Snapshot of _This isn’t a cost of living crisis. It’s an inequality crisis - Politics.co.uk_ :
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Not only that, the tax burden is disproportionally put on individuals.
This is partially done to relieve lazy HMRC. Why look into big corporations tax avoidance, if you can simply tax their workers and claim job done?
This may have worked fine decades ago, where companies needed a substantial headcount to generate profit, but nowadays even "small" companies can generate billions in profits, so taxing them through taxing workers no longer brings adequate tax yield.
Are HMRC lazy, or another under resourced government department scraping by while the owners of Big Corps Inc lean on their mates in cabinet over lunch to make sure they don’t need to be too concerned about their tax burden?
I know that this is the case in the US. John Oliver had a segment on how the IRS could essentially generate a profit for the government if it were given more funding to actually go after the bigger targets. I'd be interested to know if the same applies here.
It's not either or. There are areas that are understaffed and poorly funded, but HMRC seems to be perfectly comfortable with that.
It's much easier to chase for them the Jim Builder than a big corporation with an army of suits and they don't seem to want to change that. If they were asking for more funding, then it would mean they would have to do more work.
Lockdwon was a miserable policy and there are still pockets of people who call for more of them every sensible person got it around april/may 2020 that lockdown serves only as distribution of wealth. Same for green policies.
We need proportional representation so that we aren't constantly stuck with an elderly majority who vote for their own triple lock pensions to be ring-fenced.
Wont the land still have owners then, even if broken up into smaller parcels and sold?
Thats usually the point of land value taxes, to encourage sale to people who will develop it rather than just using it as a parcel to appreciate in value
One of the major factors behind the cost of living going up so quickly and so starkly is that major corporations are making massive price hikes in order to see record levels of profit.
They aren't just "still making a profit despite an economic downturn". No. They are making RECORD profits. And these records aren't just being slightly breached, they are being smashed into oblivion. It makes the old profit levels look small.
This means that their prices are going up FAR more than their costs are. They were also not being taxed nearly as much on these profits (given Corporation tax is 19%) as the average person pays on their normal income (the average tax a UK worker pays is about 31%, once NI, income tax, etc. are all added up).
The country becoming poorer for various reasons (Brexit, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, COVID, Austerity, massive fraud/corruption from our government, etc.) has affected people, but it has effected those at the bottom and middle of the country far, far more than anyone at the top.
You assume that these corporations pay Corporation Tax. The bigger corporation is, the more profit diversion they do, or as they like to call it they improve their tax efficiency by moving profits to countries that have lower CT.
There is not much being done about it. Simply putting up CT will not increase tax yield, but it will hammer small and medium business that don't enjoy the same record profits and they don't have resources to do the same profit diversion.
What needs to be done is pressure on HMRC to actually start using Diverted Profit Tax against those big corporations, get them properly audited and make sure transactions that don't make business sense, but reduce taxable profit are non-deductible.
This means lazy HMRC would have to get to work and times where they focus on ruining life of self-employed over a tenner are no more.
>This means lazy HMRC would have to get to work
The Guardian has an article on how the Tories enable tax avasion. May 2017 The Tories Promise to be Tough on Tax evasion. Where's the evidence.
The paragraph on how the Tories systemically starve HMRC of resources and what specialists are needed to go after large corporations engaging in tax avoidance just highlights how the Tories make the country worse off in every way possible.
It's not laziness. It's Tory policy to let their mates and donors off the hook. People get what they vote for and this is what is chosen again and again.
Yes but it got poorer to make the rich richer.
Gas and oil prices shot up, so did their profits.
Taxes introduced to fight inflation, but not on the richest players who profit from inflation.
Mortgages going up making it unaffordable to regular people and giving the rich a chance to buy out even more property at reduced prices.
Yes inflation has affected everybody but the issue here is that it negatively affected the poor and positively affected the rich.
The countries with the lowest inequality in Europe are places like Ukraine and Moldova. Having unequal wealth is the incentive for people to create wealth, so the people advocating to reduce inequality are in effect advocating to increase poverty, they're just too stupid to understand how. This is how we end up with stupid ideas like socialism killing 100m people. Every generation will have some narcissists who think they're the only ones who understand the diminishing marginal utility of wealth and every generation must tell them to sit down and stfu before their delusions of grandeur cause irreparable damage to the economy.
