Tax Justice UK has issued a new report this morning:
As they say of it:
The World We Want is a new report that sets out how the government could find the £20 billion a year extra it has promised for the NHS by raising taxes on wealth.
The suggestions are summarised in this pie chart:
The premise of the report is that:
And whilst I am on the one hand delighted that Tax Justice UK is challenging the right wing on these issues I admit that I am also quite conflicted by what it is saying.
The simple reality is that the premise of the report is wrong. The way to fund £20bn of extra healthcare spending is for the government to create the necessary funding for that purpose. And it can do this at any moment. The fact is that tax does not precede spend. It is always, and inevitably, true that spend precedes tax. In that case the hypothesis that extra tax must be raised before the NHS can be funded is incorrect. What actually happens is that if the government spends an extra £20 billion into the economy, and increases GDP directly as a result (because government spending is part of GDP, because it creates wealth) then the government can, if it so wishes, claim back some, all, or even more of that spend in tax if it so wishes, with the possibility that it might claim back more than is even spent being made possible by multiplier effects, which are quite high in the case of NHS expenditure.
What it is important to stress though is that the reason to make that claim back by way of tax would not be to fund the NHS. That would make no sense at all, because the NHS would have already been funded: the expenditure does that. So the reclamation of that spend by taxation has to be for some other purpose. It may be to control inflation. It may be to reduce inequality i.e. taxing those with more than others simply for social purpose. Or it could be as part of the policy to control carbon use. And it may be for the delivery of some other government policy. But the funding of the NHS will not actually come into the equation. That problem is solved the moment the government decides to create the money to make the payment to provide the additional resources the NHS requires, as it may at any time because all money creation is ultimately under its control.
And I also stress that the government could choose not to tax and still not run a deficit: ignoring the fact that QE could fund all current deficits with ease is just technically wrong now that we know that it is possible.
Putting all this together, what Tax Justice UK is arguing, in my opinion, is that if £20 billion of additional expenditure on the NHS is required, and if the government insists that this should not change its overall deficit, then socially appropriate choices have to be made on the taxes that will be used to recover the expenditure made and the program that they have laid out appears to be one that is entirely socially appropriate. I can support it for that reason, but I have also to say that the time is coming when the tax justice movement has to recognise the realities of the economics of spend and tax.
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This Task Justice UK piece is just a reminder that nobody understands how the system works. It appears that it requires something dramatic or striking that focuses public attention on the underlying issues for this failure in understanding fundamentally to change (some simple-minded critics seem to think that to acknowledge how taxation actually works will inevitably lead to gross irresponsibility. This is the level of thought we are dealing with – fear and magic are the only guarantors of stability).
In my opinion history actually supplies the major illustrative event to illuminate the issue. The failure and cover-up of 1914 3.5% War Loan. Savers were not prepared to invest in the Government, but the massive “hole” in the Government finances made no difference to the war effort. The Bank of England coevered it up (successfully, until very recently) and the spending went on. How did it do that in 1914, immediately after the failure, if Government must first tax or borrow before it spends?
This link to an FT article on the cover-up provides the background. Who funded most of 3.5% War Loan? The Chief Cashier of the Bank of England (he must have had a large mortgage on his home …..). https://www.ft.com/content/1ffa3bb6-ae87-3b6c-aa5c-7a48ca1fc2e2
It seems to have been a joint BofE, Queen Mary College, University of London research project that discovered the cover-up. Ironically, neither the contemporary BofE, politicians, nor investors appear to have understood what had actually happened; nor am I convinced modern critics do either.
Agreed re your conclusion
Good grief…………………
Just print the bloody money and have done with it.
Pilgrim Slight Return says:
“Good grief…………………
Just print the bloody money and have done with it…”
But…they don’t (bloody) want to do that.
They want to cripple the NHS so it can be ‘rescued’ by privatisation.
There will be no shortage of funding available from government then……..to ensure the shareholders get their cut.
This £20 billion is a sticking plaster. A back of the envelope figure that sounds good. Pure PR BS.
