In article , Chris Hogg
writes
On Tue, 30 May 2017 18:13:50 +0100, Harry Bloomfield
wrote:
May had my vote until she threatened to hit pensioners in the pocket.
Now I'm a floating voter, with none of the parties offering me enough
to convince me to vote for them. I am even less convinced that any but
May might have the gumption to see us through the Brexit process.
I agree with you about May and Brexit. The EU will just walk all over
Corbyn. Corbyn's policies are OK, nothing revolutionary,
Really? He is a Marxist and his Shadow Chancellor is a Trotskyist who
says his life's ambition is to destroy the capitalist system. Nether
creeds believe in social democracy.
just far-left
wing, if you like that sort of thing. But my main concern is how
they'll be paid for. In neither Abbot's nor Corbyn's media
performances do they seem to have the faintest clue about numbers,
which is truly alarming and totally unacceptable in politicians who
aspire to high office. OTOH the Conservatives are keeping very coy
about the cost and savings of their programme.
Two things I don't understand: the pejoratively named 'dementia tax',
and why it's so awful to suggest a 50p/£ income tax for top earners.
In the former case, it's my understanding that ATM if you have to go
into care you pay for it all until your assets get down to £25,000,
but May's proposing you keep everything below £100,000 so why is the
policy coming in for so much criticism? I'm sure I've just got
something wrong somewhere and that some kind soul here will put me
right.
At the moment your home is only included in your assets if you go into
residential care. The new proposal is to include it for assessment if
you need care at home but payment is deferred until your estate is
realised i.e. on death. So to call it a dementia tax is silly and in
fact wrong.
As for income tax, I recall in the 1950's the highest rate of tax, for
top earners, was something like 19/6 in the £, i.e.97.5%*, yet now
there's a huge fuss when it's suggested it goes up to 50p/£, i.e. 50%,
which is generous by comparison, so why all the fuss?
There has been talk of 75% but the point is that when the top rate
dropped back to 45% actual revenue went up. Hollande tried 75% in France
and many of the high French earners left and came to London
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
* in fact I see from Wikipedia that during the war, it was 99.25%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor...nited_Kingdom#
Income_tax
"The highest rate of income tax peaked in the Second World War at
99.25%. It was then slightly reduced and was around 90% through the
1950s and 60s"
--
bert