Avoid This

Except that you can’t.

My Right Honourable Kinsman could put the top rate up to ninety-nine pence in the pound. Tony Blair, David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg still wouldn’t pay.

Ostentatiously high rates are beside the point. There wouldn’t be the slightest need for them if the enormously rich were not effectively exempt from tax anyway.

Ending that would bring in revenue beyond what were previously our wildest dreams. It would make it possible for the personal allowance to set permanently at national median earnings for full-time work (however much that happened to be at the given time), and for everyone to be guaranteed a minimum income of half that. And it would enable us to do these things on a flat rate of income tax with no further exemptions.

Just as there would still have to be child benefit payable to the mother (or the father in her complete absence), so there would still have to be the restored tax allowance for the father (or the mother in his complete absence). But apart from that, one Social Security payment, called and delivering Social Security, and bringing everyone up to half median earnings for full-time work. And one tax allowance, of twice Social Security, i.e., of median earnings for full-time work.