'Fair' Means Something Quite Different To Socialists...

Peter Wilby in 'CiF' is baffled that so many people are against paying Labour's 'death tax':

Gordon Brown abandoned plans for an election in 2007 after the Tories announced they would exempt all estates worth less than £1m from ­inheritance tax.

So we are no nearer a solution on funding old people's care, a problem that Labour has tiptoed round since 1997 as though it were an unstable nuclear reactor.

And why so?

Because no-one is prepared to pay twice, or endure a further tax on things already taxed, you moron!

'Vote for me, I'll make you penniless!' isn't exactly a stirring rallying cry, now is it..?

The present system, whereby only those with assets of £23,000 or less are paid for wholly by the state, is widely resented. Many old folk have to sell the family home to meet care bills and it causes them great distress to dispose of their most treasured asset.

Fancy that! I'd never have believed it...

But what about Income tax and NI? Weren't they sold as a means to fund social care for all?

Ah, here Peter lets the lefty cat out of the bag, you ignorant suckers!

They believe the state should meet the full cost of personal care and, ignorant of how the system works, some always thought it would do.

And whose fault is that? Wasn't that how it was sold to us all? It is, after all, called 'National Insurance'...

If there is such wide antipathy to a tax that affects only the largest estates – 2% in America, 6% here – what hope for a similar one that would hit most of us, as a levy for elderly care would?

Maybe it will play better than straightforward inheritance tax because people will see what they are getting, and recognise that the certainty of a small levy on the estate after death would be infinitely preferable to the possibility of a near-100% charge if you are unlucky enough to need years of expensive care.

And maybe it won't.

Certainly, the comments to this article should give you a bit of a clue. If you can't carry the regular CiF'ers, you certainly aren't going to carry Mr & Mrs White Van Man, looking glumly at their income tax forms and wondering just what benefit their money is buying them...

Over the past decade particularly, the capacity to borrow against the security of a house has helped disguise stagnation in ordinary people's incomes. No wonder they wish to hand on this precious, hard-won asset to their children just as aristocratic families wished to hand down intact estates to their heirs. No wonder, even where an inheritance tax is unlikely to affect them personally, they empathise with those who have to pay it.

Of course they do! People don't like handing over yet more money to the reckless, troughing cretins in government so that they can squander it on yet more bloated schemes. Hold the front page, folks! Peter's had a revelation...

In other words, the "death tax" runs up against the same emotions as the requirement for old people to sell their homes to finance care while still alive. It would be the most socially just means of funding, as well as the most economically efficient, but it will be hard to convince the voters. That is a measure of how far the left in Britain and America have allowed the case for social justice to go by default.

No, it's a measure of how far you've lost the plot, in believing that one day, that goose isn't going to start asking where all its golden eggs have gone.

And there you are, with yolk dripping from your mouth and a 'Who, me?' expression on your face...