This Blog post from 26 July 2011 had hundreds of visitors presumably because it includes
the name “Alexander McQueen”; the real story is what follows on from that and it is still pertinent in 2019 where UK government policy (or lack of one) is making it even harder to
pay down debt:
.
All the papers report
that Alexander McQueen left his money to the dogs: £100 000 to Battersea Cats'
and Dogs' Home, £100 000 to the Blue Cross sick animal centre, and £50 000 in
trust for the lifetime care of his own pet dogs.
In a Will
worth £16 million, it's not a lot, just rather sad. Why didn't he leave it to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer?
Very few
people now leave money to the State, voluntarily that is, though they used to.
A Report out today indicates that we badly need them to.
Officially,
public debt stands at around £900 billion or over 60% of GDP. But lots of
things are kept "off balance sheet". In a report for the brokers
Tullett Prebon, Project Armageddon, Tim Morgan factors them in:
Add the final
costs of bank bail outs, of unfunded future public sector pension commitments
and of payoffs under Blair-Brown private Finance contracts and the debt figure
rises four times to £3.6 trillion representing £135 000 per household. [I am
using The Daily Telegraph's reporting]
It seems
inevitable that at some point, like when they die, the present generation (the
Baby Boomers - people like me) should be asked to pay and, failing that, made
to pay.
Only
yesterday, I took comfort in the £200 000 equity in my flat, the mortgage down
to a few thousand. This morning I have to subtract £135 000 from that - the
burden of public debt per household. Of course, if you shared out that figure
proportionately rather than simply dividing by households, it would be less.
For Sir Fred Goodwin it would be more.
However
unpalatable to the Tory faithful, Chancellor George Osborne is going to have to
look hard at inheritance tax. I make one suggestion.
At present,
there is an exemption limit and above that the State takes a percentage of the
value of an Estate at death. I would modify that to a variable percentage. Just
as the State imposes supertaxes on alcohol and tobacco in its attempts to
discourage them or make their users pay for the social costs of their habits,
so it should tax legacies it deems noxious at a higher rate than those it deems
benign. Ninety five percent on legacies to cats' and dogs' homes
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