Tax on earned income should be drastically cut to maybe 10 to 20%. This would stimulate the economy and prompt growth. But how to pay for it?The richest 0.3% of the population owns two thirds of UK land and 90% of the UK population are in debt to the other 10% who now own almost all of the UK's unencumbered wealth.
Adam Smith through JS Mill to subversives like Winston Churchill and Lloyd George – all argued that we should tax unearned income and gains from privileged property rights, rather earned income.
The net effect for 90% of the population of such levies - eg a land value tax; a levy on non-renewable resources; a levy on intellectual property; a levy on GROSS corporate revenues in respect of the privilege of limited liability - would be positive. The wealthiest 10% would pay more - in some cases a lot more - than they do now that the greater part of their wealth goes untaxed. Moreover, they could be taxed in a way that would be impossible to escape. They may be mobile, and could leave the UK, but the land they own stays where it is. Other levies on gross revenues arising in the UK could be simply collected through the clearing system.
The savings in the public and private sector administration, and the increases in collection due to the impossibility of avoidance and evasion, would be phenomenal.
Of course, the privileged turkeys who own, manage and milk the country would never enact Christmas, but that does not make the excessive taxation of earned income any more acceptable. It just exposes the neo-liberals currently in power - and the equally culpable neo-liberal New Labour contingent in power for the last 13 years - for the hypocrites they are.
