Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Femmy & other matters
I read with annoyance yesterday of yet another female complaining about her age. That is to say, some female television personality or other, having got rich by looking pretty while reading off the autocue, is now whining that she has reached her sell by date and is being replaced by a new model. Perhaps there should be a special channel with a high free-view number, perhaps adjacent to that interesting news service from Moscow, which broadcasts older females reading off the autocue, 24 by 7. Perhaps, to make the thing a bit more of a challenge, they should only be allowed to read from 'Finnegans Wake'. Might even become cult viewing. Perhaps we could tempt Joan Collins to make a guest appearance?
On a more serious note I have been pondering about how we might best deal with our debt problem, which I suppose for these purposes to be £100b. Say £3,000 for each of the 33.3m taxpaying households in the country. Not a huge sum really.
One scheme, very easy to implement, would be to cut all public sector pay and pensions by, say, 10%. Or maybe aim for 10% overall but with some graduation so that those at the bottom of the heap pay proportionately less than those at the top of the heap. But then I think, why should us hard working public sectors types take the hit for the improvidence of the country at large. I don't mind paying, but I would resent all the others not paying.
Then I think of VAT. But it probably would not be practical to raise this by enough to do the business as both compliance costs and evasion would go up so much that one was not making very much headway.
Then, thinking back to my recent read on the Normans (May 10), another answer would be for the government to exact a tenth or a thirteenth. I think the idea in the olden days that the king, when hard pressed, perhaps by the Vikings, could impose a tax on moveables of this sort of order. A modern version would be to impose a tax on real estate. So we go down to the Land Registry in Plymouth and tax everyone owning real estate some amount proportional to the value of that real estate. With some equitable split between mortgage lenders and borrowers.
The tricky bit would be valuation. But it should not be beyond the wit of the Land Registry IT department to come up with some valuation algorithm. The answers could then be sent out. People who felt swizzed could appeal. But with the deterrent that if the valuation was upheld there was some kind of penalty. This would stop the system being swamped with whiners.
In the meantime, a special account could be opened at the Bank of England to which decent tax payers could direct cash and assets. Doing their bit for the country. They could choose whether to do it anonymously or publicly. Either way, the gifts would not affect tax liability, except in so far as they reduced the wealth and income of the donor. All those old ladies presently leaving their money to the RSPB and save the whales could do something more useful with it.
# posted by Jim @ 8:52 AM 
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It has been pointed out that the national debt stands at £1,400b not £100b. Well fair enough. But it has been a lot for a long time and no-one expects us to pay it off all at once. So maybe a fortieth on real estate (£25,000 per million)to get the level down and a hike in VAT to keep it down. Plus a bit of slash and burn in the fluffy bits of the public sector.
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