11. HOT NEWS ON THE AUTUMN STATEMENT…

JAM FOR THE FEW!

I can speak with the greatest confidence and on the highest authority to predict that the Chancellor will not be cutting the rate of Land Value Taxation, tomorrow.

Er, but we don’t have Land Value Taxation, do we?

Well, we don’t have THAT kind of Land Value Taxation.

What is THAT kind?

The kind that landowners pay for doing nothing while their land gets more ‘valuable’ just because of where it is, all the public investment in infrastructure and services, and because there isn’t any more of it, etc.

Ah, so what kind are you talking about?

The kind that people who rent or buy somewhere to live have to pay landowners whose land has become so valuable just because of where it is, etc, etc, but which they did nothing to create.

But that’s the way ‘the market’ works, isn’t it? You have to pay the going rate, or someone else will rent or buy it…

Depends on what you mean by ‘work’. Flats and houses are a depreciating asset, so their price should be going down all the time unless the property is being improved and modernised. It’s only land prices that keep on going up, and you can’t do much to make it more valuable than it already is…a piece of land is a piece of land. So why should paying more and more for it be a good thing? It just means more of what people earn, which is taxed, goes into the pockets of people who have done nothing and mostly don’t get taxed at all.

But those people…some of them are people who are just selling on their house to someone else. They are not bad people.

No, but they are speculators just as much as the people who are doing it as a 'business' so to speak. In 2007, the amount by which house prices went up…that was the last year before the crash…was the equivalent of a deficit of nearly 4.5% of GDP…money just being sucked out of people’s earnings being spent on interest to banks and building societies (on money they created out of thin air) and inflated land prices, and not producing anything worthwhile that would improve our quality of life.

Hmm, but nobody is being harmed, are they?

Well, most homeowners will probably end up having paid no taxes, as the untaxed value of their homes will have increased by more than all the taxes they have paid over the course of their working life.

So who does pay taxes to pay for all our public services and infrastructure...and everything?

Good question! All the people who don’t own their home…mostly the people on the lowest incomes, in the most precarious jobs, or whose income from benefits is also now taxable….the people who still have to pay for rising rents, despite cuts in benefits…who don’t have enough money for food, heat, clothes, holidays, travel etc…you know, the kind of things that most normal people can do.

So what’s all that got to do with Land Value Taxation?

Haven’t you worked that out, yet? With Land Value Taxation, there would be more than enough tax income for all the services we need; no cuts to the NHS, libraries and all that kind of thing. You could cut income tax and corporation tax, which seems to be a pretty voluntary affair anyway, and still have enough, and you wouldn’t be taxing the things that you want more of…more production, better incomes, a stronger economy.

Sounds good to me.

It is…but turkeys don’t vote for Christmas…so they say…did they ever hold a turkey referendum to find out? We should let the voice of the turkeys be heard!

So no one is going to vote for anything so logical, even if our politicians had the intelligence to work this all out, and then the courage to do something about it. So all that income that could be extracted pretty painlessly from landowners is going to be squeezed out of the part of the population that can least afford it. And that’s why the Chancellor will not be cutting the rates of that kind of Land Value Taxation any time soon. You ought to read my blog on ‘Plunder’, btw. This is nothing new. Winston Churchill was banging on about it over a century ago.

The Winston Churchill?

Yes, the famous one…famously rude to women, anyone really…switched political parties not once but twice…some say for his own political advancement…not at all trusted or liked by fellow politicians…unpredictable…very smart at promoting himself in the media…bit of a celebrity politician…good at building walls...  

Sounds like someone else I know…I wonder who???             

                    

 

You can read more about the ideas in this ‘conversation’, and others, in a current series of nine blogs being written by Fred Harrison, Professor Danny Dorling and myself for a campaign in support of affordable housing, promoted by Taxpayers Against Poverty. You can also view my presentation Taking back control, with some specific ideas on how to make housing more affordable right away, made to a joint meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Poverty and TAP early in November.