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Comment by ep103 | Hacker News Reader

As an outsider, it is rather hilarious that the top two responses to this story right now on HN are:

* Our own local council in the South of England, BCP is in the doghouse too. We have extraordinary inequality of taxation at the root of it. We have some of the wealthiest areas in Europe, like Sandbanks where every house is a mansion with it's own private beach, but we still cant fill the potholes in roads in the poorest areas. So sad that they lack the courage to put basic policies in order.

and

* Guaranteed the only way they’ll think will solve the issue is higher taxes. The uk has run out of ideas and the only option seems to be taking people’s money away.

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I mean, they are both kind of true. The only thing palatable to the government is to raise income taxes. They won't dare touch capital gain tax or property tax - which is where the vast majority of wealth is concentrated. Income tax is absolutely brutal in this country, with the 100k cliff for example. It's very hard to accumulate wealth via salary.

Both are true. Property taxes haven't been re-assessed since the 90s. A minority of wealthy landowners are subsidized by a much larger group of salaried renters.

>Property taxes haven't been re-assessed since the 90s.

Whilst technically true that doesn't mean that council tax hasn't increased since the 90s.

Yeah but that makes it worse, doesn't it? The benefits to being under-assessed compound year on year, as do the costs of being over-assessed.

Well you can challenge the assessment (within 6 months of moving in I think).

Can you challenge other peoples assessments? Because that's what's needed.

Why is that needed?

The obvious implication is that there are large properties that have appreciated greatly in value but have not been re-assessed, leading to artificially low property tax on those properties that haven't changed hands in thirty years while those who purchased since that time are re-assessed at purchase. Not dissimilar to Prop 13 in California: a massive one-time gift to those who owned in the area at the time (and, in California, their descendants).

I don't know anything about limey tax law, but just reading this thread makes the point very clear: somebody thinks that property taxes are too low across the board, and have been made up for with other taxes (presumably head or consumption taxes) that impact working people more than property taxes, which scale roughly with wealth. If you agree that this is the problem, challenging your own assessment doesn't solve anything unless you are one of the rich property owners who are underpaying. Even then, you'd also need to reduce the non-property (the head or consumption taxes) portion of taxes in order to relieve the burden on working people.

because it would slow down the unjust concentration of land ownership into fewer and fewer hands.

Well yes, there are ways of increasing tax revenue without increasing tax percentages. For instance, by increasing economic activity. The more the money circulates the more vat gets collected. The more money people earn the more income tax they pay. Instead by just increasing % makes everyone poorer and economic activity slower. People demanding more tax on capital gains and property are people that have neither and never will if those taxes increase.

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