Tim Worstall

Our proposed system is based around two simple components: 1. Basic income payment – Minimum Income Standard . All families would receive an unconditional, tax-free basic income payment that would be set at levels sufficient to alleviate poverty. 2. Unified Income Tax (UIT). The current Income Tax system and the entire National Insurance Contributions system [...]

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Parasites don’t usually like the idea of their hosts being able to escape into freedom.

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Dear Lord you’ve got to hand it to hte man. His stupidity knows no bounds. His latest report. Since 2009, HSBC and Barclays bank may well have underpaid UK corporation tax to the tune of £2.6 billion. This figure represents the difference between the tax the banks actually paid and what would have been due [...]

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Obviously fraud is wrong, but many people seem to think lots of people claiming benefits do so illegally. When the TUC did a poll on this people thought that 37% of welfare was claimed fraudulently. The facts couldn’t be more different. Just 0.7% of the welfare budget is claimed fraudulently …. Compare this to the [...]

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Dear Lord this is a stupid one from the Lord High Tax Denouncer: Third, that utility is a useful economic concept. It isn’t. Distribution matters. Utility is how we fucking discuss the important of distribution! Take, for example, how we justify the extraction of money from the rich to give it to the poor. This [...]

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Current circumstances require a combination of carrot and stick. The government should announce a temporary increase in corporation tax, putting it up to a punishing 50% for a strictly limited period, say three years. Then it should announce that 150% of all investment within those three years can be written off against tax. But this [...]

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And gets it wrong again, as you would expect: This is just not true, and so it seems appropriate to give a blog I’ve used twice before another airing. I first wrote the blog reproduced below in September 2007: Northern Rock was falling over at the time and needed bailing out but it’s just as [...]

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Sometime, somewhere, someone is going to realise, soon, that there is such a concept as enough. Windows 8 may be indication of that: it is more than enough. It may well be that for many people it is just cumber (the wonderful word now almost entirely lost within encumber) and which means a hindrance, obstruction [...]

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So Ritchie tells us that nPower is very naughty because they finance their investments here by borrowing money from the German parent. They then pay interest on this so that that interest is taxed in Germany not the UK. Apparently it’s very naughty that filthy foreigners do send their sausage smelling money into the UK [...]

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One of my big concerns is the rise of fascism. I think that’s justified for two reasons; the first is what fascism is and represents and the second is that fascism is at risk of reappearing in Europe. What makes it so odd is that his entire book, The Courageous State, is a call for [...]

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This is an interesting headline, isn’t it? The argument that tax avoidance is legal is now dead and gone, for good. The world of tax abuse changed today, for the better. So, what has actually changed? Let us just run through a few cases where Ritchie has been alledging tax avoidance. 1) Lady Green’s dividends [...]

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Murphmonster rolls out his old idea that pensions shouldn’t be invested in anything that currently produces a return: Most importantly we suggest that if those pension funds are to attract tax relief in future they must use a significant part of the £80 billion of contributions they receive each year to invest in new jobs, [...]

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In one of her first moves on coming to office she delivered capital market liberalisation. What that meant was that money was allowed to roam free around the world. The result has been a vast flood of capital into the capital poor but labour rich areas of the world. Exactly as theory would predict in [...]

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So the BVI does stuff that Nick Shaxson doesn’t like. Damn pesky natives not doing what a gnome in Zurich insists they should do. Thus he states that: If ever there were a call for intervention to ensure good government, this is it. Yep, send in the gunboasts to stop those damn uppitty darkies doping [...]

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As the Telegraph noted this weekend: While Chancellor George Osborne insists benefit reforms are designed to help hard-working families, new rules which take effect on Saturday will mean that some of the poorest people in the country pay marginal rates of tax that are half as high again as those paid by millionaires. Many on [...]

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François Hollande’s former tax tsar begged for “forgiveness” after admitting to having an undeclared Swiss bank account for the past 20 years, as he was placed under formal investigation for tax fraud. If the political class will decide that the rules just don’t apply to them then why should we submit to the rules of [...]

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But for all those who say that is unlikely to happen, it is wise to recall that for many years neoliberals thought they had no hope of overturning the post-war Keynesian consensus that delivered the greatest period of sustainable increased prosperity the world has ever seen. Hmm. But did it? That’s the question, isn’t it? [...]

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Or if they’re not lying scumbags then they’re either innumerate or entirely incapable of actually looking up numbers. So, via Ritchie, we get this: Today the Telegraph reported a government claim that 900,000 people had given up disability allowance claims because of the threat of medical examinations. The clear implications was that this was the [...]

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The extent of the control over all life that economic control confers is nowhere better illustrated than in the field of foreign exchanges. Nothing would at first seem to affect private life less than a state control of the dealings in foreign exchange, and most people will regard its introduction with complete indifference. Yet the [...]

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In summary my new faith can be understood as follows: Government allocates capital better than the private sector, and should use interest rates, exchange rates, price fixing, price controls or whatever artifice it deems fit to ensure that capital goes to where it is properly directed. The alpha and omega of the central bank’s proper [...]

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