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EXPRESS COMMENT

OUR CREAKING TAX SYSTEM IS CRYING OUT FOR REFORM

Wednesday August 6,2008

Comment Speech Bubble Have your say(1)

NOW that the Chancellor Alistair Darling has publicly acknowledged that he is considering a stamp duty “holiday” he will have to go ahead with the measure very soon.

Any prospective housebuyers out there will now wait before completing deals to save themselves a fortune in tax. So the market will grind to a halt until the bungling Mr Darling makes his intentions clear.

Suspending stamp duty is an idea which has been used to kickstart the housing market before and would be a welcome move.

But the levy needs a more fundamental and permanent overhaul. For a start, stamp duty rates are simply too high and hit people with unaffordable bills just when their finances are at their most stretched.

The thresholds have also not been uprated in line with the house price rises of the past decade, dragging people into the net who in previous generations would not have had to pay a penny.

It is also ludicrous that higher rates of stamp duty have been applied to the whole purchase price of a property rather than being graduated like income tax.

The current stamp duty regime increasingly looks like a relic of an era when ministers took a healthy housing market for granted and viewed it as a cash cow for the Treasury.

From inheritance tax and the starting rate of income tax to fuel duty and now stamp duty, Labour’s fiscal agenda is buckling in the face of a voter uprising.

What Britain really needs is not piecemeal concessions from financial bloodsuckers like Mr Darling and Gordon Brown but a new breed of politicians who actually believe in letting hardworking people keep more of their own money.

PETER PAN AT THE TREASURY AND MR. DARLING AT NO TEN

06.08.08, 5:27pm

Oh what a tragic comedy we have come to.
Genuine mortgage holders, priced out of their homes because of inflation and the ever rising cost of living. And yet, this is August the 6th. Just eight months after Christmas 2007. When the City of London paid out some Eight Billion £Pounds in Bonuses (I seem to remember.) to the Merchant Bankers of the City of London, at the very beginning of the credit meltdown, the collapse of the Private Pensions Industry and next will be the Unemployment of the honest working Taxpayers.
This cannot be avoided now. But much of it can be mitigated if you do as I have been suggesting
for a year or two now. Abandon Westminster and Whitehall, and start your own system of Taxation, based on the Parish, Town and County Council. You, the poor Bl***** Taxpayer, take control of Direct Taxation and ignore London. The only Tax that can be Legally be Enforced, is the Local Council Tax. Westminster has no more power than that. Then my beauties, County by **** County, put together your own system of Public Service Funding, and you, you the poor b*** Taxpayer, say what you are prepared to support in the way of Services. And more to the point, what you will pay for and who you will pay for. It is your Bl*** Money.
Regards, ATFlynn, "Norfolk's Mutineer"

• Posted by: Watchkeeper • Report Comment