The idea of socially appropriate taxation is upside down imo. We should be looking at how we have been deluded into allowing socially inappropriate wealth accumulation. It’s surely obvious that people doing the real and necessary work are “taxed” by everyone else. Socially approved taxation might be better termed ‘The Proceeds of Crime Act’. Of course, all of these means to trap money for the NHS are righteous except including people over 65 in National Insurance. I no doubt speak as a disinterested over 65er – no doubt believing my little pot of gold was hard-won (no one mention the dead Leprechaun). It strikes me something is more rotten in the State of Denmark before we start corrective taxation than we are allowing for. We would not design a system with so many flaws that need correction, though basic life processes often correct many times, Imagine the actual costs to us of the NHS and maintaining people who need dozens of “homes” around the world were put in front of us ahead of a vote on decent wages for nurses or another villa from Branson and his mates. Not living in democracies we get no such information or votes. Easy to agree with Richard – but as I hope I indicate there’s a can of worms.
The essence is that we need to agree that we should tax the rich more because they are rich….and that is justification enough, as Stephanie Kelton says
“The essence is that we need to agree that we should tax the rich more because they are rich….and that is justification enough, as Stephanie Kelton says”
Agree with that, but also true to say if some of the other abuses (e.g. of labour) were stopped then not so much wealth would accumulate unequally in the first place.
Spot on – I had the very lady in mind. There is a lot of behavioural-propaganda-created-homoeconomicus dross to be dealt with though. “Just printing the money” actually has a lot to say for itself as one assumes some mechanism for valuing the money involved would spring up or re-organise if we just abolished tax or used it like a steam-release valve. Various scrooges with wealth actually based on successful Leprechaun hunts (Trump is surely the archetype) are in the way. I prefer Soddy’s Law to MMT for ironic reasons and because he said a few honest adding machines would do a better job than financial services. The current system is not just unfair, it’s killing people and reform is in the overdue, urgent, I’ll remember where I buried my SA80 pile. The Establishment is not in an argument with us – to them we are distracting supplicants who have under-estimated their genius in understanding just where MMT leads – the fair society the Establishment don’t want at any cost. When “successful investors” like Buffet tell us why the succeeded they give answers that may sound expert to the business uneducated and like utter textbook dross to subject teachers. McKinsey training was done through acritical didactic use of textbooks I would ritually bin. Sensible taxation faces similar problems in our supposed democracy. The words are uttered in a frame of the abusive use of legitimated authority, not argument at all.
Once you realise that a sovereign government is not financially constrained but rather is resource constrained, as you frequently point out, having a well educated well housed healthy population becomes key to having more and higher quality resources available to create a better society. Why the labour party refuses to argue this leaves me baffled and frustrated.
“having a well educated well housed healthy population becomes key to having more and higher quality resources available to create a better society”
I couldn’t agree more – there have been studies that suggest that the struggles of poverty lower available IQ – https://www.princeton.edu/news/2013/08/29/poor-concentration-poverty-reduces-brainpower-needed-navigating-other-areas-life
The above is scary enough but even worse is the permanent consequences for children – suggestions that the way that children develop is negatively affected by poverty – https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/30/brain-development-in-children-could-be-affected-by-poverty-study-shows
What chance for us in the knowledge economy when we are depressing the abilities of our population?
This is wonderful news Richard. So why not spend a £100bn on the NHS? Or a £trillion?
It will pay for itself because of the multiplier effect. People wouldn’t mind a little inflation with so much being spent by the government so there would not even be a need to raise taxes. Indeed, of food got more expensive, the government could simply print more money and buy it for us.
How is there ever government debt or want of resources when it is all so simple?
So you really do reveal yourself as a simple troll Sarah: it’s good to know
The reason for not doing so is well known: there is a limit to need and there is a limit to physical resources available for money to be usefully spent on
Nit neither constraint applies at a spend of £20bn
Hmm. So £20bn is fine and safe. £100bn too much.
How about £30bn? £60bn?
You must know.
The question is a very simple one
Is that the best available use of the resources in the economy?
Sarah – “How is there ever government debt or want of resources when it is all so simple?”
Government debt equals private savings. We can get rid of the vaaaaast majority of government debt tomorrow. Just redeem all the bonds we’ve issued and apply a 100% one off tax on all savings, including pension funds. That’d get rid of government debt, except that pesky balance of trade bit. Would you like that? Of course not. Stop being daft.
