It's a straightforward way to tax people who have homes that are worth a lot of money. Not entirely the same as being rich.
What if you live in one of the leafier parts of the east end, where only 30 years ago you could buy a house on a blue-collar wage. Now your house is worth more than £1m. But you're retired and on a basic state pension. You don't want to move to a cheaper area because your friends and family live close to you and are able to support you.
High property taxes based on the value of your assets would force you to move away or re-mortgage. Not ideal when it comes to maintaining a sense of community or caring for the elderly.
I assume by 'proper' property taxes you mean 'the way the US does things'. I'm not sure that it would work in the UK with our different economics, system of government and geography.
So in the article they discussed a special tax break for non-residents which was resulting in much lower tax revenue from these properties.
As it happens, living in the Bay Area I'm very aware of living in a house that, I could neither afford to 'buy' again, nor pay the taxes on should my prop 13 bill revert to 'current value'. But the way the tax base evolves in California is when property turns over or is sold. So when buy a house the taxing level is reset to the current value.
My suggestion is that by normalizing the tax burden to new owners without special "non-resident" perks, you would force the cost of ownership to be the same for everyone, and that would both discourage some rich folk from moving (lowering demand a bit and helping) and increase the tax base even though the number of residents was not increasing (which increases per capita services budget).
Now the last time I looked at buying a flat in Chelsea part of the thing that confused the heck out of me was the whole 99 year lease thing. I decided that real estate in London was going to need a lot more research than I had time for. A pity though because in 2002 when I was looking at it, I could have made a nice return.
I think that the tax break the article is talking about is the fact that in the UK, if your 'main residence' is elsewhere, you only pay income tax on your UK earnings. That's different to the US where (I believe) citizens are expected to pay tax even if they are non-resident. I'm not sure why it's mentioned to be honest as income taxes are not related to just buying a house in the UK - which anyone can do whether they are a citizen, resident, or whatever.
Council tax in the UK is payable by the building owner or tenant, and is much lower than, for example, the US property tax. Council tax is supposed to just pay for municipal services. IIRC, they even break it down into bits on your bill 'Police - £xx, Fire Brigade - £xx' etc etc
I suppose my points were firstly that it is unreasonable to compare UK council tax and US property tax, and secondly that a tax directly related to a home's value can impact people disproportionately due to the crazy rise in UK house prices over the last few decades.
All that said, the idea of a property tax level resetting when a building is sold is very interesting - I didn't realise that was the case in California and it certainly makes sense. However, there is still the issue of our system of government being different - local governments can't create new taxes (and it would need to be a local tax since the problem is restricted to one geographic area), and the economics are different - people just aren't set up to pay high property taxes. Not insurmountable problems, I accept.
And yeah, 99 year leases are weird, but not uncommon. It gets weirder. For example it's not that unusual in the UK for properties to be totally surrounded by land owned by others. Also, land ownership in the UK (London especially) often has crazy disputes just due to the age of the records.
>What if you live in one of the leafier parts of the east end, where only 30 years ago you could buy a house on a blue-collar wage. Now your house is worth more than £1m. But you're retired and on a basic state pension. You don't want to move to a cheaper area because your friends and family live close to you and are able to support you.
Then you are making very inefficient use of an extremely scarce resource. Economically speaking, you should get out of the way and let someone more productive have that property.
Morally that might be wrong, but I think you should be able to argue for why we should adopt policies that sound morally right but have nasty economic consequences.
>I assume by 'proper' property taxes you mean 'the way the US does things'. I'm not sure that it would work in the UK with our different economics, system of government and geography.
Same here. I liked it (even if a little flawed) but never donated. I think this gives me the motivation to self host something that I know won't go away.
Problem with SNI is that you lose IE users on XP. In the UK at least, that means entire organisations with thousands of employees such as Lloyds bank and the NHS. According to our stats anyway.
To be perfectly frank it was a throwaway comment - I was being facetious.
I don't consider accusing someone of naivete to be particularly pejorative but if you are offended on his behalf, I suppose I would qualify the comment by saying he strikes me as the kind of bloke that would pay full price at a market stall rather than haggling. As do lots of Americans :-)
For those visiting London (or who live here), I highly recommend a visit to Greenwich. There are several museums, including one at the Royal Observatory, a planetarium, a brewery that sells its own creations at the naval college and a huge park for those rare moments of sun.