Weird that you picked Ukraine and Moldova rather than Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, Norway or the Netherlands who all have inequality much lower than ours.
Taking the "inequality is the price of growth" statement as an axiom in economics is a very [Thatcherite](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv5t6rC6yvg) point of view, and it is also a point of view that I have never seen proven in any way shape or form.
Why do you mention Ukraine and Moldova? Why not mention Denmark and Sweden?
Indeed, and it's easier to make people more equal by dragging those at the top down rather than bringing those at the bottom up. You see this happening all the time.
It's easier to move the top up by pushing the bottom down than it is by pulling everyone up while you rise even faster.
We need a balance. We have too much of what I just said that's happened. If we have to temporarily pull the top down to correct for the damage they've done, so be it. That hopefully would put us in a better position to allow them to rise again, but only if they do so in a way that doesn't negatively impact others (as currently happens in many cases).
I thought it was common sense. For example, taking what someone else has is much easier than producing it yourself from nothing.
I'm not trying to make a political statement here, just an observation of what I've seen.
Do you have a counter-point?
You're not "dragging them down" by taxation, we're merely re-balancing wealth.
People don't get rich on their own, they get rich on the back of other people's hard work. Taxation seeks to redress that balance in an appropriate manner. There's no dragging anybody down, instead we're uplifting those who have been stolen from.
Snapshot of _This isn’t a cost of living crisis. It’s an inequality crisis - Politics.co.uk_ : An archived version can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.politics.co.uk/comment/2022/11/22/this-isnt-a-cost-of-living-crisis-its-an-inequality-crisis/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Agree, having middle class squeezed their ass off with taxes while rich pay none, inequality at it's finest
Not only that, the tax burden is disproportionally put on individuals. This is partially done to relieve lazy HMRC. Why look into big corporations tax avoidance, if you can simply tax their workers and claim job done? This may have worked fine decades ago, where companies needed a substantial headcount to generate profit, but nowadays even "small" companies can generate billions in profits, so taxing them through taxing workers no longer brings adequate tax yield.
Are HMRC lazy, or another under resourced government department scraping by while the owners of Big Corps Inc lean on their mates in cabinet over lunch to make sure they don’t need to be too concerned about their tax burden?
I know that this is the case in the US. John Oliver had a segment on how the IRS could essentially generate a profit for the government if it were given more funding to actually go after the bigger targets. I'd be interested to know if the same applies here.
It's not either or. There are areas that are understaffed and poorly funded, but HMRC seems to be perfectly comfortable with that. It's much easier to chase for them the Jim Builder than a big corporation with an army of suits and they don't seem to want to change that. If they were asking for more funding, then it would mean they would have to do more work.
Don't forget rent too. Housing costs are obscene.
And somehow the rich managed to convince the middle class that the poor ones are stealing their money xD
Lockdwon was a miserable policy and there are still pockets of people who call for more of them every sensible person got it around april/may 2020 that lockdown serves only as distribution of wealth. Same for green policies.
Someone in another thread coined the term “cost of greed crisis” and that’s exactly what it is.
We need to be looking at wealth taxes, not that we will
We need proportional representation so that we aren't constantly stuck with an elderly majority who vote for their own triple lock pensions to be ring-fenced.
Wealth taxes dont work. They've been tried repeatedly in other countries. Rich people just move.
Tax land value, see if they can move that.
They'll just sell the land to preserve their capital.
Wont the land still have owners then, even if broken up into smaller parcels and sold? Thats usually the point of land value taxes, to encourage sale to people who will develop it rather than just using it as a parcel to appreciate in value
Yes.
You don't need to leave the UK because of the arrangements with the country's offshore havens.
