Heaven knows, I don't think western politics is fair at all. The British Government aren't being very nice to us in the Channel Islands either. They just think we are a load of tax dodging scum because we are an offshore center. A very well regulated and helpful one I think.
Well we have just lost a court battle with them over something called Low Value Consignment Relief. This meant that we built up a considerable fullfillment industry supplying goods under the £15 threshold for VAT. Mainly from music and other leisure related items. The reason LVCR was there in the first place was that the UK Government couldn't be bothered to deal with items under £18, then they reduced that to £15, now they have decided to tke away the LVCR altogether.
We are in the position of having up to 2000 people here put out of work, and there are only about 97 thousand of us. This is going to cause us unimaginable problems.
The UK Government think they are losing millions of pounds in revenue. I honestly don't think it's going to make a huge impact on high street retail sales in the UK, however the companies that do the fulfillment from here will have to consider where they move to if they find Jersey is no longer the best place to operate from.
We just don't know what will happen in about a weeks time when I assume the 20% UK VAT is added to the purchase price. Perhaps there is a glimmer of hope that customers of Jersey online businesses may stay loyal and continue to use us. I assume they would not be able to buy their purchase cheaper?
The cheek of it also, is that we will have to collect the VAT for the British government, and they will not be paying any of the costs of doing this.
Our Government thinks that the initial impact to our economy if this sector is virtually wiped out ovenight is an extra 10 million pounds in unemployment benefits per year. That is a heck of a lot of money to find for a small island. We simply can't absorb those sort of job losses.
This whole thing could/will hit us very hard. Imagine us as a 100 thousand size Town in the UK, and the local factory closing and putting 2000 people out of work. We are all sitting here biting our nails to see if the orders still come in to keep those people in work.
I think I agree about the stamp duty though. Yes its a lot of money, but if you can afford to buy a very expensive property, you must be able to afford the tax as well. Yes I understand there are ways that a company registered offshore can buy property in the UK and not pay for the stamp duty. We all have to pay stamp duty here on buying a property.
I think if people earn the money that puts them in that super wealthy bracket, paying a higher rate of tax is not always productive. I think there is obviously going to be more effort put into avoiding tax through offshore means if the tax rate is 50%, I think even 45% is high!
We all pay 20%, which is why wealthy people come here. In my opinion, wealthy people create jobs and wealth for other people in the community. That's if they feel better about spending their hard earned cash. I think most people I know that are wealthy worked very hard to be able to retire. Frankly I don't think I would ever want to be 'wealthy', I would worry too much.
Our problem is a shortage of affordable housing, and high cost of living. We have to support a county size hospital, and all social services out of our various tax revenues. We all have a tighter belt on at the moment! The reason we are short of housing, is because we are an island, and the building cos