Wednesday 20 January 2010

Fun Online Poll: Burkhas & tax simplification

The people have spoken. The response to this week's Fun Online Poll "Do you agree with UKIP's proposal to 'ban the burkha'?" on a high turn-out, was as follows:

I oppose it on libertarian or religious principle 49%
No, as I'm not sure how it would be enforced 5%
I'm not bothered either way 7%
Yes, but I'm not sure how it would be enforced 8%
Yes 32%


That's that settled then, for this corner of the blogosphere at least.
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Next up, tax simplification.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The question needs to be more specific. From listening to UKIP spokesmen, I gathered that the ban would apply to public (in the true sense of the word - not the smoking ban sense) buildings, and that business owners would be permitted to ban burkhas should they wish to. It was not proposed that burkhas should be banned in the street. I suspect that more would have voted for a "ban" had the poll been conducted around these proposals.

James Higham said...

Flat rate income tax?

Mark Wadsworth said...

Anon, fair point, but pollcode won't allow such long questions plus I can't expect people to think about it for more than a few seconds.

JH, of course flat income tax as well (i.e. scrap higher rate tax), but that's probably a shoo-in with my readership so it's barely worth asking the question. A more serious campaign is explaining to people that VAT is The Worst Tax.

bayard said...

Does it really have to be as high as 1%?

Ed said...

The 1% property value tax would be much better than the others, but better still would be a higher rate only on the land value. I think that would be your longer term plan, but why not go straight to LVT?

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, make up your own mind which taxes you'd replace £ for £ (I'd include Insurance Premium Tax as well, for example), the total receipts are (let's say) £40 billion; the total value of residential property is approx. £4,000 billion, ergo required tax rate = 1%. At this rate, two-thirds of households would pay the same or less as they pay now. Maybe the correct rate is 0.78% or 1.09%, that I do not know.

Ed, yes of course, it's just that PPT is easier to explain and they have it in real life in Northern Ireland, so we know that it is administratively workable.