Tim Worstall

So, various unions are stumping up the money for a not think tank called CLASS. The National Advisory Board consists of: Dr Ha-Joon Chang Jack Dromey MP Daniel Elton Mark Ferguson Sunny Hundal Will Hutton Joy Johnson Paul Kenny Stewart Lansley Professor Costas Lapavitsas Professor Ruth Lister Kevin Maguire Angela Mason Professor Marjorie Mayo Len [...]

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There’s no doubt that the biggest part of what I measured was profit that should have been taxed in the UK and wasn’t. That tax gap is down to Vodafone, and Google, and Amazon, and GSK and PricewaterhouseCoopers and all those other names we all know and love who’ve been darned sure they shift their [...]

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His speech to the PCS itself: So friends, let me tell you something right now in case I forget to do it later. If defending your jobs, and demanding that you be spared from redundancy and if saying that giving jobs back to your colleagues who have been sacked makes me a dangerous man, well [...]

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This was prepared for elsewhere but not in the end used: There is joy in heaven and sniggering down here upon Earth as Richard Murphy gets a jolly good spanking from HMRC over his quite lunatic estimates of the tax gap. You’ll have seen him, heard him perhaps on the radio, popping up to claim [...]

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The resolution also raises the stakes to make evading the FTT potentially far more expensive than paying it. Taking the UK stamp duty approach, the text links payment of the FTT to the acquisition of legal ownership rights. This means that if the buyer of a security did not pay the FTT, he or she [...]

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Superficially flat taxes look attractive. People like the idea of simplicity. It’s an easy sell. The fact that it takes 417 pages to explain the proposal suggests that this idea is not simple though, and that’s because it isn’t. What, as opposed to the 17,000 pages of Tolley’s for the current tax system? The rest [...]

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The personal allowance will increase very modestly to £10,000 and then 30% tax will due – which will hammer low earners and pensioners in particular, whose tax rates will rise considerably as a result, as will the tax rate for most on less than £45,000 of income a year. That’s about the TPA report. In [...]

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He’s desperately spinning the whipping that HMRC have ginve him over his estimations of the tax gap. The latest is this: So, just to make this clear, in 2009-10, the year for which their latest tax gap estimate for tax avoidance was prepared, they said in September 2011 there was just £5 billion of tax [...]

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An extremely interesting line from HMRC. The trend in the VAT gap is used by OBR as part of the VAT receipts forecasting process. This is something that Ritchie just never considers. That tax rates are set with the certain knowledge that any tax system has holes and gaps in it. Revenues assumed from mooted [...]

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I know, huge surprise. Britain is not broke, nor can it go broke. If you can print your own money you can’t ever go broke. We actually have a recent example to prove this. Zimbabwe printed so much money that they actually ran out of the ability to purchase the ink to print the money. [...]

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This really is most amusing from our favourite Irish tax exile: Actually Bob, lots of us would like to lecture you on your tax morals if you don’t pay in full what somebody else living in the UK might owe. I stress we don’t know whether you do or not, but you had the option [...]

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Requiring just one quarter of all new pension contributions go into new infrastructure investment – in exchange for a guaranteed and proper return, maybe with an upside if something went especially well, is a wholly reasonable condition of giving pension tax relief. That’s the finance part he doesn’t understand. If infrastructure investment could provide a [...]

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The European Court of Justice (ECJ) declared the French tax was discriminatory, preparing the way for a tax rebate to UK investment funds of up to €5bn. France had levied a withholding tax of between 15pc and 25pc on dividends paid to foreign investors, while exempting local funds from the tax, a practice the ECJ [...]

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He’s done a long interview. Here. Anyone who wants to teach economics or accountancy these days has to subscribe to neoliberal economic thinking. Blatantly untrue. Prem Sikka is a Prof of Accounting and he’s certainly not a neo-liberal. George Irvine most certainly ain’t a neo-liberal and he’s a Prof of Economics. Murph might not have [...]

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but candidly, I don’t give a damn if the solution works, and nor should anyone else. That is logic from another era designed to constrain what needs to be done now. Apparently not even he cares whether his nostrums work or not any more.

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That ignoring the requirements of law is worrying in itself. It indicates a civil service that has been corrupted by greed and the ethos of personal gain. The answer, of course, is that the State administered by the corrupt and greedy must be given more power over the rest of us. Facepalm.

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Ritchie picks up on a piece in the New York Times: Without such tactics, Apple’s federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year, according to a recent study by a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of [...]

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But let me also be clear, based upon my long experience as a tax practitioner, which I was before I became a tax campaigner, and during which earlier career I was responsible for the preparation of thousands of tax returns, I can genuinely say that I can’t recall seeing anyone give 10% of their income [...]

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The reason why we got a welfare state was that charities did not and could not do the job that was needed. Nor can they now. Which is why although I think charity is vital at drawing attention to problems and facilitating the actions of those who want to address them paying tax to maintain [...]

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Here: Today presenter Evan Davis said: ‘We need to clear up something from earlier this week … We said that Sir Philip Green had cut his tax bill in the UK by hundreds of millions of pounds by transferring ownership of Arcadia … to his wife. We’re happy to make it clear that Arcadia was [...]

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