Now available for £8.99, or less.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Read more about me
If you like what I do please support me on Ko-fi using credit or debit card or PayPal
Tax Research UK Blog is written by Richard Murphy unless otherwise stated and published by Tax Research LLP under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Design by Andy Moyle
Hopefully copies of the hardback will achieve antique status and will become a form of ‘near money’. (smiley emoticon).
I d personally have preferred the title;
The Joy of Tax…..Avoidance.
Great news Richard – will be added to reading list for a new final year undergraduate module
Thanks!
I will buy a copy.
Speaking of tax – my business partner (also based in Belgium) was talking to a neighbour – who is leaving Belgium for France. They work for Total (the French oil company) & the person was bragging that they will be paid (& thus taxed)out of ….Switzerland.
The “cherry” on this particular cake is that the person’s partner is a rabid Brexiter & when it was pointed out that UK exit would have a deleterous impact on my partners (& mine) business – gave a shrug of the shoulders.
I am sure that is true…
Why care when Jack’s all right?
I thought your book was very good, Richard, but one thing puzzles me, if I have read it right. You have advocated a wealth tax and an expansion of national debt. In order to create more fairness and move from income produced by ownership to income produced from work, a wealth tax would have to be heavily weighted at the top end. I believe this is essential and surely it would obviate the need to create more national debt. We could, instead, eliminate the debt; the interest may be low but it is still a cost to the economy. I do not think a wealth tax imposed in this way would harm the economy at all.
I am suggesting a change in the composition of debt
We cannot get be rid of national debt: there would literally be no money left
You can’t run a modern economy without national debt
“the interest may be low but it is still a cost to the economy.”
It’s not really a cost to the economy. It’s just the interest on savings.
Being paid in sterling, the yield cannot be spent or saved anywhere other than in the sterling area, or exchanged with a holder of some other currency, who will then spend or save that sterling here.
What’s so bad about either of those outcomes?
Around a quarter of it is going back to the gov via QE anyway.
If government expenditure includes interest on the national debt, I call that a cost to the economy. And Richard, “you can’t run a modern economy without national debt”? Why?
There is no money without national debt
The Labour government from 1945 found plenty of money whilst reducing the national debt. The national debt would have got to zero, but the rot set in when Major/Lamont took charge. They, and of course Thatcher, decided that the country should borrow money so that wealthy people could add to their wealth. There is still plenty of money. It just happens that much of it is in the hands of relatively few extremely wealthy people. Much of the return they receive on that wealth, without having to do any work, is not spent in any way that helps the economy. Instead, it is just added to the wealth they already have. The only way we can reduce inequality is to tax that wealth.
Most of the debt is owned by insurance companies (as “safe” collateral), banks and, importantly, pension funds. As such, much of the interest payment you see as a cost to the economy emerges as payments to pensioners, or interest on savings. By eliminating national debt, you would (under the current system) be denying pensioners private pension schemes (pension funds simply wouldn’t cope without the steady interest of Government debt), hugely increase the cost of insurance (insurance companies would require risker assets as collateral) and savers to 0% interest, even possibly fees to save (since banks would need risker assets to hold as collateral against the savings accounts).
Richard
I am a proud owner of the hard back edition of the Joy of Tax which I hope one day to be carrying with me when/if a bump into you and ask you to sign it.
Good luck with the paperback – the book deserves to be read widely and taken seriously – David Cameron please note.
Thank you
To add to my post of June 17, to which there does not seem to be a response:-
Wealth of the wealthiest 10% of households = £5.0 trillion (still growing)
National debt = £1.6 trillion (still growing)
QED