This Is Money Show

‘If they could tax the air you breathe they’d do it.’ That age-old moan about taxes going up has sprung to mind over the past week, as rumours about pretty much any tax you can think of being hiked were spread about. So many kites were flown about potential tax rises that even taxing selling your own home and bringing back the 50p rate were floated as potential Autumn Statement ideas troubling Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak’s minds. If all this came to pass it would surely become known as ‘the everything tax raid’. But will it come to pass? Probably not. You get the sense this is a massive exercise in softening up the nation, so that when some but not all taxes go up on Thursday, people breathe a sigh of relief. Yet could this bout of not-officially-encouraged-but-definitely-not-discouraged speculation do lasting harm to the economy? Simon Lambert argues that case on this week’s podcast, where he says with sentiment already heavily depressed going into a recession, striking the financial fear of God into th