Tim Worstall

What is VAT, Value Added Tax- A form of consumptive tax

Eh? With all the TB around, they should be swimming in money, shouldn’t they?

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Really?

The GMB, which has given the party £1.4 million in the past year, wants the cap on National Insurance lifted so that higher-salaried workers pay more.

Depends how you look at it. But for those on something like 40k and above that would raise the income and NI tax rate to something like […]

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Gasp, shock, horror. The rains of blood and cats with dogs cannot be far behind. Polly:

…why not lift personal allowances to take the low paid out of tax altogether?

Timmy:

Fortunately my fellow bleeding- heart classical liberals over at the Adam Smith Institute have a solution: simply take the poor out of the income tax net altogether […]

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Well, yes, there is this problem of diverting to the Continent:

The Treasury has proposed three bands: travel within most of Europe, flights of up to 3,000 miles and those of more than 3,000 miles.
British airlines fear that the changes could lead to millions of passengers taking their business abroad, choosing to change planes at continental […]

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The Office of Fair Trading has issued an embarrassing apology to supermarket chain Wm Morrison and has agreed to pay the retailer £100,000 to settle a defamation action linked to the regulators long running probe into milk-price fixing.
…
The regulator is also to pay the supermarket chain’s costs.

Excellent. Now all we have to do is get […]

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That’s the problem with the market, capitalism stuff. People screw up and they get massive pay offs.
Never happen in the public sector, of course.

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Oh good grief, what is the Taxpayers’ Alliance doing here?

Even after adjusting for technical accounting issues, however, ADI would not have paid any tax for 2007.
That is because it has geared up BAA with so much debt that its interest bill wipes out any taxable profit.
The ADI accounts show net debt of £16.8bn and net […]

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Says at least one sensible thing in his 12 step program to reform the tax system.

9. Abolish ID Cards: The government’s ID card scheme is a veritable bonanza for IT companies and consultants. Yet the need for the cards has not been established. It is doubtful that reliable and safe technology can be produced. The […]

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OK, maybe it’s only two people who don’t like it:

Gordon Brown, a happily married man himself, is responsible for the inheritance tax which, at 40% after the limit of £300,000 has been passed, affects all those whose houses have enjoyed a huge rise in value in the past decade.
It’s a new phenomenon that a levy […]

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My word, Polly T does rather lay into the tax system today. And, umm, quite rightly too (not what you expected to read here, did you?).

Those at the very bottom pay a far higher marginal tax rate than those at the top, with a bungled benefit system imposing a 70% tax loss for every extra […]

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Richard Murphy gives us his April Fool.
The thing which I find really amusing about it is that I’m absolutely damn certain that one of the first things someone’s going to do when the private Moon base(s) get going is exactly that: explore the very interesting possibilities of tax dodging.

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He said: "When the money’s piled up in the pot, then you give it away in tax cuts. It only makes sense to look at this over an economic cycle. You can’t look at it in a single year, or even necessarily in a four-year parliament."

That’s the new Tory Policy. Something of a sadness that […]

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Hmm, interesting question really, isn’t it. Why would people use a Foundation? That is, an organisation which owns itself, and has a charitable purpose?
Businesses owned by one pay the same tax as businsses owned in other ways, so that’s not it, no. It’s actually all about the transfer of the ownership of the whole organisation. […]

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Tee Hee.
And Tee Hee Hee indeed:

I’ll begin with my former employer, the Guardian Media Group, following its flagship paper’s investigation last week into Tesco’s use of tax efficient Cayman Island vehicles.
That one drew quite a bit of flak from those Farringdon Road firebrands, with a Guardian leader thundering: "The Government should make it clear that […]

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No other way to describe it really.

The heads of the biggest gas and electricity companies are being ordered by the Government to hand over part of their multi-billion pound profits - or face a new windfall tax.

These soaring profits are due more to a quirk of the accounting system than anything else. Explained here.
There will […]

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You’ve really got to stop listening to Richard Murphy you know, he’s making you look very foolish.

"Check out the recent report The Missing Billions from tax expert Richard Murphy, for the TUC, who identified £25bn of tax lost from the exchequer. He lists major companies whose tax payments don’t begin to reflect the size of […]

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The idea that companies are "overtaxed" is difficult to sustain when leading companies are systematically avoiding tax.

When companies are going to great lengths, involving no little cost and a lot of hard work, to avoid taxation that is of course prima facie evidence that they are indeed being "overtaxed". If they were not being overtaxed […]

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Guardian leader today:

The most worrying thing about tax avoidance is the corporate thinking it illustrates. Listen to Tesco’s defence of its hunt for tax havens: it is already paying a lot in taxes, and avoiding giving any more is "our duty to shareholders and customers alike". That philosophy is becoming ever more widespread. Tax avoidance […]

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There’s something to be said for tax havens, but it’s an unpopular case to make in the middle of the Liechtenstein storm. The danger is that the tax competition that they bring, and which should be welcome, will be annihilated along with the secrecy which they struggle to justify.

Without tax havens, without the possibility […]

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