Gordon Brown's Labour conference speech in full | Politics | guardian.co.uk .
On this one Brown hit the right buttons:
For there are only two options on tax and spending — and only one of them benefits Britain's hard-working majority.
One is reducing the deficit by cutting front line public services — the conservative approach.
The other is getting the deficit down while maintaining and indeed improving front line public services — the Labour approach.
So we will raise tax at the very top, cut costs, have realistic public sector pay settlements, make savings we know we can and in 2011 raise National Insurance by half a percent and that will ensure that each and every year we protect and improve Britain's frontline services.
Some of those are weak commtiments but the clear mesage is progressive taxation remains on the agenda. as it should be. And that spending will be protected in many areas. As it also should be. Not least because spending is the only way to get out of this recession.
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I am not enthusiastic about raising NIC. This is regressive and attacks the hard working majority.
Sorry for being ignorant, but…
has the upper threshold on National Insurance contributions now gone?
Putting up NI instead of income tax was always a sneaky way of letting the very rich offthe hook for their fair share.
Unfortunately “Progressive Taxation” is really a bit of a deceit. The problem is the “Tax clawback scam” (checkout helpful Youtube video on this). While progressive taxation is focussing on collecting higher tax rates from high earners, a flood of untaxed income is returned to the wealthy through land and monopoly rents. This explains why Labour governments try to help the poor by taxing high earners, but *always* end up widening the gap between poor and rich. Put simply, the more tax you collect from high earners, the more you pump asset prices and imputed incomes of the wealthy.
The solution to this progressive taxation paradox of course is to collect the unearned economic rent from land and resource monopolies while reducing (or preferably eliminating) income and corporation tax. That truly would be progressive taxation.
Gordon’s dichotomy is false. Immediately slashing Income Tax rates would cut the marginal cost of production to businesses stimulating the economy, while introducing land and resource taxation would balance the books. Ultimately, eliminating HMRC would bring widespread joy to the public, freeing millions of people to do more productive things!