Now, clearly, the 50% tax can\’t both be a fiscal lynching and an ineffective waste of time.
You\’d think that someone writing regularly for a major national newspaper would be able to grapple with logic, wouldn\’t you?
People threatened with lynching tend to change their behaviour. That\’s the purpose of the threat of course. So if people do indeed change their behaviour (change their working patterns, work less, leave the country, whatever) the results can indeed be an ineffective waste of time in revenue raising terms precisely because people have been threatened with a fiscal lynching.
“You’d think that someone writing regularly for a major national newspaper would be able to grapple with logic, wouldn’t you?” No; it would disqualify him from employment on the Nurdgaia (unless he were to hide away on the business pages).
And how does someone come up with logic like this:-
“Let Michael Caine leave. Fairer taxes must be made to stick if we’re to avoid the cuts in services Cameron has in mind”
Michael Caine’s money is free money. He’s retired, never has to work again, gets driven around by a chauffeur. I expect he has the best private health care, has no kids in school (and if he did, they’d be in private school) and probably lives in the sort of place with private security. He probably alone pays for the living of a page full of the Guardian’s job pages.
I’d actually suggest a millionaire’s tax band: 1%. They’re already way over anything they cost the state at that point, so let’s encourage all the motor racing drivers, rock stars and whoever else to just come here and spend their money in our economy rather than the economies of Switzerland or Monaco.
Tim Almond, your logic is spot-on. The trouble is that the Milnes of this world don’t want to know: they are driven ultimately by an adolescent guilt over their own inherited wealth and a sort of malevolent hatred of anyone who is rich and successful by their own graft.