Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Tarnished by emotive phrases, labelled the ‘death tax’ and ‘the tax on love’, inheritance tax (IHT) has become the bogeyman of British taxes. Add a link to house prices, the favourite topic of certain British newspapers, and a regular place in the headlines seems assured. But, like the bogeyman, many of the flaws of IHT are more talked about than real, and contain a large dose of myth and misunderstanding. This chapter argues that we need to defend the principle of a strong IHT, while at the same time recognising that there are some genuine problems with the current system. We must address the two together: to defend a strong tax, we need to reform its errors; to reform its errors, we must defend its principles. In reforming IHT, it may also be possible to raise modest revenues for an expanded citizens’ stake such as the Child Trust Fund (CTF). Debate on the future of IHT is active and aggressive. At its gentlest, reform is led by the Treasury, steadily closing loopholes, introducing new rules to prevent avoidance, and, in the pre-election budget of 2005, increasing the threshold. Raising the temperature slightly, the Fabian Society's Commission on Taxation and Citizenship in 2000 proposed that the formal incidence be shifted from the estate to the recipient – this is discussed in Section 2 of this chapter, at p 43. In August 2004 the headlines were briefly filled by the preliminary publication of this paper, suggesting that IHT should be banded in a way similar to income tax. The press commentary, dividing relatively clearly between left and right, showed again that IHT provokes interest far beyond its size in terms of revenue or number of taxpayers. It demonstrated a clear appetite for reform, but also that the cost of opening the debate may be to unleash abolitionist forces that would otherwise remain dormant. At its most aggressive, argument on IHT was taken up by the Conservative Party ahead of the 2005 general election, and put at the centre of the party's tax-cutting proposals. America's phasing out of estate tax, as part of George W. Bush, Jr’s 2001 tax package, has added a sense of momentum to reform. With Canada, Australia and New Zealand also having abolished it, Britain now feels unusual among developed English-speaking nations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".