Those Redwood tax cuts – a question of priorities

I’ve been going down the list of tax cuts that John Redwood is proposing. Scrapping inheritance tax, lowering corporation tax, raising the super tax threshold, restricting capital gains… to be brutally honest, I regard all of these as good things in principle, but even leaving aside the affordability issue, how can they be said to be priorities?

Inheritance tax, for example, certainly does hit a lot of middle-income families these days. But what would you prefer? A tax cut on your estate when you die, or a tax cut on your income now? I know that I for one would prefer the latter. Happily, I’d also argue it is better for both the economy and society more generally.

As I’ve argued before, the accretion of wealth within an ever declining number of families is not a particularly healthy thing for our society. It creates a situation whereby, because of historical accident, some individuals end up higher up on the ladder than others. If that wealth is bound up in property, it is a finite resource and our existing financial system creates a situation whereby the more property you own, the easier it is to acquire more. As it is a finite resource, that means that, over time, private ownership becomes nothing more than a dream for more and more people and an underclass emerges.

To a certain extent you might argue that is inevitable, but if anything ought to be a candidate for taxation, it is this. Indeed, the creation of IHT and other fiscal tools in the last century have done much to create a more egalitarian society which we now seem to be slowly slipping away from.

IHT’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t do this terribly well. Nothing a half-competent financial adviser can’t wriggle around any way. There are better ways of taxing wealth such as a land value tax. Needless to say, this isn’t top of Redwood’s wish list.

For me, the “Competitive Challenge” is to ensure that the fruits of people’s labours and entrepreneurship are kept by the individual to as great an extent as possible. IHT doesn’t make our economy uncompetitive; income tax does. The point at which the 40p rate for income tax kicks in isn’t the main issue: the 20p rate and the level of personal allowance are. And then, of course, there’s VAT (which Tories historically seem to love).

But if I don’t understand the economic case for Redwood’s priorities, I understand the political case even less.

It’s a gift to the Lib Dems: not only are our policies better targeted at people at the lower end of the scale (I’d go further, but that’s another issue), we explain how we will pay for it. Redwood’s case, by contrast, is tax cuts for the relatively well off, paid for by vague, amorphous cuts in ‘red tape’. I for one would relish that particular fight.

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