New polling finds 44% prepared to pay more tax to cover costs of COVID19
A wealth tax the most favoured way
Given the huge extra government spending to deal with COVID19 and cover things like the billions which have gone on the test and trace system Ipsos-MORI finds 44% saying they are ready to pay more. But when it comes to what form of new taxation the preferred choice is a wealth tax that doesn’t exist at the moment.
When asked who should pay a new wealth tax, the most popular is those with total wealth over £500,000 (approximately 10% of the population). However, more Conservative than Labour voters prefer that a new wealth tax be limited to the top 1% of the population with total wealth over £2million.
Clearly changes are coming and how Rishi Sunak approaches this will be one of the the big political debates in the coming months.
But how the money has already been spent is an issue that isn’t going to go away. Asking people to pay more is inevitably going to lead an examination of things like the test and trace billions that appear to have gone on an Excel spreadsheet.