As for “want of resources”, yes… we often find ourselves lacking in required resources, both labour and stuff. That’s because people misguidedly believe that a government has to go looking for money before it can spend it. Money is the oil that lets the resource wheel turn. As long as our view of money is tied to the lie that it’s some kind of a resource in itself, we’ll have problems assigning resources correctly.
Read about this stuff, because sarcasm -when it isn’t clever – is just ugly.
But why have government debt in the first place? Why has no government tried this panacea? Think of those governments which assumed power by force. You’d have thought it would be easy to wipe out all debt and never need to borrow again.
I’ve heard that if something seems to good to be true, it usually isn’t true.
Have you heard that?
You clearly need to do some reading
And stop making false assumptions
And throwing silly aspersions
“Government debt equals private savings”
Almost right. Almost, but you leave out the important bit.
“Net of investment”
Which rather changes the whole picture of things doesn’t it.
Any fool knows that private sector savings dramatically outweigh government debt.
Richard – why aren’t you answering Sarah’s questions?
Why don’t you put a number on how much money the government can print? Why not just keep printing near infinite amounts – after all it would increase GDP, right?
If, as you say, government spending always increases GDP with a multiplier, and ALL the money comes back eventually as tax, why do governments have massive debt piles and constant budget deficits?
The last bit is especially puzzling given your assertion. If there is a multiplier as large as you say there is GDP should always be growing more rapidly than government spending and the tax revenues should grow in line with that…..meaning that budget deficits would quickly be eliminated…..yet in the real world they almost never are?
How do you equate this real world observation with your “theory”?
Sarah is a troll with multiple identities
And your claims make no sense?
Do I need to engage with those who come to ask ill informed questions?
“Do I need to engage with those who come to ask ill informed questions?”
No. It’s a waste of time.
Sarah the gov did with QE and made some of us, for transparency I am one of them, a lot of wealth. I do not see the inflation.
Pure sophistry Sarah & ‘Steven’ and others.
If we live in world as we do now, where NHS budgets were kept at there 2010 levels in the face of other rising costs (costs by the way that rise because there all too often are greedy grubbing rent streams for investors who want to preserve the value of their funds – not just because of the ‘ageing population’) no amount of money can be claimed to improve the service until we actually put it in, and try and monitor the effects.
Keeping a service like the NHS in constant crisis through under funding helps to create the view that it is incurable of its ills Sarah, Steven/ whoever.
Now you might fall for that but I and others do not. Do you understand? Is that clear?
If you have a service that is in demand you fund it. That is how good companies and good public sector departments work. And if you can’t be bothered to fund it, then p**s off and go and do something else instead because we don’t need you I say.
Incidentally Nicholas Timmins in his book ‘The Five Giants’ tells how the NHS was under pressure from budgets from the day it was created and this caused concern to those who created it. But why? If you invent free health care because you know from two world wars that your menfolk are not fit enough to fight your wars – what would you expect!!? Of course there will be high demand but that would level out over time as the health issues were addressed – especially if there were no cuts to the budget. Budgets only need to be reduced when they have got results – not on a ministerial or party political whim or because stupid politicians want create tax cuts to bribe voters. In the Neo-lib world its OK apparently to bribe voters with tax cuts but wrong to incentivise them with well funded excellent public sector services. Funny that isn’t it?
The problem is that cuts are made in the NHS by politicians and the long term benefits are not always realised because of start/stop funding. And then some of us (like you Sarah, Steve and whoever) can snipe from the corners saying that the system just does not work.
In addition I’ve just read ‘Citizen Clem’ by John Bew and it is quite clear that for all his talents Attlee did not understand economics even though he played a pivotal role in the creation of the NHS. It was thought that National Insurance would pay for the NHS based on full employment. There seemed to be very little realisation at the time that the newly nationalised Bank of England could print the money and use the other powers it has (this is how it comes across to me anyhow).
It’s as though Attlee’s government did not really understand what they had created and that lack of understanding has perpetuated itself right up until today in British politics – and why we so badly need to give MMT a chance.
Sarah O’Hagan says:
“……This is wonderful news Richard. So why not spend a £100bn on the NHS? Or a £trillion?…..”
Why not spend £435 billion bailing out the banks, with no strings attached, and let them screw the global economy instead ?
