At the, highly egalitarian, TaxPayers' Alliance our reports are available for free from our website. By contrast, the Fabians have a cover charge for their report "How to defend Inheritance Tax" to keep out the riff-raff. If you don't have £6.95 going spare don't worry - you aren't missing out. All it contains are some turgid arguments for a long discredited tax and a spurious 'reform' proposal.
I won't go on a complete fisking here. There isn't a lot of point when you can't even the read the original article. I'll just point out a few flaws:
- They assert that this is a tax on the person inheriting, who hasn't earnt the money, and therefore not an unwarranted and unpleasant tax on the earned wealth of those who wish to leave money behind. Ordinary people clearly do care about what happens after their death - that's why they resent Inheritance Tax so much; that's why they leave money in the first place; that's why they do all sorts of things. In the end, they don't see it as a transfer of money from themselves to 'someone else' but their family's money that is taken away because one of its members has died. The Inheritance Tax strikes at family bonds whose weakening is the cause of so many social problems.
- Their analysis of the number of people inheriting is based on the number who have inherited rather than the number who will inherit throughout their lives and, as they accept, takes little account of the rise in house prices over recent decades that has exposed many families to inheritance tax for the first time.
- The only good thing about proposals for a "citizen-led, public campaign for tax fairness, bringing together trade unions, anti-poverty groups, and others to contest the claims of anti-tax groups such as the Taxpayers’ Alliance" is the potential for jokes about an Anti-taxpayers Alliance.
- Their new proposal for a gift tax with a lifetime allowance could become hideously complicated. There are so many clauses, rates, allowances, aggregations and calculations over a lifetime that the administration of their proposed system would be a nightmare. It would quickly become as resented as Inheritance Tax is now.