I also strongly recommend membership too. There is so much to see that a single visit will never be enough - time is complex and the astonishing story of measurement and ties to astronomy and navigation which were a coernerstone to allowing discovery and for our modern society to evolve are astonishing.
The time and navigation section at the Smithsonian in Washington is also an interesting adjunct but the true gem (to me) is Greenwich.
Plus, membership also gets free access to the Cutty Sark and the Queens House making for an interesting day or two in London for anyone to enjoy.
I tried to visit when I was last there but the DLR was out of action completely, and when I asked the staff how else I might get there from where I was they were completely out of ideas (one said "nah you're pretty much fucked...")
You can select what modes of transport you're interested in (so you could disable the tube if the DLR isn't running). It'll show you boats too which is cool and definitely the best way to get to Greenwich.
Welcome to UK customer service. You got one of the good ones - there are many much much worse.
There is a convenient river boat you could have taken from the center of London but don't expect anyone to tell you.
Screw you customer service is one of the worst things about living in the UK - especially if you're used to North America. I constantly dream of the days I can move back to my lovely house in Canada and put all this behind me.
As a born and bred Brit, I have to thank you for being so kind as to put "UK" and "customer service" in the same sentence. That's quite generous of you.
Thing is though, I find that when we do try to do North American style customer service, we tend not to like it and find it fake and tacky, and judge actual US customer service in the same way. We simply don't trust it and think we are being BSed. When some one serving us in some way says "have a nice day, Sir" or some such, the British mind seems to internally mumble "Yeah, like you give a toss, don't think I'm falling for that one old chap", or worse!!!
But equally, we get really agitated when something happens like the previous poster experienced. We too would want the alternate information to help us on our way.
So, we tend to get neither the information we need, nor the NA style "Sir" and "have a nice day stuff". What we too often get is the nice words, but not the information or action required. Its like the nice words are seen as a cheap replacement for action.
Of course this is all rooted in the centuries old class resentment thing. In short many here still see service as subservient. Both ways. Those serving resent serving, those being served look down on those doing the serving. Isolated, its ridiculous, but in historical context, you can understand why.
Oh, also there is nothing in it for us. In the US, a lot of service work is usually tipped, coupled with a low initial wage, right? Not so, generally, in the UK. Good service gains the employee little. Might be great for the business, but again, there is this them and us thing between the business owner and the employee. So, the employee just looks at it as gaining them nothing while making the owner more prosperous.
No idea if things are improving, as I live here. That is a question that a frequent foreign visitor would be better placed to assess for us.
On one hand I think its all very amusingly "British", but I do think the whole class resentment attitude really holds us back. But, I have to be honest and admit that even though I think I can see through it, and I can see the really problems with it, I still "feel" in those limited class resentment terms. Its like its genetically bred in.
As a native of the US of A, I've found that customer service can often be improved by being a congenial customer. Better customers get better customer service (generally).
See Tickets (http://www.seetickets.com) are a stable, profitable and technology focused online ticket retailer covering the entire live events market in the UK and select events across Europe.
We work primarily in .NET and are seeking web developers with experience in this area. If you have an interest in Postgres and devops we'd also love to talk to you.
Not to defend the indefensible, but why not make a couple of discussion points...
If you have a huge application and a high staff turnover you want to minimise the amount of information in your developers' heads. Strictly architected code can do this to some extent, and can go some way to reducing need for that other 'enterprise bane' - documentation. This is less of a problem in a startup type environment were you can find out about a particular piece of code by walking over to the kid that wrote it and having a chat.
Code generation (mentioned elsewhere on the thread) is another example of something that is less necessary in a small environment. Matching an enum to the contents of a database table or whatever can be done by convention to begin with, but it's less practical if your development team is spread across three timezones. Better to invest the time in letting computers do the work.
> well, you've been fired from the company you worked for for 5 years, but hey, at least you have fresh drinking water
I'm not sure whether it's my brain, or 'me' that's saying it, but this is pretty much what I tell myself every time something 'bad' happens to me. Works like a charm.
What if you live in one of the leafier parts of the east end, where only 30 years ago you could buy a house on a blue-collar wage. Now your house is worth more than £1m. But you're retired and on a basic state pension. You don't want to move to a cheaper area because your friends and family live close to you and are able to support you.
High property taxes based on the value of your assets would force you to move away or re-mortgage. Not ideal when it comes to maintaining a sense of community or caring for the elderly.
I assume by 'proper' property taxes you mean 'the way the US does things'. I'm not sure that it would work in the UK with our different economics, system of government and geography.