My idea for Britain's new tax system
In this article, I will outline a completely new tax code I am proposing that the UK Government implements, however even if a minister sees this, I'd doubt they'd actually implement this.
So why wouldn’t the government implement this?
So first, I’ll start why I have doubts that the UK government would ever go full Mikhail Saaskiavelli before outlining my new plan to replace the entire existing tax code in the UK.
Below are the reasons why I don’t think they’ll ever implement this plan or any other similar plan:
The current UK government is filled with Keynesian economists who feel like their big government plans is what will fix this country.
So for one, I would argue that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is massively over-regulated, for instance the railways is over-regulated and if I or you owned a railway operator on the mainline network (so excl. tramways, heritage railways etc.) I must submit any network changes to the “Department for Transport” for approval before the changes can be made. Another problem is that there are multiple A3 sized pages of text full of requirements for before I am able to create my own limited company, in contrast to places like Hong Kong where John Stossel once famously set up a limited company in only 8 minuets and that is just something you cannot do in the UK.
The current parliament does not clearly believe in supporting massive reforms as they grow the size of the government with their massive new spending plans during this terrible economic decline period (some would describe it is Stagflation, I would however say that was in the last decade).
The current party which holds the most power in government is the socialist-leaning Conservative Party which is not conservative and clearly does not support the idea of a small-limited government but to be fair, that has not been the case since the 1920s.
The government wants to implement Communism, likely not specifically the party that is in power but rather the people behind closed doors, i.e. the “Civil Service” aka the Deep State whether they realise it or not since I feel like this is the direction that much of the “west” is heading in at the behest of the World Economic Forum.
I should add that if you don’t know who Mikhail Saaskiavelli, he was the Prime Minister (or was it president?) of Georgia between 2004-2012 where he massively reformed the country of Georgia from being a corrupt, crime ridden country to a prosperous nation with the highest GDP growth of any country between 2004-2010 which was 10% GDP growth, unfortunately he was constitutionally barred from running a third term so a different political party won the subsequent election and started going on a political crusade against him which ended in him fleeing to Ukraine before going to back to Georgia where he was subsequently arrested and is currently in prison. In my opinion, it was bad that he supported the clearly violent “Euromaidan” revolution in Ukraine which helped the Russian Government use said violence as a casus belli for his 2022 invasion…
Now I will argue my new tax plan for the nation!
Under this plan, all taxes would be replaced by all these new taxes which would be talked about below, the Welsh, Northern Irish and Scottish parliaments would be shut down and the MPs would keep their seats while the seats for each parliament would be dissolved as a monetary spending cut and to make this tax plan easier to develop.
At the end of each section, I will put what I think should be the maximum tax rate that each authority would be allowed to set e.g. with the first new tax to be introduced, the LCFIT, a local authority such as Croydon Council would only be allowed to tax income up to 10%.
I will be putting these taxes in order of hierarchy, in order from the most decentralised council to the main parliament in Westminster.
Local council flat-income tax (LCFIT)
The LCFIT is a flat-income tax which will be set by your local council or parish council or unitary authority depending on your area. So for instance, if you live in London, you would pay this tax to whatever London Borough that you live in, so for instance if you live in the London Borough of Croydon, you will pay this tax to Croydon Council, if you live in the City of London, you will pay this tax to the City of London Corporation and so on. If you live outside of London, then you will still pay this to your local council, e.g. if you live in Epsom, Surrey, you would pay this tax to the Royal Borough of Epsom & Ewell or if you live in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, you would pay this tax to the West Lindsey District Council, another example for if you live in a local council which is also legally a city such as Brighton & Hove, then you would pay this tax to the Brighton & Hove City Council. If your local community is just a parish council and is different to what I have just mentioned above and you do not have a “local council” as described above in your local area then you would pay this tax to that parish council; if you do not live in the boundary of a council or parish council or London borough, then you would not pay this tax but I don’t think that would affect anyone. And as for Unitary Authorities, they are all located within a single county so in this case, a Unitary Authority would be treated the same as a council with the exception of Unitary Authorities that are also County Councils such as Cornwall Council which according to Wikipedia is both a county and a unitary authority; I don’t want people in these areas to be paying this tax as it would directly conflict with the next tax to be introduced.
This tax would only be paid for by individuals aged 18 or older, and the maximum tax rate would be 10% and would be payable on an entire person’s income, so for instance if you lived in the London Borough of Kingston-Upon-Thames and your yearly income was £100,000, and the council’s tax rate was 10% then I would only need to pay £10,000 in tax for that year. This tax would not apply to registered businesses as that would conflict with one of the other new taxes I will talk about.
