been taxed. The investments could have gone bad but we took that risk and they turned good. The mortgage is paid for using money that has been taxed. The insurance on the house is taxed. Everything is taxed left right and centre. When we die the children will have to pay inheritence tax (on property bought with money that has already been taxed). Now Blunktwit wants to tax us directly on death.
No. If it is introduced I will find a way to legally avoid paying it. I already pay a lot of tax. I will not pay this one.
I don't avoid any other taxes but that one I would happily find a legal route to reduce or remove the liability. While I'm doing that it would then make sense to try to reduce my tax liability elsewhere - quite frankly because I would be angry. If that upsets the left wing on this forum then so be it. My family come first.
...and this is just one example of why I can never see me voting Labour.
My wife and I own a house in an expensive area. Yes we are lucky but to afford that we have gone without a lot. We never have new cars. We can rarely afford to have family days out. We have been on one holiday in the last ten years (a week in Italy). Both of our jobs are constantly under threat of redundancy and the stress in our life is high because of the impact it would have. Until recently we still had an old fashioned CRT TV. We never buy new toys and even our phones are second hand. We have no savings as we spend every penny we earn on keeping the roof over our heads.
We managed to buy the house from a combination of investments and a mortgage. We took risks with the investments and they were paid for with money that had already been taxed. The investments could have gone bad but we took that risk and they turned good. The mortgage is paid for using money that has been taxed. The insurance on the house is taxed. Everything is taxed left right and centre. When we die the children will have to pay inheritence tax (on property bought with money that has already been taxed). Now Blunktwit wants to tax us directly on death.
No. If it is introduced I will find a way to legally avoid paying it. I already pay a lot of tax. I will not pay this one.
I don't avoid any other taxes but that one I would happily find a legal route to reduce or remove the liability. While I'm doing that it would then make sense to try to reduce my tax liability elsewhere - quite frankly because I would be angry. If that upsets the left wing on this forum then so be it. My family come first.
...and this is just one example of why I can never see me voting Labour.
The top 1% pay 30% of the whole income tax take of the UK.
Deleted member 66701
Deleted member 66701
Your daughter can earn her own money.
Let her work hard like you have, rather than giving her a silver spoon she has no real appreciation of.
Yep... Add a compulsory additional 10% death tax on ALL inheritance with no tax free allowance and see how far that goes the first time families all over the country have to sell the family house in order to pay the tax due leaving children unable to live in the family home because their parents have had the termerity to die without being in debt rather than chucking the money away and living off the state.
So... this is a bit of a pointless debate (although when are they not on GD...) as people'll always be defending their own personal circumstances. If you have an expensive house or two, you'll always argue for less taxes, people ought to work hard for their stuff, etc, etc.
If you are renting and seeing 1/2 your paycheck going to somebody who bought their house 20 years ago for £10,000, then you're probably going to side on the inheritance/death tax as a way to fund the NHS, schools, etc.
One point of view that I think isn't really considered very often by the wealthier side of the debate is a broader view of society/earning/ownership. It's very well to say that me and my family worked hard in the past earned X so now we own Y.
But ownership is a social construct... i.e. we have a concept of ownership because enough people agree to abide by some rules that state that Y is yours and the majority of people will not try take it from you.
The people who own the most should have the most interest in keeping the system intact as they have the most to benefit from it. If you end up with a society with a great deal of inequality, sooner or later, people will opt out and then your "ownership" won't mean much.
If you are renting and seeing 1/2 your paycheck going to somebody who bought their house 20 years ago for £10,000, then you're probably going to side on the inheritance/death tax as a way to fund the NHS, schools, etc.
One point of view that I think isn't really considered very often by the wealthier side of the debate is a broader view of society/earning/ownership. It's very well to say that me and my family worked hard in the past earned X so now we own Y.
But ownership is a social construct... i.e. we have a concept of ownership because enough people agree to abide by some rules that state that Y is yours and the majority of people will not try take it from you.
The people who own the most should have the most interest in keeping the system intact as they have the most to benefit from it. If you end up with a society with a great deal of inequality, sooner or later, people will opt out and then your "ownership" won't mean much.
Are you married? Do you share your money with your wife/husband and if you do she/he should pay tax on it as unearned income then...
Or is that different somehow?
What? I have no words...
'Then stop benefits. Let them earn their own money, let them work hard like we have rather than giving them something they have no appreciation of.'
I might come into a nice inheritence one day. I appreciate it massively. So much so I want to do the same for my kids.
I don't think anyone's ability to 'sort their life out' given a certain sum of money should have any bearing at all on the rights of a parent/sibling/child/grandparent/friend/acquaintance/total stranger to allocate their assets in whatever way they please. From my point of view, the wishes of the person who actually owns those assets are incredibly relevant to what happens to those assets.
Let's say that you really like Warburtons Bread, but I think everyone should eat only Hovis, and I happen to have power over your bread because of some kind of convoluted Bread politics I was made emperor of bread. How peeved would you be if I decided that due to the inherent uncleanness of all non-hovis Bread I would take 2 slices out of every loaf of Warburtons Bread that you bought, toast it (to burn out the inherent uncleanness of non-hovis bread), and served it up to the hovis-eaters? Or would it actually be fine for me to do that because if you can't make as many sandwiches as you'd like from n-2 slices of bread then you don't deserve any Bread at all?
... Might have gone on a bit of a flight of fancy with that last paragraph... But I stand by the first one!
Frightening. Truly, truly frightening.
.Or a small 2 bedroom flat in London... Perhaps their parents dying is the only way they can get on the property ladder after the 30 years of horrendus price increases in their area.
The same reasons people get up in arms about moving people in soci housing out of London should be used for those that cannot afford to live in the area they grew up in without their parents passing their (usually very modest) property down to them.
So what should happen to our estate when we die?
It's put into a lottery for those who haven't worked a day in their lives.
While we are at it take everything. When people die everything belonging to them is swallowed by the state.
In fact let's not stop there. From now on no one is allowed to borrow money. You can only use your own money you have earned it personally.
Your children should be kicked out of the family home they have done nothing to deserve and the doors should be flung open for anyone to come help them selves to anything they can carry. Finally the house should be knocked down and the bricks used to build social housing flats on the site instead.
That'll learn you to work hard and not be a burden to the state...
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I'm pretty left leaning (especially for this forum) and yet I can't see how this is even a two-sided debate, at all.
If you work hard, you deserve to enjoy the benefits of your labour. No one should be able to take away the legacy of that when you die. It should be a lesson to your children that hard work DOES pay.
It is clear that more money needs to come in (alongside some cuts) if we wish to receive the same level of service from the public sector we are used to (and hopefully improve it, even). Some tightening of social equality would also help the general "well being" in this country. But this is not the way to do it.
If you work hard, you deserve to enjoy the benefits of your labour. No one should be able to take away the legacy of that when you die. It should be a lesson to your children that hard work DOES pay.
It is clear that more money needs to come in (alongside some cuts) if we wish to receive the same level of service from the public sector we are used to (and hopefully improve it, even). Some tightening of social equality would also help the general "well being" in this country. But this is not the way to do it.
Yes because I'm sure she's going to freeload of her parents until she's 50 odd and then celebrate winning the lottery when oldcoals over there dies.
What people with this view don't seem to understand is that the "freeloading, greedy, dispicible children" will probably have already paid off a mortgage and been taxed to high heaven already by the time they inherit anything of worth. The home they inherit will probably be be sold to make their lives easier, help their own children get a foot on the housing ladder or treat them to a holiday or help put their grandkids through university.
You mean to say the money won't help your kids in any meaningful way anyway?
So what's everybody complaining about?!