I happen to have two sons who both qualify for 0% VAT rate clothing. I admit I do not keep a tab of what it costs to cloth our children: what I do know is we probably do it for less than average. Brands are unknown to our two.
What I can say is it is [...]
The average household fuel bill is more than £1,300 a year.
VAT at 5% is included in that: about £62 in all.
Now suppose that as the IFS suggests VAT is charged at 17.5% on domestic fuel. The VAT bill would increase to £217. The overall bill would increase to £1,454.
That’s an increase of 11.9%.
For a median [...]
The average household shopping bill is about £5,200 a year based on British Retail Consortium data, extrapolated from here.
Most, but not all food is VAT zero rate. Let’s suppose this food bill has 80% zero rate items (based on a quick check of my family’s almost exactly national average spend this week I’d think that [...]
I found it extraordinarily depressing to read the Institute for Fiscal Studies press release on the reform of VAT issued last Friday. Its headline is this:
Abolishing zero and reduced rates of VAT would cut compliance and administration costs for business and government, interfere less with people’s spending decisions, and raise enough revenue both to improve [...]
A commentator on my blogs on the IFS proposals for the reform of VAT said:
Surely, if we wish for integrity in any debate like this, we must complete the proposition with ‘all other things being equal’. If we cancel a vat subsidy, we would have a very large pot of cash. The virtue or otherwise [...]
I admit that there are moments when I quietly despair of the harm that is likely to result from so called tax reforms. This morning the FT has reported that:
Corporation tax should be scrapped and replaced by extra value added tax
adding that:
The proposal, which is designed to address the growing difficulties faced by the Treasury [...]
You don’t believe me? It was KPMG that said it. OK, they’re only talking VAT, but this is an enormously important tax for the economy and for the companies that operate it. And they’ve issued research showing the follwoing::
- UK tops league table of VAT-friendliness in KPMG International survey
- Multinationals predict shift to indirect taxes [...]
As if to follow up the publication of Oliver James’ new book ‘Selfish Capitalism’ (about which I wrote here), the FT has reported that:
More than half a million young Britons are officially too sick to work and claiming incapacity benefits, a higher tally than the number claiming unemployment benefit. The figure, which includes more than [...]
It’s a fact that we cannot do without taxes. That’s because we cannot do without government. And we cannot do without markets either, at least in the world as we know it. The relationship is symbiotic: governments provide the structure in which markets can work: markets need government as their insurer of last resort: populations [...]
One of my Jersey correspondents tells me that the public’s repulsion for the regressive GST (Goods and Services Tax) to be introduced in Jersey in 2008 has even got to the local pantomime at the Opera House, Jersey.
A question was asked to the audience “What does GST stand for?”
The retort was “Get Stuffed Terry”.
Senator Terry [...]
