Date published: 2006/09/28
The BBC says:
More than two million households are struggling to keep up with council tax bills, a study has concluded.
People on low incomes are particularly badly hit as a larger percentage of their earnings is spent on payments, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said.
...
It suggested the proportion of tax levied on each valuation band should be revised.
There is only one tax that is "fair" (progressive) to people on low incomes and that is of course income tax. All the other zillion and one taxes must be "unfair" in this regard almost by definition. The council tax is a crude property tax and therefore it is a crude wealth tax. But there is nothing more and nothing less "fair" about a wealth tax than an income tax, and the levels for both (as for all taxes) are completely arbitrary. The Rowntree Foundation (as ever) is most concerned by those in low valuation properties. But a lot of low income people in fact live in high valuation properties, in particular retired people. The Rowntree Foundation seems to want to make people in high valuation properties pay much, much more, relative to people in low valuation properties. Since older people live in higher valuation properties than younger people (on average) the Rowntree Foundation is in effect asking for there to be a new generational tax from older to younger people. The worst thing about such a proposal is that it would be a sudden change, and so many people would arbitrarily be thousands of pounds worse off (summed over time), and all their financial planning would have been arbitrarily undermined by the State. (This happens all the time.) Like most pressure groups, the Rowntree Foundation spends too much of its time and effort on producing half-baked reports which advocate stealing from one group and giving to another, and not enough time actually doing something productive for the nation.
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