A tax on grief? Can we change this?

[Senethro]

The role of the old aristocracy in this age puzzles me. The ranks of merchants, mill owners and managers who have risen to join them over the centuries clearly did stuff but what is Sir Domhaill MacDougal-Stewart-Campbell and his pile of rocks for?

(christ I'd love to remove all the stealth taxes and just bump up the income tax [in a progressive manner!] but you'd never get the buggers to agree to it because waaaah taxes)

[jollytiddlywink]

Burial of the dead is the seventh Corporal Act of Mercy. This is an act which almost all cultures share.

A head stone is a memorial to the burial of the dead person and links into seventh Spiritual Act of Mercy: prayer for the living and the dead. Although this latter point depends on belief in an immortal soul.

The state should facilitate this; taxes are an obstruction.

Burial (or cremation) of the dead is a sanitary measure to prevent the spread of disease, and laws detailing where bodies can be buried date at least as far back as the Roman Empire, and indeed pre-date Christianity. Burial of bodies far pre-dates Christianity, in a time scale that can be measured in thousands of years, if not tens of thousands.
The fact that Catholicism later adopted burial as an act of mercy is therefore irrelevant regardless of belief in an immortal soul. Burial and cremation are undertaken primarily for biological reasons, given that it is only the biological reasons for the treatment of corpses which have remained constant through history.

Taxes are an obstruction to everything that is taxed. They are an obstruction to me flying home for Christmas, to me heating my house (albeit at a reduced VAT rate), to me spending my wages as I see fit, etc. And that doesn't bother me. The state provides services, and they need to be paid for.

[munchingfoo]

94% of estates don't pay inheritance tax. The ones that do can clearly afford to.

Many of these families can't realistically afford the tax, as their wealth is tied up in their own property - which is usually heavily mortgaged. This results in the sale of many families' houses: I have personally witnessed the combined problem of high house prices and inheritance tax change one rural village into a commuter suburb for London. It's not just a question of whether people can find the means to pay.

Hmm - is it true that if I own a £1m house with a £750,000 mortgage, and I died, that my children would have to pay tax on that estate? I don't believe so. I could be wrong.

Either way - if they are "heavily mortgaged" then it is the parent's fault for losing the "family home", not the governments. If the home is owned fully, or in a large enough part, there is no bank in the country who won't offer you a re-mortgage to cover the tax, unless you are unemployed.

What's worse, a rural village becoming a London Suburb, or a couple of elite families owning a vastly disproportionate quantity of the country's wealth such that it becomes nearly impossible to redress the balance after a number of generations (wealth creates wealth).

[Haunted]

You talk about these "rich people". 10% is still a large percentage of the population - it's not all yahs. As a St. Andrews graduate, there's a good chance you'll end up being among them.

Wouldn't bother me. In fact it's quite nice to think I could one day live as comfortably.

Besides who paid for my education to put me in a position to acquire such wealth?

[RedCelt69]

Wouldn't bother me. In fact it's quite nice to think I could one day live as comfortably.

It has long been an annoyance of mine that people back policies (and political parties) which benefit themselves rather than what would benefit the whole of the country.*

It shouldn't matter whether an inheritance tax would or would not affect you as an individual. Uppermost should be the concern of whether, on the whole, it serves the best interests of the wider population.

Besides who paid for my education to put me in a position to acquire such wealth?

Good point.



* Such people have a tendency to vote Conservative.

[Super Jock]

* Such people have a tendency to vote Conservative.

I think the above statement is true, and hence why conservative still hold the bad guy look. If they could shake the attitude of their voters then maybe they'd have more respect. I'm not convinced the party is any worse than the alternatives though.

There is a responsibility of democracy to provide for the individual as well, but it bottlenecks when people "me me me" vote. That's just the worst case scenario of democracy, that provides it's moral high ground over other governments, as it's worst case scenario can still represent for the majority. I think this holds a nation back.

[same guest]

94% of estates don't pay inheritance tax. The ones that do can clearly afford to.

So fuck you duggeh, redistribution is awesome

All estates under 325k don't pay inheritance tax. The super-wealthy have other ways of making gifts while escaping tax, such as making a transfer to a trust seven or more years in advance of their death, or doing what a lot of wealthy Brits do-- expatriating to a jurisdiction, generally tropical, which doesn't have the tax. As they are non-domiciled the tax passes outside of the UK tax net. It also raises very little revenue- about 2.8bn per year by my count. And it is expensive to administer, costing 1.28p per pound collected.

