Fair Ways to Raise over £10 Billion Quid.

   It's disconcerting when you have to listen to the likes of Cameron, Osbourne,Clegg and Milliband attempting to the claim the word "fair" as their own.  It's as if they can't help themselves. "Fair" to working families, "fair" to the taxpayer, "fair" to the nations' children etc,etc. This is a group of people who never had proper jobs,never had to make harsh financial decisions in their own lives, trying to tell us all that they want to be "fair" when they clearly don't understand fairness as a concept. The light from "fair" would take decades to reach them.

 

  To hear the word "fair" come out of George Osbourne's mouth is doubly galling. Here's a man who flipped the mortgage on his second home to make a few quid out of parliamentary expenses. A man who receives a trust fund income every year that means he doesn't even need to work. Despite that fact that this man is an odious creep, the very embodiment of the toxic strain of Toryism that rendered his party unelectable for a regrettably short 13 years, I'd like to offer him some advice. I have some ideas to help the impoverished Tory boys  raise some  money for the UK. The ideas are based on the concept that you should get money from working and not by exploiting others or by sitting on your arse. The idea of fairness in politics should be based on the ethical principle of justice. To save George the effort of having to look this up, the principal of justice states that one should do what is of the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people.



 1) PROPERTY TAX:

Scrap Council Tax  in  it's present form. The main problem with Council Tax is that it's levied on property occupiers and not owners. This makes it difficult to collect and means that Councils have to spend vast amounts of time attempting to find out who lives in each property. Leaving to one side that it's none of the council's fucking business who shares a property with whom, it also creates a large and unnecessary bureaucracy. The solution is a property tax. This should be charged at the same rate as Council Tax but  levied on property owners rather than tenants.  It's easy to find out who the property owners are as  their name appears on the land registry. If some owns more than two properties they pay an accelerated rate of property tax. This helps to protect people who've  bought a small cottage for their retirement but will hit buy to let landlords who've done rather well in recent years. I suggest that someone with  ten properties should pay an accelerator of 15%. In other words they pay what would have been levied on their ten properties in Council Tax plus fifteen per cent. In addition to this any properties empty for more than 3 months attract a 20 per cent surcharge. There could be exemptions for properties in need of structural repairs etc. This would mean that it is not in landlords interests to leave properties empty. Then we should introduce a Mansion Tax on properties worth over £1 million. Many commentators have said the super rich would simply avoid this by using offshore companies etc. Therefore the rules should be simple: Pay up or we'll take your fuckin house away and you won't get it back.
        I don't really like to take any notice of what the Liberal Democrats say but on this topic I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. They estimate that it costs £600 million per year just to collect Council Tax. A property tax would mean collecting at least the same amount of revenue from far fewer people. Based on nothing other than guesswork I think that this could save £300 million a year.
        

  

2) BENEFITS FOR THE UNEMPLOYED:

The concept should be simple. If you haven't paid in you can't take out. One of the most unfair aspects on the present system is that in lots of cases if you have paid in you can't take out. Partners earnings are taken into account when assessing eligibility for benefits. The effect of this is that someone who may have paid ten years contributions is entitled to nothing because the person they're shagging has a job. This is patently unfair. It's none of the state's concern who someone lives with or who they choose to have sex with. Provided of course that it's consensual and legal.
  To protect those who've just left school or university and may not have paid any contributions they'd be entitled to benefits for 2 years. People who are acting as carers for the sick or disabled should be given National Insurance credits. Bearing in mind that they save the country a fortune this is only fair.

3) CHILD BENEFIT: 

Only available for the first three children. If you want more children than that then good luck but I don't see why everyone else should pay for it.


4) ELECTORAL ROLL:

At present anyone who's name appears on the electoral roll has their details submitted to credit reference agencies. Regardless of whether or not they want this to happen . Give people the choice. If they are happy for their details to be submitted then the credit reference agencies should pay a fee for being able to access each persons details.

4) ENTERPRISE:

The Tories spend lots of time talking about encouraging enterprise and wealth creation. They may even mean it. The problem is that because they've led such useless existences they don't have the first clue where to start. First they should abolish business rates. The system is a mess. Also rates bear no relation to profit. Increase Corporation tax to offset the cost of abolishing business rates. Then make sure  that companies and that means all companies pay their Corporation tax. This can't be that difficult. Why do we live in a world where the powers that be will chase the average person to ends of the earth for parking ticket but won't ensure that Vodafone pay their tax bill. I'm led to believe that Vodafone did a deal with the tax man. If the garage down the road tried to do that they'd get told to fuck off.

5) HOUSING:

Build social housing. Lots of it. The criteria for getting social housing should be that you've got a job or are in training. The people who live in these properties would then have more income to spend because they'd no longer be paying obscene percentages of their income in rent.
  Then bring back fair rent tribunals.

6) INCOME TAX

    A one pence rise in the basic rate of Income Tax. It is estimated that this raises £4.5 billion per year.  Nobody likes income tax but at least it's proportionate to income. It's also four times cheaper to collect than Council Tax.

7) FLAT RATE TAXES: 
      

           Some ideas for some new flat rate taxes. You can avoid paying these by not buying the goods or services that would attract these taxes:
   

•                   A new tax of £10 to register a vehicle with the DVLA. If you can afford to buy a car then you can afford a tenner. For cars with a purchase price of over £30,000 this would rise to £200.

• A £5 tax on all new tattoos. If you want to walk around looking like a tattooed fuckwit then thats fine but it'll cost you a fiver a time. It'll make it easier for the rest of us who have to look at you. This will particularly disadvantage Premier League footballers which is a good thing in itself.
• Satelite/ Cable TV: £10 a year. Collected via your provider once a year. Around 12 million households in the UK subscribe to these services so this should raise £120 million per year.
• A ten pence additional tax on every Lottery ticket sold. This would raise the price of a normal ticket to £1.10. Over 30 million lottery tickets are sold every week so this would raise somewhere in the region of £156 million per year.
• Mobile phone tax of £1 a month. This would rise to £5 a month for anybody with more than two phones. There are an astonishing 75 million mobile phones in the UK. That's more than one phone for every person in the country. This would raise £900 million per year.

          


Just a few ideas for you George. I think most of them are "fair." As most of you're mates won't benefit from them you probably disagree.