I fucking hate The Gobblin' King

The Gobblin' King: "You have thirteen hours to solve my labyrinthine tax policies and rescue your baby's inheritance before it becomes mine; forever... Such a pity..."

Sometimes, even with my extensive mastery of Anglo-Saxon, it is difficult for me to articulate satisfactorally my hatred for Gordon Brown; to say that he is a fat, evil, crusty daemon's cunt of an excuse for a dog-turd hardly even comes close (although it provides a minor satisfaction for my blistered soul).

However, I had forebodings when I heard that he had tinkered with Trusts, and my fears were confirmed when I saw this article quoted by The Englishman.

The Chancellor announced plans to apply a triple tax to trusts set up to enable beneficiaries to avoid inheritance tax.

“Accumulation and maintenance trusts” are set up by parents and grandparents wanting to bequeath assets free of tax while preventing them from being squandered.

The action against the trusts is retrospective, forcing people to reorganise their financial affairs or leave their heirs with an unexpected tax bill.

Need I point out how rare it is to make any legislation retrospective? He must be getting really desperate for cash.

The Chancellor’s measure means that assets put in to the trusts will be taxed at 20 per cent on the way in. The assets will also be taxed at 6 per cent every ten years. The final sting is an “exit charge” of up to 6 per cent when the beneficiaries take the assets out of the trusts.

Assets put into these trusts have hitherto been free of inheritance tax on the way in and the way out. Crucially, too, they have been able to grow in value without attracting tax.

Now, longtime readers will know how I feel about Inheritance Tax, or death duties. I think that they are deeply wrong on both a moral level and on an economic level. It is capital that provides social mobility, for capital provides leverage. Destroying reserves of capital destroys opportunities and thus stunts social mobility.

Trusts were one of the ways in which death duties could be avoided or ameliorated. Now, please remember that any money going into a Trust has already been taxed, usually via NI and/or income tax or via Capital Gains Tax. This is not tax-free cash, OK?

Now the Trust fund will also be taxed as it accumulates. Can you think of any other situation in which this happens? If you save money in the bank, you get taxed on the interest, i.e. the income, but not on the capital itself (until you die). With Capital Gains Tax, you do not get taxed until you liquidate the capital assets, i.e. turn the assets, e.g. shares, into income. The only other place that I can think of this happening is in businesses, where the business capital (which the Chancellor calls "profit") is taxed each year. This is an extraordinary move, by our one-eyed chum.

And, then, of course, the money is taxed on the way out. Remember that it has been taxed at least twice on the way into the Trust, it will be taxed every 10 years whilst it is in there, and it will be taxed on the way out. And then whoever receives the money will also be taxed again since it will usually count as income. So, in most circumstances (except for if the money is used, for instance, to buy a primary residence), the money will be taxed twice on the way out too.

The Gobblin King has done it again, the fucking little shit. And the worst of it is, there are some otherwise quite intelligent people in the blogosphere who will praise him for this action, whining and bitching about how "taxing luck" is totally fair, etc. He is not taxing luck: he is taxing the hard-earned income of hard-working people; he is doing it multiple times and he is doing it out of pure spite. He is taking away people's incentive to save, both for themselves and their children, and taking away opportunities that people would not otherwise have. And he is doing it so that some feckless shit who couldn't keep her legs together can get a Council House, or so that a man in Derby with 14 children can have a bigger house, or so that some fucking waster smack-addict on a Glasgow housing estate can have a TV to sell for skag.

As I have said repeatedly, socialism is about taking property from those who have earned it and handing it to those who have not. It is theft, pure and simple, and no amount of whining about fucking "social justice" will ever detract from that fact.

You want to help those who aren't in work? Give them a really good reason to go and get a job. You think that there are jobs that "natives" won't do? Cut off their benefits and see how those jobs get filled. You think teenage pregnancies are harmful? Don't give them economic incentives to have children.

And finally, Gordo, you fucking Cyclopean little tossbag, you want to help the hard-working poor? Give them their fucking money back, you cunt.