Re: Well, at last they've given up with the lies...

On Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:46:55 +0000, in
<mg32t3hvesolc2rek14elos29ug3p0p9e4@xxxxxxx>, Champ
<news@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:22:39 +0000, Ben <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:24:05 GMT, Rope <spam@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Poll Tax

As someone who was quite young at the time, can anyone explain what
was really so bad about the Poll Tax?

It strikes me that it was actually a fairer way of taxing people for
local services than the Council Tax is. After all, all council tax
seems to do is tax your purchasing power.

The previous rates had a loose association with your wealth - a big
house house had a higher rateable value than a small one.

The poll tax switched to everyone paying the same. Now, this might be
'fairer' in that we all get the same sized dustbin emptied, but it was
a significant change from the previous system, essentially making poor
people pay more, and rich people pay less.

The main way in which this shift was seen as unfair was that
multi-occupier households, which are much more common in the poorer
income groups, were suddenly required to pay the community charge for
each member of the household, which while clearly "fairer" in the
sense of charging for services used, did increase their burden more,
whilc decreasing that of rocher families living in smaller numbers,
often in larger houses.

So, the 'unfairness' of the poll tax was it taking no account of
'ability to pay'.

Well, that's not quite true. Lower earners were actually granted
reductions. But more importantly, the 'unfairness' was really, as
Colin states up there ^^, about leftward-leaning people getting
annoyed when rich folk were required to pay even less. Logic, which
clearly fits the "pay for services based on likely usage" model, goes
out of the window when it comes to class jealousy.

This whole argument could be applied to taxation
generally -- I pay more income tax, VAT, etc than the average,but I
don't use any more of the services provided (probably less).

Indeed.

But
taxation in this country is mostly based on ability to pay, and
services on need : "from each according to his ability, to each
according to his need"

But the shift to community charge was less about changing the way
taxes were collected than it was trying to change the whole "local
services" model. It was intended, in the long term, to open up many of
the local service tasks to private industry, allowing consumers to
choose whether to pay their rubbish collection charges, for example,
to a council-run collection service, or to an independent operation.
This actually happened with Water, although this was already seperated
before the CC came into play.

Clearly many of the service elements were unsuitable for this kind of
approach, and the desirability of privatisation of services has taken
a knock in recent years, given what we've seen hapenning in some
industries, but this was, I believe, the long-term intention at that
time.

--
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