Taxation

You want to do as much as possible with as little as possible tax.

People might be fine with 40% tax, but some people might not. In which case, you should have a low tax, and people who want a high tax can just crowdfund what they want instead.

The government can have an idea of something to build, for example, and then rich people can crowdfund it if they want, or rich people can have their ideas and give them to the government and crowdfund it while the government builds it, having consulted the two councils.

Poor people might have ideas of what they want and can't crowdfund it, in which case, The Awesome Party in government will ask the rich if they'd be happy to crowdfund a poor people idea. The rich will have low tax, so they'll be more happy to stay in the country and crowdfund something real, as opposed to just paying tax which is a completely blind process and could feed inefficient government processes supported by people who forgot that you have to deliver bangs for bucks at every level of public-funded stuff.

The rich, for example, may be happy to fund certain public services and projects, but not others. By letting them choose what they want to voluntarily fund, they are less likely to flee taxation.

I will reduce the top tax rate to 20%, slowly.

A more powerful and cohesive country, which actually has a govenment that cares = less need for tax

I may go below 20%, down to 10%, if crowd-funding works well.

In principle, you want to go as close as possible to a taxless society.

To do this, you have to assume that the reason people might not want to pay to for public things, is not because they're selfish, but because their contribution isn't taken seriously, and with simple taxation, their contribution goes to all sorts of things that they don't want to fund.

Imagine you have a poor country and a relatively extremely rich person moves to your country and is suddenly expected to pay lots of his income to the poor people. Surely, he would expect to be given a great say over where that money goes to.

We may have a, for example, two-part tax, particularly for rich people, as follows. Say that a rich person is expected to pay at least 30% of their income towards public stuff. We can make it so that 10% of that income is simply tax - no questions asked. Then, with the other 20%, they can select from a grid on a screen, of various projects/services that they want to fund more, and what they want to fund less.

For example, there might be a grid with different types of healthcare expenses, different types of military expenses, different types of roadworks expenses, and different ideas from the government which might not already be funded.

Then, they have a certain number of "likes" they can allocate to their different public things, and they have a certain amount of "dislikes" they can allocate. The 20% of their tax will be allocated to things according to what they liked and disliked, provided that their grid is accepted by their constituency two councils. Their grid can be rejected a total of twice by their constituency's two councils, and then once by the national two councils, before the grid thing is abandoned and the 20% tax is taken regardless of their preferences.

⬆ Dawg, you can't just magically bring down bills, fix roads and get faster GP appointments.

Of course we want to make these mindless improvements.

Your job is to actually use your brain to improve the things that you actually can directly improve, which is the structures of public services.

Don't pretend that you have the power within your brain to magically bring down bills.

You can only bring down bills indirectly, by making structural changes to public stuff, such that people are better served for the same amount of money.

So, it's no use saying you're going to bring down bills.

I'M going to bring down bills, but I won't do it by bringing down bills. It’ll happen as a consequence of people being healthier and happier and more productive as a result of my restructuring of public stuff.

THAT'S the primary job of a politician - is to figure out how to maximise the efficiency and efficacy of public services and decision-making process for when you do decide to spend public money on things.

Of course we want to fix roads, but it's not as though roads are broken just because previous politicians forgot about roads. Everybody knows about roads.

Not everybody knows about the social breakdown that is causing the physical breakdown.

The social breakdown is ultimately caused by THE GOVERNMENT'S social structures, mainly the education system, which hasn't changed due to the social structures that inform politicians.

"Better value for taxpayers" is basically your entire job, and "raising school standards" would go within that.

So, it's like you should just replace your advert with just "deliver better value for taxpayers".

Of course, then you'd have to explain how you're going to provide better value for taxpayers.

I've read the Scottish Conservatives' ideas on education. As expected, they're basically nothing. They're not going to save civilisation. 

You can tell that Russell Findlay isn't going to save civilisation, just by seeing that he's wearing a tie.

If you actually cared deeply about value for taxpayers, you'd stop paying teachers to teach kids algebra (and art, and drama and social studies - which they can do by themselves, by the way, they don't need schools to force-feed it) for no good reason when they don't even want to be there and they'd rather be having fun or learning something else probably more important. 

THAT'S a common sense programme that would deliver better value for taxpayers.

We want to maximise what we can offer the taxpayer without the need for tax, by coming up with things that people might like and seeing if we can get crowdfunding for it. Less tax (which is unaccountable to what people actually want), more crowdfunding.