Date published: 2008/02/12
The BBC says:
The "super rich" should pay 10% more tax on earnings over £150,000 or give the same amount to charity, senior Labour MP Frank Field has proposed.
Mr Field, MP for Birkenhead, said his proposals would fulfil Margaret Thatcher's dream of a "giving culture".
He said his hope was to "breathe life into this noble aspiration".
The former welfare minister suggests the move could raise £3.6bn a year.
Frank Field is the John McCain of England. He is supposed to be a "straight talker" who just says it like it is and is willing to speak the unspeakable. Unfortunately, just like McCain, Field mostly spouts random nonsense (which is generally why it is unspoken).
Like all people who want to "soak the rich", he just plucks a random figure from nowhere (here 150k pounds) and decrees that these people are "super rich" and should pay more tax. But all taxation is arbitrary like that, so he is no worse in this respect than anyone else.
The real problem here is that pretty much any organisation can call itself a charity. Indeed, rich people can set up their own charities and give money to that. Well, some rich people (e.g. Bill Gates) already do that. But it could easily be used as a way of not paying this extra tax (for a tax it is). Every charity has overheads, after all, and there is no reason why a rich person couldn't choose to have the charity's overheads just happen to be beneficial to the family of the rich person.
It is extremely unlikely that anywhere near the suggested 3.6bn a year would be "raised". In fact, like tax, it is not "raised" so much as shifted (it's not as if this money wasn't being used for something already).
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