Wednesday, November 12, 2003

House levies

Frank takes issue with my support for the house levies scheme (see 4 posts below). He notes (correctly) that this proposed scheme will punish some people disproportionately. I was thinking more generally & long term on this and just saw it as a further advance in the march towards local government, local accountability and local taxation.

I don't want to prescribe how this should be done, but perhaps VAT could be eliminated and every county/town be empowered to levy what they feel is an appropriate tax on goods for sale. Properly valued and locally based property taxes are another possibility? We might even find some counties choose one method (income tax levy) and others will choose another method. All sorts of possibilities open up when we break the stranglehold of the central government.

Frank is more in tune with the specifics of this proposal and who will suffer as he is in the process of moving to a new house, still to be built.