Try telling George Osborne that ‘tax doesn’t have to be taxing’ — I’m sure he’d laugh at the sentiment. The story this morning is that he has a grand, gritty choice to make ahead of the Budget: to tax income or to tax wealth. The Lib Dems have apparently agreed to relent on the 50p rate, but only if they get a mansion tax on properties worth over £2 million in return. The thinking is that, in the current political environment, the government must always be seen to be hitting the well-off in some way.
So, will Osborne accept the offer? He and other Tories will certainly be tempted to do so. For starters, there are fiscal as well as political arguments for replacing a cut in the 50p rate with a tax hike elsewhere, as Paul Goodman explains
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