The Government’s conversation with the newspapers the elderly and wealth read is interesting. The elderly and the wealthy should know that they are going to get it in taxation so that the Chancellor can manage her books and encourage growth in the UK.

Ideas that have been mooted include a capital gains tax on property sold for more than £1.5m, additional council tax on properties worth more than £500,000 as well as more radical measures .

Last year  Onward, economist Tim Leunig tabled proposals last year to scrap council tax . Homeowners — and not tenants — would pay a proportional tax towards local services on house values below £500,000, alongside a national levy on the value above.

The latest proposal is to ditch transaction costs on buying and selling.This from the FT.

The Treasury is reportedly assessing ditching stamp duty — a transaction tax paid by buyers on properties valued at above £125,000. The government could look to replace it with an annual tax on homeowners, with properties worth more than £500,000 based on the value, according to property executives.

What all these proposals have in comment is a prejudice against older wealthier people for whom their home is typically something that other generations aspire.

There are of course quite different reasons older people are wealthy from property. Some have inherited it , some have fought for it by sacrificing (often pension payments) and there are some who speculate, buying and letting to others. But by and large, housing has been a leveraged bet on house prices going up fast – and they have.

We have not had to work hard to get rich out of property and wealth in properties is a mark of success which elderly people find important and rather more ostentatious a measure of merit than holdings in stocks or receipt of pension.

I suspect this is why attempts to tax property wealth has come to nothing. The FT reports that much

Wealth taxes in general are popular with Labour backbenchers, but finance ministry figures see them as complex to introduce and administer

There is in the word “conservative” a genuine wish to maintain the hierarchy that home ownership has created and there is no more conservative a body than the senior element of the civil service. Most of those of us over 50 years were appalled and comforted by “Yes Minister”. So there is a certain complacency amongst my generation (I am 63) that plans to tax  housing wealth are unlikely to get very far. We chortle from our comfy armchairs in out £1m mansions (which in London can mean a 2 up 2 down).

UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has asked officials to draw up options for tax reform before the Autumn Budget, with property levies a central focus.

This is a pension blog and I have sold pensions for 42 years as a way to have liquid in the cash to meet the costs of later life.  Against me has been an undercurrent of complacency that I label “my house is my pension”. But rather worryingly, it is not housing as an asset but house ownership as a liability that is worrying the readers of the FT. I fear that the fear of my generation is that what has marked them out as being successful could rather cramp their lifestyle.

Luckily for those who who have made it into the retirement zone , we are the generation who own the mansions and the pensions. If we think we are immune from wealth taxes, then we really are complacent.