Simon Lambert

The mansion tax should be on homes that are worth £2 million after you've taken the mortgage off.

But there's a reason why that isn't the case.

It's because loads of people with £2 million houses would go out and get massive great big mortgages in order to not have to pay the tax.

So it's like you don't have to pull on many threads for this whole idea to start unravelling as a particularly stupid one.

And so for something that's going to raise such a minimal amount of money anyway, I just think we should bin it off.

I mean, you would argue perhaps that it is for show.

It's a for show tax, you know.

Yes.

I mean, there's a number of reasons why this would be a bad idea, but there is a good way to do it as well.

And if you do it the good way, then it's probably fine.

But if you do it the other way, which I believe there may be quite a strong risk of that happening, especially if you look at some of the parties who are arguing for this to happen.

And so the reason why it's lower or the argument why it's lower is because people are taking a risk.

That's why you pay a lower rate on investment gains, business, entrepreneurial risk.

So you might be taking an investment risk, you might be taking an entrepreneurial risk.

You could go up, you could go down.

If it goes down, obviously you don't pay any tax, but you are taking a risk with your capital.

Also, the reason why capital gains tax is lower is because in the past it was higher, but we had an element of indexation, which means that you were only taxed on gains above inflation or you had something called taper relief, which reduced the level of the tax depending on how long you'd held the investment and rewarded long term investment.

There is an argument that

that if you just raise the level of the tax and you don't bring in that indexation element, then you will start to see to stop investment because there's an easy way to avoid this.

You don't sell.