Council tax whinge

Originally Posted by Ed

Cobblers.

You cannot deny that council tax has far outstripped inflation. It's a fine socialist dogma to confuse all the issues. I am talking about Council Tax and Council Tax alone. It is a perfectly valid statement to say that it has gone up far more than inflation. It is neither inaccurate nor misleading. But your suggestions are both.

And if it isn't the Government's responsibility - specifically Gordon Brown, as he was in charge of the purse strings - then whose responsibility is it?

Oh please, socialist dogma? I'm more than open about my politics but please don't mistake my ideals for my eagerness to see the truth of any given matter rather than just resorting to knee jerk responses of "tax has gone up - burn the witch/politician/asylum seeker". I'm not looking for a fight but you sure as hell can have one if you want.

At no stage did I claim that council tax has done nothing other than outstrip inflation, in fact my very first sentence was "Total tax burden has increased." - is that socialist dogma, is that innacurate and misleading? What I did point out was that without looking at the whole picture you get a very narrow set of statistics that can be used to fuel knee jerk responses.

In fact this has already been highlighted at the beginning of this thread:

Originally Posted by Kilted Ginger

Be grateful my brother in the us pays 3k a year council tax, the next street over pays 16.5k

Btw he has a 2 bed flat

Followed by:

Originally Posted by Luckypants

But his income tax is lower, offsetting it to a degree. He is also able write his local tax off against his federal taxes, which means he pays it out of untaxed income not taxed income - that makes a big difference to the amount of gross pay Council Tax takes.

Still a lot though!

Now I was quite happy to have an economic argument but if you want to reduce it down to socialist dogma insults - if others can follow the simple logic that one tax does not a whole picture make, then why the hell can't you?

this thread has really picked up

Originally Posted by sarah

this thread has really picked up

Meh MiniMatt is GrumpyCat today

Possibly a little harsh on Ed there. I shall ponder this further.

Originally Posted by MiniMatt

Meh MiniMatt is GrumpyCat today

Possibly a little harsh on Ed there. I shall ponder this further.

i haven't got the patience to write that kind of post. i wish i did.

I'm big enough to apologise for the 'socialist' jibe.

Sorry Matt.

But I stand by everything else. And your reply, whilst no doubt inflamed by my comment, is over the top. What difference does the 'overall tax burden' make to my 85 yo mother, she pays hardly any income tax as she has hardly any income, and most of it is pension so fixed, but the huge rises in council tax over the last 10 years have affected her badly. Her pension hasn't gone up by anything like as much.

And what's the relevance of a US comparison to the UK?

It isn't valid to mix up all these taxes. If you don't have a bike or a car then you won't pay road tax, fuel duties or insurance premium tax. If you buy very little there'd be next to no VAT. I don't agree that the acid test is average wealth because there is no such thing as the average person. It's perfectly valid to select one tax and to examine it in isolation and so far you have not persuaded me otherwise. Averaging hides everything, specifics stand or fall on their own.

[northwind]

Originally Posted by Gazza77

Probably doesn't help that councils are funded by central government as well as council tax. In order for their total income to remain at a constant council tax has to rise each year, because central government funding is falling

Actually I think the exact opposite is true, I'm pretty sure central government contribution to councils has gone up over inflation every year in this period.

How much of council tax is actually controlled from central government? I was under the impression it was pretty devolved but it looks like I'm wrong.

[northwind]

Originally Posted by Ceri JC

They just lost all the money they had already taken off us in the icelandic banks, remember?

Oh, maybe you can explain this one, why did people find it so objectionable that councils put their budget into banks in order to get a better return on our money? It'd be madness to have it sat around gaining no interest so they used short-term savings accounts, but when people hear about it they act like it's the end of the world... "Why are the council saving MY money?" it's ridiculous...

[punyXpress]

Originally Posted by northwind

Actually I think the exact opposite is true, I'm pretty sure central government contribution to councils has gone up over inflation every year in this period.

