Letters / Puerile grandstanding
Oh Dear! To nobody’s surprise the Labour Party really hasn’t done their sums very well in regard of the latest wheeze to put up income tax for everyone in Scotland earning over £20,000 (Barton backs 1p tax rise to protect services, SN; 09/02/16).
The Scottish Government can vary income tax rates only by the same amount in each of the existing bands. There is no mechanism in the tax system to pay a “rebate” to low earners.
Taxes and excise duties are mainly reserved to Westminster. So Holyrood can’t introduce a genuine “rebate” or “tax refund”. And critically, it couldn’t be administered through the tax system, with all of its convenient access to the financial information of hundreds of thousands of Scots.
Who then is going to administer the “rebate”? Noddy? The tax fairy? Will every local authority have to set up a local HMRC to obtain details of everybody’s income so the “rebate” can be paid? How much will that cost to administer?
Will the taxman consider the “rebate” as income, and tax it?
I thought Labour told us we are ‘Better Together’ and that the ‘Broad Shoulders of the UK’ were to our advantage? How does paying more tax, in Scotland alone, square with that?
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this proposal is simply puerile electoral grandstanding, that Labour know they will never have to implement.
Some of the practical difficulties are here: http://lallandspeatworrier.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/questions-questions.html and some detailed calculations here http://calumcashley.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/labours-tax-rise-and-why-its-wrong-in.html
“Low earners would pay 5 per cent more in tax than they do now, an MSP would only have a 3.75 per cent increase in the tax they pay and the company director 2.66 per cent”. Very progressive.
Derick Tulloch
Denny
Sterlingshire
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