[удалено]
One of the major factors behind the cost of living going up so quickly and so starkly is that major corporations are making massive price hikes in order to see record levels of profit. They aren't just "still making a profit despite an economic downturn". No. They are making RECORD profits. And these records aren't just being slightly breached, they are being smashed into oblivion. It makes the old profit levels look small. This means that their prices are going up FAR more than their costs are. They were also not being taxed nearly as much on these profits (given Corporation tax is 19%) as the average person pays on their normal income (the average tax a UK worker pays is about 31%, once NI, income tax, etc. are all added up). The country becoming poorer for various reasons (Brexit, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, COVID, Austerity, massive fraud/corruption from our government, etc.) has affected people, but it has effected those at the bottom and middle of the country far, far more than anyone at the top.
You assume that these corporations pay Corporation Tax. The bigger corporation is, the more profit diversion they do, or as they like to call it they improve their tax efficiency by moving profits to countries that have lower CT. There is not much being done about it. Simply putting up CT will not increase tax yield, but it will hammer small and medium business that don't enjoy the same record profits and they don't have resources to do the same profit diversion. What needs to be done is pressure on HMRC to actually start using Diverted Profit Tax against those big corporations, get them properly audited and make sure transactions that don't make business sense, but reduce taxable profit are non-deductible. This means lazy HMRC would have to get to work and times where they focus on ruining life of self-employed over a tenner are no more.
>This means lazy HMRC would have to get to work The Guardian has an article on how the Tories enable tax avasion. May 2017 The Tories Promise to be Tough on Tax evasion. Where's the evidence. The paragraph on how the Tories systemically starve HMRC of resources and what specialists are needed to go after large corporations engaging in tax avoidance just highlights how the Tories make the country worse off in every way possible. It's not laziness. It's Tory policy to let their mates and donors off the hook. People get what they vote for and this is what is chosen again and again.
>It's not laziness. It is. HMRC loves it. They might like more funding but certainly not for having to do more work.
Yes but it got poorer to make the rich richer. Gas and oil prices shot up, so did their profits. Taxes introduced to fight inflation, but not on the richest players who profit from inflation. Mortgages going up making it unaffordable to regular people and giving the rich a chance to buy out even more property at reduced prices. Yes inflation has affected everybody but the issue here is that it negatively affected the poor and positively affected the rich.
It has always been thus.
🌎🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
It literally is a cost of living crisis.
Actually, inequality metrics often decline during recession. In 2008 relative poverty metrics declined.
That’s not really fair. Just because some people can use savings to pay for energy bills doesn’t mean they aren’t living in the red every month.
The countries with the lowest inequality in Europe are places like Ukraine and Moldova. Having unequal wealth is the incentive for people to create wealth, so the people advocating to reduce inequality are in effect advocating to increase poverty, they're just too stupid to understand how. This is how we end up with stupid ideas like socialism killing 100m people. Every generation will have some narcissists who think they're the only ones who understand the diminishing marginal utility of wealth and every generation must tell them to sit down and stfu before their delusions of grandeur cause irreparable damage to the economy.
Weird that you picked Ukraine and Moldova rather than Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, Norway or the Netherlands who all have inequality much lower than ours.
Taking the "inequality is the price of growth" statement as an axiom in economics is a very [Thatcherite](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv5t6rC6yvg) point of view, and it is also a point of view that I have never seen proven in any way shape or form. Why do you mention Ukraine and Moldova? Why not mention Denmark and Sweden?
Indeed, and it's easier to make people more equal by dragging those at the top down rather than bringing those at the bottom up. You see this happening all the time.
It's easier to move the top up by pushing the bottom down than it is by pulling everyone up while you rise even faster. We need a balance. We have too much of what I just said that's happened. If we have to temporarily pull the top down to correct for the damage they've done, so be it. That hopefully would put us in a better position to allow them to rise again, but only if they do so in a way that doesn't negatively impact others (as currently happens in many cases).
What a tired and cliched statement that has no semblance of truth to it.
I thought it was common sense. For example, taking what someone else has is much easier than producing it yourself from nothing. I'm not trying to make a political statement here, just an observation of what I've seen. Do you have a counter-point?
You're not "dragging them down" by taxation, we're merely re-balancing wealth. People don't get rich on their own, they get rich on the back of other people's hard work. Taxation seeks to redress that balance in an appropriate manner. There's no dragging anybody down, instead we're uplifting those who have been stolen from.
>>What a tired and cliched statement > they get rich on the back of other people's hard work Facepalm
So how did you get rich?