This is brilliant stuff from Gary Stevenson that debunks the dogma from politicians – in both the Conservative and Labour parties – that taxes need to be slashed:

Is that clear?

In brief: neoliberal governments since 1979 have sold off all the property they own, meaning that – in order to provide services – they have to rent property from the rich people to whom they sold it all.

This is, of course, a ridiculous proposition because renting property from rich people is much more expensive than owning it oneself. We can see this from the sale of council housing; now councils don’t have any low-cost, low-rent houses, more and more people are becoming homeless because they can’t pay the sky-high rents demanded by private landlords, or the sky-high mortgages demanded by lenders.

So ordinary working people are now having to pay enormous taxes in order to allow our governments to pay for these services at exorbitant prices, because they’ve given all the means of providing these services to the rich.

And when we hear talk of more taxes, we logically conclude that it refers to us paying them – after all, wealth means dodging taxes; the rich pay very little in comparison to the rest of us.

Gary is saying we need to make sure those very wealthy people have to pay more taxes – at a level that will force them to sell the assets they have bought from the government and hoarded away from the rest of us.

That’s a pretty tall order!

But persuading them – nudging them, if you like (remember the nudge unit, long-term readers?) – to sell is the only way to get taxes down for all of us.

If our governments own their own assets again, then they will be able to provide the services we need at a much lower cost and our taxes can fall again, for a realistic, justifiable reason.

That way, we will all enjoy more prosperity.

That is why the likes of Jeremy Hunt and Rachel Reeves are absolutely wrong to say they want to cut taxes. They mean they want to cut taxes for poor people, and the only way to do that is to cut public services.

And you’ll still be paying more, because the government will be using privately-owned assets to provide its services.

The problem is, they don’t want to increase taxes for rich people, partly because they are rich people, and partly because rich people give them donations to keep them from forcing those rich people to give money to the Treasury.

That’s why they lie to us that higher taxes are a bad idea.

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