From the Guardian this morning: “Having set out his fiscal consolidation plan, it is important that chancellor George Osborne resist the temptation to engage in any significant net giveaway in the budget,” the IFS said in its green budget, produced jointly with Barclays Capital and Barclays Wealth and published this morning. I think the identity
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I have found a redeeming feature in the Mirrlees recommendations. They suggest the abolition of stamp duty on sales of domestic housing and the abolition of council tax. And they suggested its replacement by a land value tax. As far as I can tell this was the one coherent, progressive and logical moment of this
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The Mirrlees report assumes that savings equal deferred consumption. As such their whole approach to the tax of savings assumes that this is simply an issue of when to recognise income during a persons lifetime and so tax them. Oh dear. Yet another false assumption. Our society does of course include many people who make
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The Mirrlees review has a number of assumptions on consumption taxes. The most important, it says, is that such taxes should only be charged on consumers. It sounds so innocuous, doesn’t it? But think about it for a moment. What it is saying is this: – No disallowable VAT for business. So, for example, banks
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Amazingly, the opening presentation on the Mirrlees review this morning suggested that the fundamental cause of inequality in the UK is different opportunities for access to work. Well, there’s no doubt that’s a factor. But this represents an extraordinary – and I suggest deliberate – blindness inherent in this review. Not once was it mentioned
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