Conclusion: inheritance tax is paid overwhelmingly by the estates of middle classes. There are statistics on this if you trawl through the website of the ONS. It is, in my opinion, a "jealousy tax" imposed by the proles on the wealthy that they have to look at every single day, rather than actually taxing the hyperwealthy that the government likes to say it's taking money from.

[RedCelt69]

It is, in my opinion, a "jealousy tax"

Well, seeing as how you've repeatedly demonstrated that your opinion is worth jack-shit...

[LonelyPilgrim]

It shouldn't matter whether an inheritance tax would or would not affect you as an individual. Uppermost should be the concern of whether, on the whole, it serves the best interests of the wider population.

But that's not how democracy works. In fact, the tendency for everyone to look out for themselves was the key reason why so many Enlightenment thinkers felt that democracy was a non-starter. It was James Madison who really articulated that if you have a large enough country you will also have enough special interests and self-interested voters that all of their petty nonsense will be cancelled out by other petty groups and individuals' petty nonsense and the policies you get in the end, with a little luck, might actually do more to help most people than harm.

If you want policies that are designed, from scratch, to be of greatest benefit to the people as a whole then you need a good ol' enlightened despotism.

[RedCelt69]

If you want policies that are designed, from scratch, to be of greatest benefit to the people as a whole then you need a good ol' enlightened despotism.

I totally agree. Which is why I'm not an advocate of democracy.

[Senethro]

When democracy fails, you can count on Stalin!

[RedCelt69]

When democracy fails, you can count on Stalin!

Yes. Because the only alternative to democracy is Stalinism.

[exnihilo]

Am I being really stupid? IHT? What's the H stand for? Or are we talking about In Heritance Tax?

[RedCelt69]

Am I being really stupid? IHT? What's the H stand for? Or are we talking about In Heritance Tax?

Google IHT... and ignore the references to the International Herald Tribune. It comes up with hits for inheritance tax, meaning that the pages have IHT as a search tag.

It is an accepted acronym for inheritance tax (less confusing than referring to it as IT - as that acronym has wider usage for something else entirely).

[exnihilo]

That it is widely used, or accepted, is irrelevant to my point - there's no H. So the 1986 "rebranding" to Inheritance Tax/IHT was stupid. At least when it was Capital Transfer Tax or Estate Duty the abbreviation (not acronym) actually represented the words, unless some civil servant/politician somewhere things it is "In Heritance", which wouldn't surprise me in the least.

[RedCelt69]

That it is widely used, or accepted, is irrelevant to my point - there's no H. So the 1986 "rebranding" to Inheritance Tax/IHT was stupid. At least when it was Capital Transfer Tax or Estate Duty the abbreviation (not acronym) actually represented the words, unless some civil servant/politician somewhere things it is "In Heritance", which wouldn't surprise me in the least.

It seems a strange thing to get your panties bunched-up over. You're suggesting that something should be named so as to have a unique acronym? What abbreviations did Capital Transfer Tax and Estate Duty have - other than (respectively) CTT and ED, which are abbreviations and acronyms?

[exnihilo]

You'll be wanting to check that, there is no sense in which CTT is an acronym. I don't ask that they be unique, nor are my panties in a bunch, I just don't think we should go sticking nonsense letters in in order to avoid being the same as something else. As you yourself pointed out, IHT returns the International Herald Tribune before it returns Inheritance Tax, just as IT would return Information Technology before Inheritance Tax. There are few unique letter combinations left, and splitting Inheritance into In and Heritance didn't provide one of them, it just made it look stupid.

[RedCelt69]

You'll be wanting to check that, there is no sense in which CTT is an acronym.

Uhm, you'll be the one wanting to check that. CTT is a TLA (Three Letter Acronym).

An abbreviation is where you represent a word using only some of the letters of that word. e.g. Mr for Mister. An acronym is a form of abbreviation which uses the initial letters* of more than one word.

*Sometimes, to make for a more fluid, pronounceable acronym**, more than just the initial letters are used. A classic example is radar for Radio Detecting And Ranging... because rdar doesn't scan so well.

**Or just to make it clearer and/or more appealing. Having BSc (Batchelor of Science) after your name is preferable to BS.

[Thalia]

I think exnihilo is making a distinction between an acronym and an initialism - in the strictist sense an acronym is an abbreviation of initial letters that forms a word of its own, such as radar, whereas an initialism would be where you take the first letters and spell them out when you say them, such as FBI. In which case CTT is an initialism and not an acronym.

[RedCelt69]

in the strictist sense an acronym is an abbreviation of initial letters that forms a word of its own

FBI, BBC, ITV, CIA, RIP... are all acronyms. Call them initialisms too. Things can be defined by more than one word.