Jane Burnet’s letter (Echo, December 10) about Green Party tax policy raises some thought provoking points. It has long seemed wrong to me that if I earn £100,000, I lose £42,000 in tax.

If I make £100,000 on my share portfolio, then I have to pay around £25,000 in tax. However, a homeowner can sell his house, make £100,000 through no effort on his own part, and pay precisely nothing (in fact it’s worse than that – the buyer ends up paying).

Outside of the main employment areas, and parti-cularly in places such as Dorset, wages are not keeping pace with inflation and have not for nearly a decade.

The cards are stacked against young people.

Even those that can afford to save for a deposit for a home of their own cannot keep up with rising prices, and see little return on their savings because of successive government policies aimed at propping up the housing market regardless of cost.

So, while I applaud Green Party policy in this area, it does not go far enough. The lower limit on which such a wealth tax would apply is £3m. Why so high?

According to the Green Party’s own figures, the top 10% of “wealth owners” own 44% of UK net wealth. To be in this club, you need to be worth £1m.

Applying the tax from this threshold would generate around £110bn per year – enough to completely clear the annual budget deficit and start paying some of the debt we owe.

A 1% tax on all net property wealth (house value less mortgage outstanding) would yield an extra £20bn in tax.

That’s enough to double the staffing in A&E and maternity wards, double the spending on roads and railways and pay for free prescriptions for everyone.

It would create a downward pressure on house prices. I am sure that some readers are recoiling in horror at this suggestion, since we all know that the route out of all problems is to punitively tax high earners.

However, consider this. Even in these difficult times, and as affirmed by the Green Party’s own research, the return on capital is around 5%. A wealth tax of 2% is therefore equivalent to the higher rate tax rate of 40%.

Access to capital is a far greater predictor of social mobility than income alone. It is grotesquely unfair that a 25-year-old with no assets and an average income is taxed, whereas a 65-year-old whose house has risen in value by the same amount is not.

James Young

Friar Waddon Road

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