UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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How exactly is someone meant to solve poverty in 20 months?
There is no silver bullet, and redistribution of wealth takes a long time, even if you go full armed revolution.
Progress is being made, albeit slowly, wages are growing faster than inflation, school kids are getting free meals, 3rd+ kids aren't being punished for simply existing.
There is a lot more to do, but suggesting nothing has been done is pure fiction.
Probably true.
Note that your chart is from the IRS for the USA, not the UK.
But Labour also got to power with a promise not to touch most taxes because they were terrified that promising to do anything big would give the Tories what they needed to dupe the electorate once more. So they adopted a meek strategy to get into power. Then people got mad that they weren't radical once in power.
And while I support higher top rates of tax, I think you need to be very careful in what you promise from them: there ways to avoid paying taxes that are very hard to fix, especially in a world where such rates are unusual, and the tax base for these high marginal rates becomes very small very quickly: HMRC statistics say there are 26,000 taxpayers earning over £1M. If we guess they earn on average £2M each, your 90% marginal tax nets about £23bn a year. That's a big chunk of change, and would absolutely make a difference (assuming you can collect it all) but... it's also less than 2% of the UK budget. It's not going to "fix poverty" in the two years which Labour is being criticised for not having achieved it in.
I would love for higher income and capital gains tax brackets to be electorally viable.
The problem is that without the explicit threat of the USSR, and the implicit threat to the rich that their options are high taxes or death, you're not going to get that policy enacted anytime soon.
Fuck, just look at the sheer level of bad faith argument made against changes to equalise personal inheritance tax for agricultural business assets (aka farm land) to close a loophole abused by Bezos et al.
As I said, there is not easy path or singular option.