That's why we tax the living fuck out of the working man, it seems.

I, for example, pay \ufffd1-ish for a litre of fuel. 75% of that is tax.

I am taxed at approximately 40 pence in the pound, all things considered.

And when I buy a house, I will pay tens of thousands of pounds in stamp duty, for the privilege of spending many thousands of pounds on a house.

Inheritance tax is, quite simply, the final insult.

If government cannot afford to work with the tax income from living people, then I humbly suggest they get their house in order, stop spending money on stupid wars that have no bearing on the security of our nation, and don't do things like \ufffd750 million of our money on the Millennium Fucking Dome and other idiotic white elephants of a similar ilk.

There's billions of pounds sloshing around that's been extracted from the populace that simply gets pissed away by the state. Make them spend THAT properly.

An article with which I agree is in a comment replying to this one (it's a bit long).

(As for the "we need to control the rich people" thing - well, it's pointless because they simply employ expensive accountants in order to arrange their money in such a way that they're untouched. So you piss off the tiddlers (aka voters) and don't affect the big fish.)

[link|http://conservativehome.blogs.com/100policies/2006/08/matthew_elliott.html|http://conservativeh...thew_elliott.html]

Matthew Elliott and James Frayne: "Abolish Inheritance Tax"

Matthew Elliott is Chief Executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance and James Frayne is Campaign Director

> Policy summary

The abolition of inheritance tax.

> Policy explanation

Inheritance tax is currently levied at a massive 40 percent on estates worth more than \ufffd285,000. This currently affects around 1.5 million households. However, the Halifax have projected that by 2020 the tax will affect 4.2million households if the threshold continues to rise very slowly at a time when house prices are rising steadily. The tax raises around \ufffd3.6 billion a year.

We believe that inheritance tax should be abolished. It is not simply a tax on the rich (who can and do employ expensive accountants to come up with ways of dodging it) but affects ordinary families. It is immoral because it forces people to pay tax on their possessions, having already paid huge amounts of tax throughout their lives.

> Political risks and opportunities

Contrary to what many in Westminster seem to believe, inheritance tax is an issue that concerns ordinary people across the country. The polls clearly show that people are opposed to it. According to a Populus poll for the BBC in March, people disagreed by 73-25 percent that inheritance tax was a "fair way" for the Government to raise money. The poll also revealed that over 40 percent of those questioned had had to take inheritance tax into account recently in their own lives. This reflects two things above all:

(a) people understand the obvious immorality of what amounts to "double taxation"; and
(b) it is not seen as a "tax cut for the rich" - ordinary people are being hit by it.

A commitment to getting rid of inheritance tax would show the Party understood the concerns of ordinary middle class families and that it its agenda was driven by wanting to make life "fair" for people. The abolition of inheritance tax should form part of a wider campaign to reduce the tax burden on families - a campaign which should (like the Lib Dems) commit to changing the thresholds at which the various tax rates kick in, and reducing the basic rate of tax.

Of course there is always some "risk" in announcing any policy. Here the risk lies in what message abolishing inheritance tax says about the Party's priorities at a time when the Party has been actively and explicitly briefing that it was moving away from tax as an issue because it does not fit the new "brand". It will require a significant change in the tone of the Party's campaigning and a clear briefing that the Party sees the issue of tax as an integral part of its compassionate conservative agenda - for
example, because "reducing the tax burden on ordinary families will make life easier for them and give them the money to spend on their own priorities". On the issue of inheritance tax specifically, whilst the public are opposed to it anyway, it would be better if, like in the US, the tax became publicly known as the death tax (which is essentially what it is).

> Questions for ConservativeHome readers

* How should the issue of tax be brought back into the Conservative "brand" given the Party's clear briefing that it has been excluded?
* What other high-profile tax cuts should be announced at the same time to minimise the ability of the Government to say it will mostly affect Southern voters?
* Would it be better to begin the process of abolition by raising the threshold massively?

> Costs

It is always dangerous to get into the game of "costing" tax cuts because tax cuts have "dynamic effects" - they create a "rising tide" which boosts the economy as a whole and leads to revenues holding up (look at Australia, Ireland, the US and elsewhere). However, on a "static" analysis, the
abolition of inheritance tax would "cost" \ufffd3.6 billion - the amount the tax currently raises. Given that the European Central Bank estimates that the British Government wastes over \ufffd80 billion a year, the figure is relatively trivial.

:-)

I think I've plowed this ground before, but to briefly recap. My views are:

1) Vast accumulated wealth is bad for society. It gives too much power over long periods of time to families. It removes incentives for following generations to create new wealth (they instead spend their time protecting what Great Grandpa created). It helps create an aristocracy of wealth in a country that is supposed to be egalitarian.

That will always exist on some scale in any society where some people have more stuff than other people. You cannot legislate or tax it away. Well, you can; we call it "North Korea".

2) Those who have vast fortunes (the top fraction of 1%) are in a much better position to pay a fair share of the costs of society than someone in, say, the bottom 25% of incomes. The rich have much more invested in the society than the poor, as TR pointed out, so they should be willing to pay more to help lift society as a whole.

The rich, generally speaking, have much more invested offshore than the poor. In fact, your paragraph here is positively socialist; I thought the "American Way" was "Pay Your Way"?

3) In the US, very few estates are taxed as it is, yet it's an important source of revenue for the Federal government. If inheritance taxes are abolished, that money has to come from somewhere.

In the UK, a paltry \ufffd3.6B was raised from inheritance tax last year - the square root of fuck all, in government accountancy terms. By contrast, some \ufffd80B was wasted by the government. What's that about tails, dogs and the wagging thereof?

4) Few, in the US anyway, are talking about some sort of leveling tax that cedes huge fortunes directly to the US Treasury. That's certainly not what I'm looking for. I think a graduated rate peaking at something like the top marginal Federal Income Tax rate would be fair; kicking in at say $5M or $10M or $50M or so.

I don't see inheritance taxes as "double taxation" and I don't see it as unfair. We can argue about what level of estate should be taxed, and we can argue about the rate, but I think the idea of an estate tax is a good one and it should be maintained.

It's double taxation (a tax on stuff just cuz) whether you see it as that or not.

I don't find arguments like, "The rich have lawyers and accountants so they can get out of it, so no-one should have to pay it" to be persuasive. Tighten the loopholes, don't throw out the tax. We don't abolish sales taxes because people don't pay them at yard sales, or don't pay them when they visit their drug dealer, for example.

What have informal yard sales and illegal narcotics transactions got to do with sales tax?