Reality impedes left wing fantasy of high tax rates increasing revenue

[Zevico]

How did Colbert put it? Reality has a well known conservative bias.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9707029/Two-thirds-of-millionaires-left-Britain-to-avoid-50p-tax-rate.html

[Asher]

You are ****ing retarded.

[snoopy369]

Do the british not have the "%" key on their keyboards? Do they have the pound sign on the 5 instead?

[Dauphin]

You don't like the expression pence in the pound?

BTW, the % key is above the 5.

[Asher]

Clearly they are referring to the 50 pence tax.

[giblets]

Did they increase the tax rate for investment income? In that case people would want to report their capital gains before the higher rate comes into effect and you'd see a spike in the number of people reporting a million pounds in "income". I guess this was a political stunt by the Conservatives so they could say "see? we'd love to tax the rich more but our hands are tied" and they avoid increasing what the rich have to pay in the long run.

This is from the comments on the article:

Couple of points here... For a baseline, you can look at the 2004-5 tax year when there were 6,000 in the million pound tax bracket (data available on wikipedia under "income in the uk" article). In 2009-10 it did jump up to 16,000, because they had passed the law implementing the higher bracket and everyone knew the tax bracket was going up, so they took all the income they could to avoid the change. The next year (2010-11), there were 6,000 in that bracket, as everyone had pulled a lot of that tax years wealth into personal income the year before. If you actually read closely, then you see that in the 2011-12 year, it started to equalize to 10,000... Honestly, its very unlikely many people moved to a different country, rather its a temporary accounting blip that moved some of one years income into another year. And yes, when they lower it back to 45% the incomes will probably jump back up as they have been holding their breath and spending money they had already taken as personal assets waiting for it to go back down. None of this would really have been valid until it had been in effect a few years and people just got used to it. All of the analysis in this article then is an oversimplification and you could just as easily have written the headline "millionaire incomes rise 40% in 6 years despite 2 years of new tax bracket taking effect and giant recession" and that would be true because from 2005 to 2012 the number making over a million went from 6k to 10k. Also, what this article doesn't really explain is that much of the income that wasn't turned into personal income in one of the years still got taxed as corporate income or reinvested. Finally, Just as a little funny aside, here's the headline from 2011... which proclaims a banner year for millionaireshttp://www.dailyma... (millionaires in this case by personal assets not yearly income) because many of these guys had taken a fat paycheck the year before that was now being counted as personal assets. So which was it, a banner year or an unmitigated disaster? Honestly, I agree that a personal tax rate of 45% is better for the UK than one of 50%, but the actual story is never as simple as a 5 paragraph partisan article makes it seem (and that goes in both directions).

[Imran Siddiqui]

How did Colbert put it? Reality has a well known conservative bias.

Not quite.

[Dinner]

Why am I not surprised Zevico got that one wrong?

[Asher]

My reply said exactly what everyone else has said since, but more succinctly.

[Zevico]

Not quite.

I may have made some slight alteration to the text. Good of you to pick it up. It was subtle, but it was there.

[Alexander's Horse]

I forgot Imran moved to the left

[Zevico]

Left blank.

[Hauldren Collider]

You are ****ing retarded.

Nope.

[onodera]

Britain should invade tax havens and install its own governments. Or just tax everyone related to UK, like US does.

[Asher]

Nope.

Yes. See the other posts in this thread and comments in this thread.