Tim Worstall

Sigh. The Energy Secretary backed plans to increase environmental levies by £15 billion to free hundreds of thousands of people from income tax. He is already drawing up proposals for the proportion of government revenue raised by environmental taxes to jump from 7.7 per cent to 10 per cent within five years, from £35 billion [...]

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A week before he died, his mother touched his skin for the first time. David Viner. Who died as a 12 year old and, yes, she and he were together for those 12 years.

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Richard shows some tables from the HMRC report on the tax gap. They show that very large numbers of peeps aren’t filling in their forms correctly. Overall HM Revenue & Customs say 30% of returns have errors. Overall 12% of liabilities are under-reported as a resulted. For the self employed 45% error rates arise. And [...]

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In possibly the most lacklustre speech ever made by a minister to a party conference Danny Alexander has announced HM Revenue & Customs is to get £900 billion of resources over four yeasr to tackle tax avoidance and evasion. Except it isn’t. No, you’re quite right, no one is going to give HMRC £ 900 [...]

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Tesco is to start selling Viagra over the counter at half price. The pills were only available on prescription – or from dubious internet sources – until Boots began selling direct to customers last year, at £55 for four. But Tesco will offer fierce competition by selling Viagra at £52 for eight of the blue [...]

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At the ASI. Speculation in food markets is such a lovely thing: stops people starving so it does.

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Bank of England: Banks making ‘excess’ profits from loans High street banks are increasing charges and fees on new loans by “substantially” more than the rise in their own costs, the Bank of England says. For, as we all know, a few years back they weren’t charging enough: risk was mispriced. That’s why half of [...]

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But sources said pilot schemes showed that even with the limited powers to write and telephone suspects they were far more efficient and effective at clawing back money than HMRC staff. Companies proved particularly successful at forcing tax avoiders to pay small sums. Why are they more efficient than the highly trained and professional (copyright [...]

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Here.

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At the ASI. Competition in education raises the standards (and lowers the costs) of the entire system.

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For over two centuries, Haiti has been effectively controlled from outside. The French enslaved the entire island in the eighteenth century… Err, no. The island is called Hispaniola and has been divided between the (originally French) Haiti and the Spanish (originally) Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic, since 1697. To continue his sentence: ….and worked [...]

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Plus a few other people…. The wife’s away for a week which leaves me at a loose end…and allows me to play the music she doesn’t like and remind myself umm, why I chased her in the first place actually. And look forward to her return. Still.

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At the ASI. On why public sector workers should pay higher taxes than everyone else.

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Amazing: back comes the small scale private economy and Gott’s all praises for it. Everyone who lives in Cuba and those who follow Cuban affairs closely know that the existing economic model has not been working well. Rilly?

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Well, we all know about the wonderful little spat going on between Richard Murphy and HMRC over the tax gap, don’t we? Well, here’s one reason why Ritchie keeps getting such different results from everyone else. He’s got tripped up by his own definitions of tax avoidance, tax planning and tax evasion. Just to remind [...]

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Very good and at times amusing (in  geeky sorta way). One way of reading it is that as a source of policy advice macroeonomics is bunkum: and will remain bunkum until it’s based on solid microeconomic foundations. Yes, this does mean neo-classical economics wins: for that’s pretty much what micro is.

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In arguing for restrictions on private industry risk taking Ha-Joon Chang makes reference to Adam Smith. What causes the amusement is that the precise references he provides lead us to Smith denouncing everything else Ha-Joon Chang has ever said about infant industries, trade protection, his preferred mercantilist trade policies and the role of government in [...]

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Because it’s the Financial Times that has fucked up here. Well, we’ll slightly let Ritchie off because as an anti-poverty campaigner he should know these things and not swallow what he reads in the papers. Poverty among the working-age population of the US rose to the highest level for almost 50 years in 2009, as [...]

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Piece in T’Graun about how musicians, being generally low paid and self-employed, have a hard time affording health insurance in the US. Luckily they’ve got Obamacare now. That wondrous programme which has just raised, substantially, the costs of individual policies for the self-employed. God bless government is what I say.

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Several hundred very good reasons are right here. We might also note that the number of deaths in the “War on Drugs” in Mexico is greater than the number of deaths from all overdoses in the US. And something like 4 to 5 times the number of deaths caused by the major illegal, smuggled, drugs, [...]

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