I should also add that this is a FLAT-TAX which if you don’t know is a tax that only has a single rate, no multiple-bands, so for instance, if you earn £10,000/year you will pay the same tax rate as someone who earns £50,000/year or £150,000/year or £3,500,000/year which I believe is fairer than the current income tax system which is a “progressive” system whereby there are different bands of income so for this example, if you earn £7,000/year-£30,000/year you get put in band A with a 2% tax rate, for a yearly income of £31,000-£70,000 is band B at a 10% tax rate and £71,000-£250,000 is band C at a tax rate of 25% and £251,000+ is band D is 39% and £25,000,000 is band E at 47% tax rate, and I believe this is all unfair.
County Council Negative-Income tax (CCNIT)
The CCNIT is a negative-income tax that is paid by individuals to your local county-council, county-unitary authority (e.g. Cornwall Council) or “Greater Authority” (e.g. Greater London Authority), so for instance, if you live in Cornwall, this tax would be paid towards Cornwall Council, if you live in “Greater Manchester” it would be paid to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority but not to Lancashire County Council since a “combined authority” is the city-sized equivalent of a “county council”.
The maximum tax rate for the CCNIT would be 15% meaning that individuals would only pay a maximum of 25% towards the government which for some people may be a higher tax rate for some people but may also be a lower total tax rate for other people and some areas will be allowed to set a tax rate to 0%.
The CCNIT is a “Negative-income tax” which is a type of tax that was devised by many famous economists, most notably Milton Friedman; the tax works the same as flat-income tax but the main difference is that if you earn at or below a certain amount, instead of paying the amount in tax, you would instead receive that amount so in this case the CCNIT cut-off amount for paying tax is an income of £20,000 so if you live in Surrey County Council’s border and the tax is 5% and your income is £15,000, if it was a flat-tax you would pay £750 in taxes but because it is instead a negative-income tax you would instead receive £750 from SCC similar to what is known in many places as a “tax rebate”.
Westminster flat-business tax (WFBT)
The WFBT is a flat-business tax that would replace the existing Corporation tax and Value Added Tax and would only be payable by all businesses and the money would be paid directly to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and the money earned would be spent by the main, central government i.e. parliament and government agencies such as the Department for Culture, Media and Sport or the Department for Education, etc.
The WFBT tax rate would be 7.5% of a business’ pre-tax profit.
The WFBT is a negative-income tax for businesses only and works in the same way as was what described for the proposed LCFIT tax but the tax would be for profit instead of income and this tax would be paid quarterly based on the previous quarter’s pre-tax profit for for example if a business earned a profit of £1,000,000 in Q4 2022 then in Q1 2023 they would have to pay the tax for the Q4 2022 profit which would be £75,000 in tax for the Q4 profit meaning their post-tax profit for Q4 2022 would be £925,000 and so you would replicate this for each quarter.
I think this tax should be paid quarterly because it would give businesses, private enterprises more flexibility on paying their taxes because some businesses only receive a large profit at particular times of the year and at other times may receive a loss so only being forced to pay a skewed tax on profit in each quarter seems fairer.
Land Value Tax (LVT)
Below is a tiny selection of great YouTube videos on Georgism 101 which should help you really understand what the LVT is since I believe that LVTs are the least-bad form of taxes. Under this plan, the LVT revenue would be split into thirds so if I pay the Land Value Tax, ⅓ would go to HMRC, ⅓ would go to the London Borough of Merton where I live and the other ⅓ would go to the Greater London Authority since I live inside the Greater London, this way the revenue from the LVT would be evenly distributed and once the UK Government’s national debt goes down to <1% then all the other taxes I have proposed thus far can be withdrawn leaving the Land Value Tax as the last one left to help fund the government and the military.
The LVT tax rate would be 40% .
I might also add that I am not a socialist, and do not support every ideal of “Georgism”, only the “Land Value Tax” that he proposed!
Why distribute taxes like this?
I have chosen to distribute taxes as such because I believe that if places get to choose their own tax rate, then there will be massive tax competition betwen areas of the country and some places will be able to recieve more investment than they otherwise would because their local economy has become more liberalised and it properly helps decentralise governance in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and should help to stop the government from becomming to bloated like it was in the 1970s and what it currently is becomming in the 2020s now that the UK is from what I can see is in a very bad economic decline period after a decade of nearly no economic growth and a near-constant 1%-4% inflation rate with the consistent use of Quantitative Easing by the Bank of England, our worlds famous central bank which was unfortunately (in my opinion) nationalised in 1947-1948 after centuries of being a monopoly on the supply of money in the UK.
And I think this is all, if you have any questions, feel free to message me on Minds or Facebook or leave a comment below if you have any questions, queries or proposed changes that could be made. Please also remember that this is © William Clifton 2022 and is listed as a CC-BY-SA license so if you are a political party in the UK, feel free to adapt this but also cite the new work as being based off mine and yes I do read some party manifestos every now and then so if your party is big enough, I will find it and email you asking for a correction or rather at least get a citation if it isn’t there.
I might also add that I am not an economist so if you think that my economic ideas are absolute bogus then feel free to leave a comment explaining why otherwise I’ll end up thinking that your just a communist or Keynesian whom likely has bad ideas on his table.