How much of council tax is actually controlled from central government? I was under the impression it was pretty devolved but it looks like I'm wrong.

But Government has created so many hare-brained schemes and non-jobs that they have directly cost many councils much more than any increase they may have given in rate support. One in particular is Bus Passes. The money reimbursed to many councils is grotesquely less than the cost - another scheme not fully thought out!
Just to hide the bad news :
Due to Brown G's efforts ( and a few others ) our indebtedness as a country is now more per household than the value of that house.
On that basis, shouldn't he be paying that Council Tax ?

[Luckypants]

MiniMatt, it's late so I can't provide a response to your cogent argument (as usual). But I would like to point out it was me that expended the argument a little to include other taxes which may have provoked some of your response.

So Ed. my bad for bringing in other taxes. I totally agree that the rate of increase in Council Tax is way beyond inflation. I believe this was one of the ways in which New Labour was able to keep it's pledge to not raise Income Tax, by raising the revenue it would have provided in rate support via large Council Tax rises. And so we come full circle to the other taxes issue.

I'll try to make a better argument tomorrow.

Ok, I was a little inflamatory, I'll try to be more constructive in this one.

Originally Posted by Ed

It isn't valid to mix up all these taxes. If you don't have a bike or a car then you won't pay road tax, fuel duties or insurance premium tax. If you buy very little there'd be next to no VAT. I don't agree that the acid test is average wealth because there is no such thing as the average person. It's perfectly valid to select one tax and to examine it in isolation and so far you have not persuaded me otherwise. Averaging hides everything, specifics stand or fall on their own.

Bingo! We have a winner! You are 100% correct, there is no such thing as the average person. What I'm trying to show is that this is precisely why we can't treat everything in isolation and have to look at the wider picture.

Individual tax systems create winners and losers. I'll use a couple of examples:
LP has already outlined in this thread that if council tax were replaced with a local income tax he'd be notably worse off.
Going by your description of your mother's circumstances, if council tax were replaced with a local income tax she'd be notably better off.

So which system is right? The answer is neither - no tax system will be fair to all of the people all of the time. So you make sure that no one tax system makes up the entire tax burden. You make some taxes based on income, you make some based on consumption, you make some that are crudely based on property, and make some that are flat across the board. And you hope that when taking the big picture into account you smooth out the peaks and troughs of the winners and losers. If we only looked at council tax in isolation we'd see that the current version of council tax hits your mother harder and LP less so. If we look at income tax then LP gets hit harder with this stick than your mother. If we only looked at individual taxes in isolation we'd think that the solution would be for pensioners only to pay income tax and working age people only to pay council tax. Obviously that wouldn't work, but we stand a chance of making it work if we looked at the total tax burden rather than individual taxes in isolation - perhaps we could abolish council tax for your mother, and to pay for that we'd increase LP's income tax; now that may be a possibility, but naturally that money we're taking from LP is money he could otherwise be putting toward his own retirement, so when he reaches his dotage many years from now he'll require more assistance from the state than before.... there's no easy solution, but a fundamental mistake people seem to make is in assuming that central government money is free money.

And yet still the overall system does still creates winners and losers, and those winners and losers will vary as they go through life - the system that benefits you now may hurt you in retirement. Or vice versa.

Ok, that's the persuasion bit out the way. Now the argumentative bit.

What I really take issue with is knee jerk "it's all the current government's fault" response because it implies that A.N.Other party or the poster could do things so much better. Now I have no love for this government or Gordon Brown - I've already made it clear on this forum that I will not be voting for them in the next election (for other reasons than taxation, in the field of tax v. spend my personal opinion is that they've performed a very necessary re-adjustment of priorities over the previous incumbents - old ladies used to have to wait a lot longer for hip operations). But I'm not so naive as to think that any other party has the miracle answer that can make a winner out of both LP and your mother. Governments the world over have been trying to (or perhaps just promising to) make winners out of everybody for centuries - none of them have got it right.

