{"id":42889,"date":"2018-08-23T08:36:26","date_gmt":"2018-08-23T07:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=42889"},"modified":"2018-08-23T08:36:26","modified_gmt":"2018-08-23T07:36:26","slug":"labour-really-has-to-understand-that-hypothecated-taxes-undermine-the-very-logic-of-its-own-political-reason-for-being","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2018\/08\/23\/labour-really-has-to-understand-that-hypothecated-taxes-undermine-the-very-logic-of-its-own-political-reason-for-being\/","title":{"rendered":"Labour really has to understand that hypothecated taxes undermine the very logic of its own political reason for being"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Guardian reports this morning that<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Jeremy Corbyn\u00a0is to propose a tax on big technology firms such as Facebook, Google and Netflix, to subsidise the BBC licence fee as part of a sweeping range of measures to reform the British media industry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here we go again: another crass suggestion of a hypothecated tax from Labour. I have written extensively in the past about why hypothecated taxes are not the answer for the NHS<\/a>. Now we have another such proposal, for another populist\u00a0cause. And it is just as bad.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s firstly because it\u2019s time Labour learned tax pays for nothing. Tax recovers \u00a0the money - the public money that the government alone can create - that the government spends into existence. Subscription to the narrative implicit in Labour\u2019s argument that nothing can be done by government unless tax is raised first is to subscribe to the entirely neoliberal line that there is only \u2018taxpayer\u2019s money\u2019 and that then what government can do is entirely down to the ability of the private sector, and it\u2019s tax payments. Since that destroys the entire logic of Labour this line of reasoning is a wholly self-destructive logic for it to follow.<\/p>\n

Secondly it\u2019s because this logic makes BBC funding entirely dependent on a bad thing happening. And what is the sense in that? Tax bads, by all means. That is a wholly appropriate use for tax. It is a market correction. But whatever you do don\u2019t make good things dependent upon perpetuation of the bad. That\u2019s just crazy.<\/p>\n

But Labour seems not to have noticed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Guardian reports this morning that: Jeremy Corbyn\u00a0is to propose a tax on big technology firms such as Facebook, Google and Netflix, to subsidise the BBC
 Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,118,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-labour","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}