How to pay for the Government’s GroupThink driven disaster of a CoronaVirus policy? Simple says Nick O’Donovan of the former third rate Poly now 4th rate University that is Manchester Metropolitan: tax the rich. Except his proposal is not simple though anyone who buys into it is.
O’Donovan who fills impressionable young minds with socialist nonsense on the Political Economy course, wants a one off tax. The trouble is that having set a precedent that the State has a new way to steal from its citizens, one off taxes tend to become permanent taxes. Income tax was meant to b e a temporary measure. That was in 1799.
But let us assume that this really would be a one off. So how would the wealthy pay? Nick and folks like him assume that those with material net assets must have access to stacks of cash. But there are two groups of the wealthy who very often don’t have any spare cash at all.
Pensioners have seen, in many cases, their incomes crushed over the past ten years by low interest rates. They may live in a nice house making them “wealthy” but they are cash poor. How will they pay this tax? By selling their house in a market where house prices are likely to b slumping anywhere as the country hurtles into recession.
And of course many entrepreneurs and small business people, the folks who risk their capital to set up firms that create employment, have had to sink their savings into establishing their businesses and/.or keeping them going during lockdown. They may have paper wealth in their house and their business but will in many cases be pretty cash strapped right now. How will such folks pay the O’Connor tax> sell the family home just as house prices crash and move into a small flat with the wife and kids? Or just close the business & fire the staff and so no longer be wealthy?
The misery O’Connor proposes is clear. And having set the precedent that the UK likes to steal the savings of its more prudent citizens, it makes it an even less attractive place to do business.
Of course, O’Connor’s job is funded by the grateful taxpayer. So it is safe/. In fact he will almost certainly get pay rises every year until he retires on a generous pension scheme. He’s alright jack Meanwhile in the real world unemployment will soon be three million and the suffering is already palpable. So why not target folks who probably vote Tory and supported Brexit anyway and add to that misery?
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“The government could consider an alternative way of paying for the pandemic,” says Dr Nick O’Donovan, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at
MMU_FutureEcon</a>, explaining how a one-off windfall tax on wealth could cover <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Coronavirus?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Coronavirus</a> costs: <a href="https://t.co/JE6qijCvCU">https://t.co/JE6qijCvCU</a><a href="https://twitter.com/mmu_business?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">mmu_business pic.twitter.com/AHibVEeGGm
— Manchester Metropolitan Uni (@ManMetUni) April 28, 2020
