Assume every tax rate except for the “personal allowance” was increased by 1% to fund free train travel.
Would you be in favour of this?
I’ve not done the math for this (though did look up some stats for a Scotland specific post, and it seems to be feasible: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/44818305). So for the UK it may require a lower or higher increase (and to be fair my Scotland “calculations” were very rough and likely entirely wrong). This is more just a question about whether people would be in favour of something like this in general.
Yes. Absolutely. I would happily pay more tax for this. 1% is a very tiny amount.
The trains in this country are shockingly abysmal and they cost an arm and a leg, despite being the absolute basic requirement for a functional modern economy.
As someone only on basic rate of tax and fairly low income struggling to make ends meet, I would still happily pay taxes for this, both in addition and especially instead of the BBC for it to spew far right hatred or endless consultantocracies and other assorted privatized money funnels like what’s become of the NHS (especially GPs), alongside council, DWP and TV loicence enforcement goons with their endless investigations, cutting triple lock, cutting winter fuel allowance and other ways boomers drain the economy.
I think there are better ways though - like taxing the top 1%, much higher carbon/road/infrastructure taxes on car people (only fair because of their increased personal pollution, infrastructure use, space occupation and damage to the environment and people).
Even this 1% tax doesn’t need to be flat, it can be scaled with income brackets, with each step being another extra 1%, as long as the math checks out.
Even moreso - Land value tax, and shifting council tax to property owners instead of tenants/residents and second home tax and property for investment tax, ramping it up to as high as it’ll go to fund property buybacks for councils, then charging rents without profit margins baked in to make trains more affordable.
But if it’s what it takes to get anything done in the current political climate dominated by the far-right, tributes to some random pro-gun grifter influencer being shot in another country flooded with guns and Sir seat warmer as PM cowtowing to the demands of pub-dwelling gammon flagshaggers, sell-your-govt-to-palantir-as-an-ideology party of ReformUK, Farage and his oligarch sponsors from the Kremlin to the White House and other various dodgy American govcorp and MIC-adjacent glowing lobby groups then that would have to be it.