Inheritance Tax

You should be, its your explanation full of contradictions that is the cause! I'm just waiting for you to get a contradiction in the same sentence.

What about a parent and a child. Or a person and a friend? Or a person and a charity? Do you have a set of allowable relationships?

But at the moment a gift before death is treated effectively as if it was a gift after death, hence there often is little difference, and the reason many gifts are made after death is that the state makes it difficult to give them before.

Irrelevant and a different argument. Stay on topic.

LOL. I think that counts as the contradiction in the same sentence! Can't you see the inherent problemthere? If its not a right, then you have no reason to think you'll get it and more to the point no way to complain or get redress if you dont. So effectively, you dont get one. Its like stealing

you cant get over the contradictions in what you have said. Why dont you just come right out and say that no one should get any inheritance, and also that no one should be allowed to give away anything (since it otherwise its a way of evading your no-inheritance ruling).

I doesn't matter whether or not that is any different. Both are punitive and iniquitous, and will be even more so if any party ever has the courage to revalue property for council tax.

Toom

That kind of ignores the fact that I worked for the monies I received, paid tax on it and paid tax on the gains I made from investing that money. It is me giving my money which I took the initiative to earn and save, to those I best judge to benefit from it. I don't think that is quite the same as a windfall for them..

On the other hand the tax helps to support others, including payments of minimum income allowance, pension credits, and other benefits to people who include those who earned the same as I did, but didn't save, invest or buy pensions, but who chose instead to eat out more often, have more foreign holidays, who drank finer wines, and traded-in the car each year for the latest model.

Again it is a matter of personal views on responsibility and accountability.

Toom

It doesn't ignore that at all! The tax is effectively being levied on the beneficiaries and they haven't paid any tax on the money you earned.

Look, when I provide services to my customers they pay me out of taxed income. Following your argument they've already paid tax on that money so why should HM gov take another cut when it passes over to me in payment for my services?

Nobody likes taxes, but surely tax on windfall income (IHT) is fairer than tax on earned income?

Jeff

That's the difference between VAT and a sales tax. The rate at which IHT is levied is far too high. The threshold at which it kicks in is also far too low. It's easy to avoid, at least in part.

Set the threshold at 40 times the average wage, representing a lifetime's earnings, and put the rate at 10%. I bet the take would increase.

In message , Terry Harper writes

If you are raising the threshold and lowering the rate, how can the Govt collect more?

Because it will not be worth trying to avoid/evade it.

When the marginal rate of tax fell from 98% to 40% the tax take went up.