I think Sarah’s sterling idea has been tried out in the pub game, sans filling willing trousers such as mine with free cash. My natural vocation is that of paid drinker and mattress tester. It may seem impossible to run an economy with everyone at my game, but it has already been envisaged as the purpose of humans in “robot heaven”. Of course, such an economy might flounder on needing so many medical robots to deal with our liver problems.
MMT already flounders slightly before beyond Sarah’s critique. The before bit is people thinking they know what money is and the after (in Establishment-governed brains) is that if we can print money for what is needed, everybody can and hence we won’t be able to rip them off. I call this the EBAGUM perspective. Once some loon gets himself elected and hires a Praetorian guard to do future counts, he prints enough to pay them and fleets of Mercedes for his pals and mistresses. Amazing how long Mugabe and similar shits last. This in no way defeats MMT or earlier theories of positive money. MMT is not about paying my bar bills or anything so sensible (from this homo economicus perspective). It is about revealing our credulous reception of what money is and monkey dust such austerity as dust. This said, we do need more on how currencies would self-regulate or be controlled beyond the sovereign territory. MMT is probably talking about a much fairer world and I see it as a route to that. EBAGUM is clearly avoidable unless you are a backwards Yorkshire person. Vote for me to pay my bar bill and get me a mistress (argh!) is an unlikely ticket winner, but Trump ran on worse. Controlling what we print money for (etc) will still be about resource allocation – though this would mean something different than current misallocation by banksters and the financialized firm. Their vested interests should be as blatantly obvious as those of my bar bill ticket.
Imagine the Chancellor stands up and says the government can create the money the NHS or the Green New Deal needs and can do it at the stroke (of a keyboard), just as we have done when we decided another war would be a good idea or the execs of some banks teetering on the brink told us they didn’t know where their next bonuses would come from and we could do it without first raising taxes….it would be like coming through the looking glass backwards and discovering we’d all been had. The public (and politicians and journalist and a lot of economists) would suddenly realise that we could have had Scandinavian style social democracy instead of the malicious neoliberalism of austerity combined with plutocracy and unbridled financialisation.
But if the Chancellor were to say that, it would destroy (at a stroke) the entire political dogma of the past 40 odd years, encompassing not only the Tories for whom the status quo suits their agenda of corporatism, but also New Labour. It is not in the interests of any of the current Parties to talk about Spend and Tax.
And we don’t have any politicians of the calibre required to make such a momentous statement.
I agree and I think I read a quote from Keynes about this very subject. Can anyone confirm or deny the existence of such a muttering?
I think I’m starting to ‘get’ MMT – it’s taken a while! It seems though that only governments with their own sovereign currency can take advantage of this? So if our government goes through with the disaster that is brexit, but many years down the line the people decide we really should rejoin the EU, it’s pretty certain that the EU would only consider this on the basis that we become part of the eurozone. What would that then mean for MMT?
I am not an economist (obviously) so please forgive me if this is a stupid question!
In theory an applicant needs to join the Euro
It is not enforced
So it is not an issue
One of the criticisms levelled at you is that none of your work is peer reviewed. No more! I see parliament has published a critique of your tax gap work. Some of my favourite quotes are:
“deeply and systematically flawed”
“greatly overstates the tax gap”
“an element of double counting”
“The Tax Research estimate of tax debt is £28 billion. That is a snapshot of all tax owed on 31 March 2009 which does not represent the actual losses…[which were] £3 billion”
“simply nonsense”
“the £120bn figure could be dangerous if not countered”
“Murphy had claimed the annual cost of evasion was £70bn…Mr Murphy had assumed that the size of any tax gap would be the same across all taxes…” “…it gives completely the wrong answer for income tax due from employees”
“Tax Research UK…uses a variant of a ‘currency demand’ model…The use of ‘currency demand’ models has been comprehensively and extensively criticised…”
That’s criticisms from multiple sources. Quoting more sources. No doubt you’ll be putting forward a robust response. Quoting lots of your research in support of your research and denouncing every detractor as a neoliberal.
Hang on: that was not peer review
That was ministerial disagreement
Maybe you need to understand what you are talking about
Maybe you need to read it. The criticisms were not based on the opinions of ministers but on the opinions of experts in the field as expressed to ministers.
