Wednesday 26 November 2014

Short lists.

Here's a list of celebrities who are well past their sell by date:

Bill Oddie
Michael Caine
Griff Rhys Jones
Myleene Klass
Sol Campbell

Here's a list of celebrities who are still at the top of their game:

Angelina Jolie

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

"I hereby confess that I am one of the Mansion owning North London set that are apparently staunch Labour. Not this time. I shall vote GREEN."
Bill Oddie.

That's strange since the Greens propose a much higher tax regime on such things. 1-2% per annum on assets worth over £3m. So a shed load more than being proposed by Labour.

Mark Wadsworth said...

PC, indeed, that was the irony on that one.

benj said...

Jolie has property in France and the US. Where no doubt she pays much more than the Mansion Tax proposal here.

If she just waits for a bit, the MT will be deducted from the selling price anyway, should Labour gain power.

Then she can boast about the contribution she is making to the poor British people, at no loss to herself.

I thought that's what these lovies want?



mombers said...

Good if the Pitts rather stay in a hotel or rented house when they spend a few weeks here, rather than exclude everyone from an undoubtedly very valuable piece of land for the whole year!

Mark Wadsworth said...

BJ, exactly, if you buy after the tax comes in, you are in a better position than now. It's only if you already own one that you end up in a worse position.

M, or that.

Tim Almond said...

This is one of the problems with the Mansion Tax. You pay tax on a house worth over £2m, and that takes no account of the value of the land. So, Madonna's place down in Wiltshire, Ashcombe House was worth about £7m as an estate. But it had over 1,000 acres of land with it.

In reality, that should probably be taxed at less than the rate of a suburban home in Swindon as it has about zero location value.

And that's the thing. If Jolie wants to come here and live down near Newport, maybe because it's close to the new Pinewood studio, we should encourage that, and do so by switching more taxation from income to land. We want the people with tax mobility - the rockstars, authors and movie stars - to come here. Even if they pay no tax, the spending on decorators, private schooling, someone to service the Ferrari would be worth it. That's the beauty of LVT.

Bill Oddie? Well, he's basically a Beeb man. If the Beeb fired him he'd be struggling for an income. It's not like TF1 or RAI UNO would hire him to do a birdwatching programme.

(Strictly Come Dancing is how the BBC should do things - get celebrities to work for free because of all the endorsement, personal appearance and biography sales they get off the back of it.)

Bayard said...

"You pay tax on a house worth over £2m, and that takes no account of the value of the land."

Are you sure? There are only 78 Mansion Taxable houses in the whole of Wales. If the land was included in a big-house-plus-landed-estate-combo, then I would have thought there'd be more than that, even in Wales.

Mark Wadsworth said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mark Wadsworth said...

TS, clearly, the Mansion Tax is second best to LVT, and even second best to more Council Tax bands, but the charge is so low, that it would not exceed the land rental value of grand houses out in the countryside.

And for 90% of homes liable to Mansion Tax, the bulk of the value is in the location i.e. those in central London.

The IFS pointed out that LVT (and its variants) are such a good tax that it is not the end of the world if the rate is different on different plots i.e. under Mansion Tax the implied LVT rate on central london homes is 10% of location value and maybe 50% or more of the location value of grand houses in the countryside, but it is more than 0% and less than 100% and that is the main thing.