the corner office

The stamp duty holiday announced by Alistair Darling seems a blatantly desperate plea to buy a few votes. Apparently, this holiday is going to cost the government £600m. And the UK's population is 60 million. So basically, every person in the UK (ignoring the fact that not all of those 60m are tax payers) is coughing up 10 quid so that someone else can get up to £1,750 off of their next house purchase, if the house is cheap enough.

I'm not planning to buy a house any time soon. And even if I was, nothing in my neck of the woods (ie. Greater London) is cheap enough to qualify for the stamp duty holiday. So it seems rather unfair that I should have to pay for other people, many/most of whom pay far less tax than me, to buy a house.

What if I'd rather take that 10 quid and put it in the bank to save up for when I am ready to buy a house? OK, that's a typical tax-is-evil response, but you can look at it another way: if the money was going towards people going hungry or cold because of the recession, then one might feel less aggrieved. As it stands though, it's really just a pointless gesture which will do nothing to reverse the decline in house prices, do nothing to help those worst affected by the economic downturn, and will (hopefully, and probably) do nothing to help the government when they get the boot in the next general elections.