Who wrote the report I was criticising
I have, of ciyrse, read it. And I think they are wrong
Actually, I know they are wrong
One simple example. You include £28 bn of debt in the tax gap. HMRC point out that’s just a snap shot. The debt owed on a particular day. £25 bn of that £28 billion was collected later. Only £3bn actually written off.
It’s simply nonsense to say that all £28 bn should be included in the tax gap, just as you don’t write off as a bad debt all year end debts in a company.
Not ministerial opinion at all. HMRC’s debt collection department. The experts.
By the way, when did you change your name today? And gender, come to that?
[…] Cross-posted from Tax Research UK […]
There is a important point that has been omitted so far in the post, and the comments afterwards:
Wealthy Pensioners
Corporations
Entrepeners
People who have wealth
People who have big valued houses.
These people are Tory voters – And this tax report has just told these people that the NHS is going to cost them £££ . They wont believe that they are being taxed because to reduce inequality helps society, They will believe it is that the costly NHS which will hurt them in the pocket.
*this* is why many tories want to destroy the NHS, and this is why they are still getting 40% support. This myth – pushed by Tax Justice. It entices class war, and typically it is the rich who will win this.
I think that is a very interesting insight
“And I also stress that the government could choose not to tax and still not run a deficit: ignoring the fact that QE could fund all current deficits with ease is just technically wrong now that we know that it is possible.”
What do you mean by that statement? Presumably that the government could choose not to tax and not to borrow, and rely solely on money printing? That would be “not running a deficit” on a very narrow definition of deficit = PSNB?
The government can and must create money or the economy suffers a shortage of liquidity
Why not do it by funding the NHS rather than house price increases? After all, the latter has been the main source for a long time
Maybe so, but that doesn’t answer my question, which was what you mean by saying the government would not be running a deficit? I think you mean it could do what you suggest without borrowing, which isn’t quite the same thing?
If a government can use its own funds from a bank that it owns how is it running a deficit? The term has little meaning in any context and even less in that scenario when it is actually injecting funds into the economy, which is the exact opposite of what deficit might imply
The socio-economic reason to tax the rich is to reduce inequality because disparity of wealth results in asymmetry that introduces market imperfections owing to the ability of the wealthy to influence government through the power that wealth and status bestow by both campaign finance (and other forms of legal bribery) and also network (as in “old boy” networks).
This has nothing to do with funding. But it has a lot to do with controling inflation wrought by the “wealth effect” of rising value of assets owing to portfolio saving, saving desire being proportional to wealth.
Politically, great disparity in wealth is poisonous to democratic republics since it favors oligarchy (plutonomy).
The term deficit is commonly understood to describe a government spending more than it recoups. Attempting to redefine the widely accepted meaning suggests a lack of faith in your own argument! You believe that governments should largely ignore the size of the deficit. Maybe that’s a good idea, but you aren’t going to persuade very many people by sleight of hand.
I am suggesting much conventional understanding is wrong
That is what academics do
Serious arguments against deficit phobia are to be encouraged, but an argument based on changing the definition of the word is asinine, not academic.
Then you clearly do not understand argument or academia
Ban private healthcare and offer custom jobs to retired doctors. Build a hospital before anything else can get built (building permits.) Price of builders should come down! Right but Sam, its asynchronous and you can view with spending first and ‘VAT as cashback.’ Spending causes taxation. No saving in the spending chain = get all money back. Saving causes deficit because it is reason, dynamically, you don’t get everything back in tax. Its technically in a currency issuer transitively linked to Sterling (currency issuer.) Compare to a local government or currency user like Greece (ECB currency.)
That’s my understanding of it – like the water cycle and ‘VAT as cashback’ and net saving causing the deficit because you get all the money back as tax otherwise.
Sam says:
“… but an argument based on changing the definition of the word is asinine, not academic….”
I think you might be wrong, Sam. We change the meaning of word all the time. Sometimes it occurs gradually and sometimes it can be quite sudden>
Language is what we think with.
It’s ‘wicked’ innit ?
Sam says:
“….. Maybe that’s a good idea, but you aren’t going to persuade very many people by sleight of hand…..”
What an extraordinary thing to say !
Nearly all commonly accepted economic orthodoxy amounts to sleight of hand, or similar deceit, and it fools most of the people most of the time.
