Tim Worstall

Britain has threatened to provoke a fresh row with Brussels by launching legal proceedings against a €35bn tax on financial transactions agreed by 11 European Union members earlier this year. The argument seems to be that you’re allowed to use this enhanced cooperation thing to tax however you like in your own countries. But you’re [...]

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Turn on the automatic Ritchierant machine: But he faced criticism from Labour’s Ian Lavery, who said: “People who pay their taxes unquestioningly are sick and tired of seeing hugely profitable companies use every trick in the book to get out of contributing their fair share. “Hard-pressed families struggling with sky-high energy bills will be absolutely [...]

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It’s led some on the left to lose faith in the gradualism of the national minimum wage and the Low Pay Commission – made up of employers, unions and academics – which oversees it. They favour usurping the late 90s settlement on low pay, replacing it with an externally imposed increase in the minimum wage [...]

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“I absolutely deny the rumour, published in the Monday April 8 edition of Liberation, claiming I have a bank account in Switzerland,” Mr Fabius wrote in a statement. There is no “substance or foundation” to the report, he added. Now let us change the question slightly. Have you ever had……?

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“HMRC acknowledges that the estimates assume employers currently operate a standard approach to PAYE and that the figures may not take into account bespoke arrangements that employers or their agents may have put in place to suit their particular organisations”. “Such bespoke arrangements are not currently visible to HMRC,” it added. “HMRC will not be [...]

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Hundreds of millionaires working in Britain’s banks will receive an average tax cut of almost £54,000 when the top rate of tax is abolished this weekend, according to figures compiled by the Labour party. The changes mean that 643 bankers, each earning more than £1m, could get a combined tax cut worth at least £34.6m. [...]

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Margaret Hodge pontificates. Hoi polloi respond in the comments. It would appear that the good work being done by Christie Malry and the like is actually getting the true story out.

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The idea of earning £10,000 of income tax, as anyone who’s working will do from next April, sounds utopian in its generosity. For HMRC it’s the public relations opportunity of a lifetime. Imagine the adverts: your first £10,000 – tax-free! And you don’t even have to worry about how we’re going to pay for your [...]

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Traditional families with stay-at-home mothers have been penalised financially by the Coalition and now pay more tax than the international norm, an official study found. Yes, that’s the way the story is being told. But it’s not the important part of it at all. Look at these numbers: In Britain, the single parent had seen [...]

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Chancellor George Osborne announced in his Budget last week that star athletes such as Bolt would be exempt from paying income tax at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow next year and that the same exemption would be extended to the athletics event in London on the first anniversary of the Olympics. Teams playing in the [...]

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Already 99,149 people have signed up to the notion that these arrangements are unfair. Higson, author of the Young Bond series of novels, is one of them. “My position is that Amazon is convenient and cheap, but at the expense of traditional bookshops that have to pay the full tax rate. How can anyone else [...]

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Observers said the timing of the announcement appeared to be a damage limitation exercise amid reports that France’s Council of State is to bury Socialist president François Hollande’s controversial pledge to slap a 75 per cent tax on millionaire earners. The Council will, according to Le Figaro newspaper, conclude that any figure above 66.6 per [...]

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By far the costliest tax avoidance takes the form of the corporate structuring that has repeatedly hit the front pages in the last couple of years, whether through Starbucks’ payment of royalties to Amsterdam, Amazon’s Luxembourg sales hub or Vodafone’s multibillion-pound internal financing arrangements through the same grand duchy. But given that all of these [...]

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and says measures are needed to remove the tax treatment bias that favours companies funding loans through debt as opposed to equity. Eh? What? A debt is a loan and equity isn’t either a loan nor debt. As written that line is completely impossible. We all know what they mean of course: they’re talking about [...]

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A hairdresser, a coach operator and a knitwear manufacturer were on a list of nine “deliberate tax defaulters” published by HM Revenue and Customs. Ministers and tax specialists said the move showed there was “increasingly no place to hide from the taxman”. OK. But there were no large corporations on the list and the total [...]

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The exchequer loses at least £5bn a year because the taxman is failing to crack down on “morally wrong” tax avoidance schemes similar to the one used by comedian Jimmy Carr, the chair of the Commons public accounts committee warns today. Margaret Hodge, the former Labour minister, said rich businessmen designing the schemes were “running [...]

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From today’s little email of theirs giving journalists a quote or two: Chris Jordan, ActionAid’s tax expert, said: “Today’s OECD study demonstrating how multinational companies game the international tax system is a welcome breath of fresh air. Yet ActionAid are concerned that the solutions proposed will not bring significant benefits for the world’s poorest countries [...]

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The same revolving door happened over the contentious controlled foreign companies rules (CFC), concerning the way companies can claim their business is in a tax haven, although the goods appear to be sold here. Challenged on Amazon, one of the accountants explained that though Amazon seemed to sell goods here, trundling delivery vans along tax-financed [...]

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The company, whose chief executive Terry Smith is one of the City’s most outspoken figures, is deferring bonuses for just over 20 staff so that any income over £150,000 is taxed at 45pc rather than the current 50pc rate. Tullett also signalled it would have no truck with any government interference over the move, hinting [...]

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UK public spending was 36.6% of gdp in 2000, and had edged up over 50% by 2009 and 2010 and now is still in the range of 49% or so. Most of the run-up came over the bubbly years of 2000-2006. Let’s start by calling that an unsustainable mistake. I would say that, looking back, [...]

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