Syriza has the nigh on impossible task of presenting a list of reforms to the IMF, ECB and EU today that does at the same time meet their needs and is capable of being explained domestically.
There is only one way they can do that.
Today will be bad news for Greek tax evaders. Whatever happens, today has to be the first in a programme that will really collect tax from those who owe it in that country.
Nothing else can square the circle Syriza has to deliver today.
But the reform is, anyway, essential for Greece.
I don't think this will prevent Greece leaving the Euro. But no left wing society can be built on the basis of a tax administration that fails to tackle industrial scale tax abuse, so this is a policy Syriza can and should embrace, and which will buy the time that is needed and the domestic credibility that is essential.
I hope the relevant authorities are sensible enough to accept it.
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I hope they’re capable of doing it: we could spend all day compiling lists of people with incentives to prevent it.
Some of them are here in London.
“Some of them are here in London”
If they are not, their companies are.
Welcome to London: Tax evasion capital of the world, where the three main political parties are subsidiaries of the financial empires!
Now, the piece below is really worth a read, and not only for the Greek element:
https://flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/more-freelancers-than-public-employees-is-that-really-a-good-thing/
Take a good look at the accompanying graphs….
I agree we’re at the heart of this
The biggest issue in self-employment is that vast numbers of people have been deceived or coerced into starting up ‘small businesses’ by JobCentre Plus advisers.
It gets them off the dole, in the sense that a different label is applied to the support that they are given.
Good luck trying to get good numbers – and for that matter, doing anything with the numbers you get: I don’t think it’s possible to perform any meaningful analysis of such a severely distorted economy.
It would be interesting to see who profited from that distortion: a lot of the ‘advice’ and ‘training’ schemes and ‘assistance for small businesses’ is now provided on a commercial basis. As is some of the face-to-face work with claimants in a JobCentre Plus.
I can tell you who *lost*: the money is time-limited and capped, and it’s very difficult to get back onto ‘real’ Job Seekers Allowance. It’s going to get ugly, sometime after the election.
Oh, and the tax credits are really hostile to people like musicians, who have seasonal earnings with one or two months dominating the year.
After that, we come to all the people who are on the other sort of zero-hours contract: not a contract of employment with no minimum guarantee of work, a contract with a ‘sole trader business’ to provide a ‘service’ – usually menial labour like cleaning or security work, but there’s a lot of individual contracts in newspapers, publishing, and other media. Work can be pretty thin, and it is often arbitrarily withheld.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of non-viable non-businesses are on limping along on a dripfeed instead of simply folding; I suspect that this is very damaging for people who are actually making a living in the brutally competitive world of the sole trader.
It seems, to me, that the above story [by Rick] may well go a large way to providing an idea of why UK productivity is low….it will be interesting to see any difference [in productivity] as self-employed find paye employment…
Indeed
I have, of course, also done work in the area, pubished November 2013