The current understanding is not only wrong, it is “conveniently” wrong. Whether through ignornace or intention, the current framing is strongly biased in favor of the current narrative, which is based on false assumptions, faulty methodology, and loaded terminology.
Buying into that framing effectively hands control of the narrative to those whose arguments are based on false premises and non-rigorous thinking. As a result of these errors, their models, both formal and conceptual, are not representative of reality and contradicted by evidence. They need to be challenged on this before these mistakes wreak more havoc on innocent lives.
This is a very good reason why we have to change things
We have to replace the current budget constraint which is non sensical with an inflation constraint
This is a must in the Labour manifesto
https://neweconomicperspectives.org/2015/01/replacing-budget-constraint-inflation-constraint.html
And lets not pretend it is difficult.
I think full employment makes much more sense
Derek Henry says:
“….We have to replace the current budget constraint which is non sensical with an inflation constraint…”
That very appealing because it sounds decisive. Sounds as if you’ve thought about it and come to a conclusion as to how it will all work out just with this one small tweak.
I don’t think it will. What you’re proposing is that we simply try a different constraint. One which was fiercely applied during the Thatcher years, and was highly effective in it’s aim of controlling inflation. If you remember ‘unemployment was a price worth paying to control inflation’.
Easily said when it’s somebody else’s job and livelihood going down the drain. Theresa May was at it again in her conference speech…saying that Labour was policy is OK until other people’s money runs out. This is backwards. She’s describing the way Tory governments behave. They will cheerfully make someone else pay the price for their model of financial prudence. Usually by losing their livelihood, their whole industry, or their spending power, employment security or whatever it is they are prepared to sacrifice. Is a Labour government any better? Well, not necessarily.
What you suggest in terms of financial constraints is in itself an unnecessary constraint. There is no practical reason why we are into binary choice territory. We can have both constraints; on money supply and inflation and apply them to varying degrees as and when appropriate. It’s rather what Old ‘Milton’ Keynes was talking about some little while ago. Counter-cyclical intervention.
The problem of the past decade has been inflation at too low a level. (According to the narrow standard measure, but let’s not go there at this point……)
A one string kite goes where the wind blows. If you wish to control it you need at least two strings.
Also it helps to design economic policy tweaks correctly if figures such as the unemployment stats are not complete fantasy.
Taxation should be highly progressive but the best approach is to minimise disparities in pre-tax incomes and wealth.
The relevant policy levers are industrial relations, financial sector regulation, corporate law, industry policy, minimum wage policy, and setting upper limits on personal income and net wealth.
If those policies are designed well, there won’t be much need to use tax policy to even out the income and wealth distributions.
Psychologically it is better for people to not receive excessive income in the first place. The psychological phenomenon of loss aversion results in people feeling distressed and annoyed if they nominally receive something only to see it get taken away. It is far better to reduce inequality at its source.
Exactly.
Ex ante revention is always superior to ex post treatment. Incidentally, Warren Mosler and the MMT economists have advocated this approach, for example, through design of automatic stabilization, which includes tax policy.
Functional finance can and should be tightly target to optimize results using a “rifle” approach. The “sights” are the operational description and macro theory.
In contrast, monetary policy is a shotgun approach (no sights), and so-called sound finance is a bludgeon that favors creditors (mis-aligned sights).
Richard your site may have referred to the following below, but at the risk of repeating it
– Thomas Edison and Henry Ford in a remarkable 1921 NY Times two-part interview expressed your position.
– The best line may have been – “Government issues currency, it provides itself with enough to increase the national wealth … without disturbing the business of the rest of the country. And in doing this it increase its income without adding a penny to its debt.”
Interview:
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1921/12/04/107034685.pdf
And the next day https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1921/12/06/98768710.pdf
Thanks
This has been known, and ignored, for far too long
Unfortunately Paul Samuelson and other economists have hidden the truth based on morality rather than evidence – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOtFsONzMjI
The use of QE proved your position in America in 2008
The restoration of the 1945 bankrupt Japan proved it – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byQZuIZ92PQ
Lincoln proved your position https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkBfdehthPI
And as John Warren showed in his comment the 1914 financial crisis proved it – as per http://www.lbma.org.uk/assets/blog/alchemist_articles/Alch73Roberts.pdf