Tim Worstall

Someone who actually knows what they’re talking about says:
Sorry Richard, but while I don’t agree with Tim Worstall on much stuff – particularly his hatred of the European project, and greater backing of tax evasion than I would support – I have never, ever, ever read an argument of yours that managed [...]

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E&Y and Lehman show that he’s been right all along of course. Thus accounting and auditing should be changed to suit his interests.
Slightly sad that he sets off with this:
…and it was used thereafter without further question arising to deliberately misrepresent the true nature of the balance sheet of the entity.
That sounds shocking [...]

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The UK has £28 billion of unpaid tax debt. I estimate tax avoidance (legal but unacceptable abuse of tax law) to run at £25 billion a year and tax evasion (fraudulent law-breaking) at £70 billion. Tackling these issues could close the fiscal deficit.
The joy of this is that he doesn’t even realise [...]

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One for Ritchie and points left.
A central tenet of public finance, however, is that the entity that has the legal obligation to pay a tax is not necessarily the one that bears the burden. For example, payroll taxes are levied on firms, but we know that they are mostly borne by workers. [...]

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Will you look at this eh?
Across the partnership, sales increase by 7.5 per cent… to take pre-tax profit to £155m. This was down on last year’s £282m,
So, item one, a fall in profits.
staff will share £151m as a bonus
Bonuses amount to an eyewatering 97.5% of profits. That’s item two. Item two [...]

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And it’s a corker.
Three major points.
1) It’s written for the main union representing HMRC staff. And it says that there should be more HMRC staff. Funny that, quite amazing how he gets to that position really. If we didn’t know that Ritchie is entirely incapable of such behaviour we might begin to wonder whether he’s [...]

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It’s time professional people changed their tune: their duty is to support tax systems – not undermine them.
Rilly?
Just to take an extreme example: the duty of a barrister when defending someone accused of tax offences is to go all Soviet on them? Yes, yes, you’re right, my client is a horrible person who should be locked [...]

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I don’t find this surprising at all. If people maximise it is their overall well-being that they seek to enhance.
If he’d actually paid attention to his economics courses at Southampton all those years ago he would have known this.
People maximise utility, not income, leisure, work, sleep, sex or any other one thing.
All of that blackboard [...]

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Contrary to those who claim that domicile is some strange beast grafted onto the UK tax system,. it’s actually quite an important part of the Common Law:
But at the heart of last week’s hearing is the issue of where the Turkish Cypriot tycoon was domiciled when he died.
Erkin and his family insist that Ramadan Guney’s [...]

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Bad news for those saying that it’ll just be the banks paying any further taxes on the banking system:
In a report on the White House’s plan to impose a 0.15pc fee on liabilities of banks with more than $50bn in assets in order to recoup [...]

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If anyone’s at a loose end tonight would they fancy going along to the House of Commons? There’s an interesting question that should be asked.
R. Murphy Esq will be speaking:
I am speaking at a meeting tonight in the House of Commons organised by the University and Colleges Union.
The aim is to abolish university fees [...]

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Julian Cook, an economist at Madeley-Finnegan, said: “Lord Ashcroft is one of around 60 million people in Britain who want to pay less tax.
“He does this by hiring an accountant who reduces his tax bill by as much as is legally possible, sends him an invoice and then everyone goes about [...]

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“Which brings me to your long point on FTTs: tell me what the real cost of a 10bp margin is and who will really lose.”
OK. Taking the numbers you’ve given me here.
Before the tax we have a 2 bps margin. We add the 0.5 bps tax. We then have a 10 bps margin. Those are [...]

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Although relatively few in number, large international banks dominate the global FX
market. The ‘economic footprint’ of the CTDL would, in the first instance, fall upon
these large financial institutions that are members of the CLS Bank and the Real Time
Gross Settlement systems (RTGS). There is little doubt that they could comfortably
absorb the levy given the size [...]

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At the heart of R. Murphy’s ideas about the financial transactions tax is the thought that the tax will widen margins in the FX business (well, actually all markets). Wider margins will lead to lower liquidity and thus lower profits for banks and thus lower pay for bankers.
This is one of the source documents he [...]

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So, I’m trying to, politely, get him to see my point:

“I’m well aware conventional economists do not agree – and they have provided not a shred of evidence, let alone logic, to support their case as yet. They simply say the cost will be passed on to others – but when the [...]

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There’s been something nagging me about R. Murphy’s latest little essay for the TUC. It doesn’t seem to mention his last little essay for the TUC.
Back in November he said that there should be a 0.05% tax on all interbank and CHAPS transfers.
I was among those who started shouting that he’s just closed down the [...]

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The major cost of trading in this market, which is largely undertaken between a very limited range of banks –
often, as noted on a pure inter-bank basis – or with a limited range of large commercial counterparties
operating what are, in effect, their own in house banks usually called treasury departments, is labour. Those
employed in this [...]

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As the report notes, the short term alternative of an insurance charge that some promote as an alternative to
financial transaction taxes does not have any of the benefits flowing from adoption of these taxes as noted
above, nor can it raise equivalent revenues. In addition, whilst financial transaction taxes should only eliminate
marginal trades but leave markets [...]

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One might be tempted to say, it can’t get worse than the status quo, but that what the Russians said in 1917, and boy were they wrong.
Eric Falkenstein.

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