The OECD has reported in an email briefing this morning that:
In 2018, four OECD countries had tax-to-GDP ratios above 43% (France, Denmark, Belgium and Sweden) and four other EU countries also recorded tax-to-GDP ratios above 40% (Finland, Austria, Italy and Luxembourg). Five OECD countries (Mexico, Chile, Ireland, the United States and Turkey) recorded ratios under 25%.
There's one thing to note first, and that is that Ireland's GDP is massively overstated by the flow of foreign profits through it: the impact may be overstatement by more than 25%, in which case the noted tax ratio is also wrong and the real like-for-like figure would have Ireland above 30%.
Then I will pose a simple question: which would you rather live in? France, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Italy and Luxembourg, or Mexico, Chile, the USA and Turkey?
And where would you feel safer?
And in which country would your human rights be better protected?
And now, why would you want to drive tax yield and the size of government down?
It's really not rocket science that tax is good fo9r wellbeing, is it?
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Thank you for reminding us that Ireland’s GDP is significantly enhanced by corporates using it to reduce their tax liabilities. Depressingly, the 2019 Cummings/Johnson Conservatives have predictably backed the assumption that we would all prefer to live in a low tax economy. Mrs. Thatcher would be proud of them.
Red Pepper today (05-Dec-2019) adresses the very point your question raises. https://www.redpepper.org.uk/election-2019-the-end-of-neoliberalism-in-sight/ : “If elected, the next Labour government can finally depart from the neoliberal consensus and deliver a major shift in wealth and power, argues Adam Peggs
“While Labour is offering hope and large-scale change of the kind that hasn’t been seen for more than a generation, their opponents are offering no serious vision for the future. The Conservative’s programme, like their modest spending pledges, is particularly negligible. Boris Johnson’s cabinet is firmly rooted in the ideas and tropes of 1980s Thatcherism. His party’s manifesto lionises ‘the free market’, the ‘profit motive’ and ‘low taxes’. Hence one of the few ideas that doesn’t represent continuity with his predecessor, Theresa May, is its talk of ‘freeports’ — deregulated, low tax zones within the UK. These ideas show Johnson’s Conservatives to be a crude re-run of Thatcher’s version at its height.
“Neoliberalism — our current economic system, installed by Thatcher — is some forty years old and long past showing signs that it is untenable. The neoliberal maxims: deregulation for businesses; privatisation and marketisation of public services; opposition to trade unions, and the glorification of greed, seem less popular than ever. What public enthusiasm existed for neoliberalism has faded. Current waves of protests across Chile — one of the first countries to pursue an aggressively neoliberal system, under dictator and friend of Thatcher Augusto Pinochet — indicate that the doctrine is no longer tolerated in its heartland. Thatcher’s certainty that Britain would continue to follow a neoliberal trajectory now looks far less secure……”
It’s well worth reading the rest of Adam Peggs article (link above).
Adam is good
We work together at the Progressive Economy Forum
And even in the US of A folk drink state funded water, drive on state funded roads, attend state funded schools, are protected by state funded fire and police services and the military, benefit from state funded research (Teflon, windows style computer interfaces, touch screens, unix underneath everything, satellites, the internet, etc etc), have a 50% state funded health system (yes while it is supposedly private the Feds pick up 50% of the bill), and so on.
So why do so many folk (in England at least) have such a severe case of Marxist false consciousness that they would vote against Labour policies of cheaper train fares, free university, higher wages for the low paid, more council houses, etc? And instead vote for tax cuts for the already wealthy (i.e. not most of them), and drastically reduced provision of precisely the services most of them need? All because of some nonsense that ‘we can’t afford it’. Who said we had better surrender to the Nazis in 1939 because we ‘can’t afford to do anything about them’? Who says we ‘can’t afford Trident’, or ‘we can’t afford a Gulf War’, etc? Or even ‘we can’t afford to leave the EU’?
Well said Timothy Rideout.
Finding money is all about priorities, isn’t it? “The language of priorities is the religion of socialism” – Aneurin Bevan.
If the Conservatives win next week and neoliberalism is not euthanised, the the ecological emergency will truly become an existential Extinction event and we truly cannot afford that.
And we can’t afford to act on climate change with the necessary urgency, so we have no choice. We’ll just have to microwave our grandchildren.
No, it’s not rocket science. Yet most Brits simply don’t get it. Nor have they ever. If they had then the country would have similar standards of living, equality and security to the ones you mention with higher tax ratios. I fear it’s a lost cause. Neo-liberalism has irremediably taken root in the UK like Japanese knotweed and is being intensively cultivated by the prevailing Tory régime (‘How the right’s radical thinktanks reshaped the Conservative party’ – https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/29/rightwing-thinktank-conservative-boris-johnson-brexit-atlas-network.)
Johnson is the useful fool in the global plan of these Ayn Rand-inspired sociopaths. In this morning’s Guardian Aditya Chakrabortty offers a realistic warning – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/05/boris-johnson-clown-autocracy-critics.
For me it’s frustrating, unnerving and depressing watching the nation make such a wrong decision for its future well-being. Of course nothing is permanent and change happens, one way or another. But at what price? We are caught up in a battle for the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens which the alt-right is clearly winning.
I don’t suppose Jeremy Clarkson’s natural constituency extends much beyond his petrol-head fan base, yet I fear his tone and views are pretty much in line with those older voters who will keep Johnson in power. If one didn’t know otherwise one would see it as jocular satire – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8rHgv7Qpts.
I know I only make generalised comment in response to your valuable insights into specific topics, which I’m not professionally qualified to judge. I just feel they make even more sense if they are evaluated in their wider context, as component pieces of a macro socio-economic jigsaw. Sorry – naff analogy. It’s not as benign & therapeutic as a jig-saw. It’s a very dangerous ideology that is currently taking over the planet. One can only hope and pray that enough young people everywhere will see through it and coalesce to over throw it before it’s too late.
Rhubarb, rhubarb. Nothing more to say other than thank God for decent coffee 🙂
I want to live in a country that recognises that taxes pay for nothing. I want to live in country that has a government that marshals its resources through appropriate spending to allocate to all the means to a betterment of a life experience so that everyone has the opportunity to engage, be a participant of and be part of the kudos of reward given their all too brief existence. whether rich or poor, on this planet
Who knows?
How do we know whether or not the Blair years turned people against the Labour party? New Labour – the party of the focus group and an obsession with swingers (the voting type). A party that looked down its collective noses at White Man Van and whose leaders were caught slagging voters off who moaned at them off microphone? A party that lost its commitment to collective action and felt that the unions were a millstone around its neck?
Entering the early 2000’s I was struck at how the middle class were very happy but the working class was angry and getting angrier. I lost count of how many times I had to hear missives about teachers, public sector pensions and immigrants. Something was not right during the Blair years.
The two speed society we live in now – slow and grinding poverty being constantly refreshed by a shrinking middle class at on end and the excesses of wealth at the other – all started being laid down by New Labour and its ‘intensely relaxed’ Giddens influenced attitudes to how markets worked.
I’m sorry but that is how I see it. As a working class lad who went to Uni – life was good as I entered the world of the middle class professional afterwards (a status that has been continuously under threat since 2010). But for those who did not get the chance I had – things just seemed to get worse, and the ‘Precariat’ was born.
And then came Iraq. As one of the principal characters in the TV series ‘Shameless’ used to say:
‘Tony Blair? Fuck ‘im!’
We cannot go back there
Indeed.