Mike Truman is the editor of Taxation magazine and a colleague of mine. Mike has crunched the numbers of Nick Clegg's emergency wealth tax and discovered this potential unintended consequence: pensioners with a total wealth of over one million pounds could be hit as well as those with considerable wealth.
Here is a quote from Mike explaining: "The Wealth in Great Britain statistics, from which these figures are taken, shows that nearly half of that wealth is the value of accrued pension benefits, and the tax would affect all households with total wealth over £1 million. This means that a teacher about to retire on an index-linked pension of £20,000 a year and owning a £350,000 house on which the mortgage had been paid off would be charged to the wealth tax, potentially facing a bill of £200,000."