Now, if you or anyone has a suggestion on making a fairer world then please, please pipe up. I pretty much consider it a responsibility of every individual on Earth to try (success is irrelevant) to leave the world a better place than they found it. But it really, really winds me up when people (and I'm generalising here rather than directing this at you) just whine about how crap the country is and about how unfair it is. Your mother lives in a country where she will not die of starvation, where she will not be imprisoned for her political views, where she will not be beaten by soldiers, she lives in a country where emergency medical care is provided free of charge, she does not have to worry about whether water will come out the taps or whether that water will be safe to drink. That alone puts your mother in the very top echelons of luckiest people on the planet.

Now getting more personal, in comparison to the rest of the country and it's inhabitants I'm fairly confident that you personally, and by implication the assistance you are able to give your mother, are more comfortable than average within this country - you're well educated, you're employed, you don't live in a sink estate, you're able to indulge in the occasional vice (motorcycles as a passion rather than a neccesity). I'm not suggesting you're rich (not that this is a crime), only that my guess is if you cut the country in half, you'd probably be in the more comfortable rather than less comfortable half. So assuming this to be the case - you're in the top half of people in one of the top countries on the planet and.... this next bit is unnecessarily cutting and I would wish it only to illustrate a general point rather than be aimed at you personnaly..... and you still think life is unfair?

Now why the section "and by implication the assistance you are able to give your mother"? Why should you subsidise your mother and make up the shortfall the government won't? Well aside from the fact that she did the same for you when you were in shorts, society is a collection of people - it's not isolatated individuals, within that society are smaller sub societies, we call those families. We've already discussed that different tax systems create different winners and losers so governments try to smooth the peaks and troughs across societies by implementing a range of tax strategies - well you have the power within your own sub-society to do a bit of smoothing yourself - your disposable income is currently greater than that of your mother; when you were doing your two year trainee time, saddled with student debt and ordering reams of OC1s on a crappy wage for some law firm perhaps the situation was reversed and perhaps she smoothed out some of those peaks and troughs in her own sub-society.

I'm not saying all this to guilt trip you, and I'm not saying that there aren't things terribly wrong with the tax system, all I'm saying is that I'm more interested in hearing potential solutions to problems than I am in hearing people just point and say "it's all their fault" (whoever they may be and whatever colour ribbon they might be wearing).

EDIT: Addendum
Now I'm not suggesting in the slightest that this implies that life for your mother and pensioners nationwide is rosy or anything like that but I just did a quick Google for some statistics (as you've probably noticed, I love a good statistic) - how about this one - in nine of the last ten years the number of pensioners below the poverty line has fallen. Who published this bit of Labour brown-nosing? The Daily Torygraph. Now is this good enough? Hell no - it's a feckin national disgrace that almost one in three are in poverty. But improvement in nine out of ten years - well, it sure as hell ain't good enough but I'd struggle to class it as fiscal incompetence especially when reported by the opposition's media mouthpiece (naturally, the Telegraph didn't spin it in quite the same way I just have - which is why you look at the statistics and make your own mind up rather than have it spoon fed from me or any other outlet).

EDIT 2: Saga Street Cred credentials
I figure when anyone makes a post like this they're duty bound to utter "some of my best friends are black/white/gay/straight". Well, my only Saga Street Cred comes from my mother, herself rapidly approaching pensionable age, who when I was growing up worked for Age Concern and who currently works for a charity which largely but not exclusively supports older people (Crossroads). Anyway, in my formative years it was her sense of outrage at the treatment of older people by the (then blue ribbon wearing) government which rubbed off on me, and it was my sense of outrage at the treatment of single mothers (and by implication their offspring - me) being demonised by the (then blue ribbon wearing) government which shaped me. Not sure if that's enough to make me "down" wiv da Tena Lady massiv?