Post by Asim Qureshi

If I buy a house in the UK to live in for £500k and 10 years later sell it for £1m, making £500k, I pay exactly £0 in capital gains tax. But if a teacher, doctor, nurse, or whoever earns £50k a year, they'd be taxed £13k, or £130k from their £500k earnings over 10 years. This is just one example that highlights how the UK's tax system, and every other tax system I know of, is skewed massively to help the wealthy become more wealthy, and discourages economic activity, i.e. employment, by taxing it. Let me give you another example. A person I know well, worth about £5m, hasn't paid a penny in tax in over a decade, she's just sitting on her wealth. Yet graduates, fresh out of university, laden in debt, struggling to pay their rent, will end up giving up well over 10% of their earnings in taxes. Do we really believe that some indebted fresh grad should pay more tax than a multimillionaire? Taxes, layered upon layers, trying to squeeze every form of activity, have become way too complex and are massively unfair. Across the world, taxes are actually regressive, where the rich pay proportionally less because of tax loopholes, which are mostly exploited by the wealthy, and direct taxes, which the less-well-off pay a proportionately greater share of their income. It's bloody obvious that to have a fairer society, the wealthy should pay the same percentage as everyone else, and by far the most effective way to do this is to have, surprise, surprise, a wealth tax. The argument that taxes have already been paid by the wealthy is a weak one. Take, for example, that £1m house, the entire gain wouldn't be taxed. And most wealthy people don't pay much tax, they get around them. And what matters, or should matter, is wealth today - we should tax people on their wealth situation today, not whether their great-grandfather or they themselves paid tax on some sum 30 years ago. It comes down to the question, should this person sitting on £5m pay less tax than an indebted fresh grad? Listen, a country like the UK could scrap income tax altogether if it introduced a wealth tax of around 2% per year. It'd make tax a lot simpler because it's far easier for the taxman to identify wealth than it is a transaction together with its true nature, it'd encourage economic activity, and, most important of all, it'd be a heck of a lot fairer.