Tim Worstall

I do like this line:
Corporations can be big, they can be profitable, and they can be big and profitable. But they cannot be wealthy, for the simple reason that corporations are not people. Corporations are not wealthy; they are a form of wealth.

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How the income tax system has become markedly more regressive over the years.
I’m pretty sure that it has you know.
Time was when only the rich paid income tax. Then the middle….now people working part time on minimum wage.
For the personal allowance is only ever raised in line with retail inflation (and sometimes is not raised [...]

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Even the Telegraph is getting this wrong.
The peer, who is the Conservative deputy chairman, admitted earlier this week that he was non-domiciled and therefore only paid tax on his British assets.
As we don’t have asset based taxation no he bloody doesn’t.
He pays tax on his income in the UK plus [...]

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Why should this be shocking?
The party’s deputy chairman shocked colleagues when he revealed that he had not paid tax on his overseas fortune since becoming a member of the House of Lords a decade ago.
Nobody pays tax on their fortune because we do not have wealth taxation in this country, we [...]

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That thing we always get told about? That we’ve all promised to spend 0.7% of GDP on foreign aid? And aren’t the Americans bastards for not doing so?
Interesting point made:
A pop quiz: What’s the largest U.S.-based international relief and development organization?
It’s not Save the Children, and it’s not CARE — both terrific secular [...]

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A bottle of Bells whisky could rise from £14.79 to £23.73 while Gordon’s gin, another favourite of middle-class drinkers, would increase from £12.79 to £21.17.
Hmm….three reasons being given for this. The first is to “curb binge drinking”. Yes, I too have seen the gin and tonic set [...]

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This looks reasonably unremarkable, just a shufling of the details of the system:
The Conservatives are working on a pilot for a new automated bank-based system that would remove the responsibility of deducting and paying income tax from employers. The new system could save businesses up to £5.5bn according to [...]

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Well, yes, one can see the point:
The Valuation Office Agency insisted it was working closely with petrol retailers to reach an agreement on its new rates.
“In recent years, the rental value of petrol filling stations has grown considerably and it is only fair to all ratepayers that this is reflected in the rateable value,” a [...]

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Or if you prefer, here’s today’s Ritchie!
Developing countries are losing approximately $100 billion dollars every year due to trade mispricing, according to a new report from Global Financial Integrity (GFI).
Ooooh, my! So, what does the report actually say?
Well, they measure the amount of trade they think is mispriced, then look at corporate tax rates, click [...]

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A rise in VAT is looming whichever party wins the general election, as Labour and the Conservatives draw up plans to balance Britain’s books.
Alistair Darling and George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, are both considering raising VAT to as high as 20 per cent — the European average — from the current rate [...]

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Look, I’m no defender of Ashcroft but really, The Observer should be better than this:
Ashcroft promised to become a permanent resident of the UK as a condition of his ennoblement in 2000. A year earlier, he had been rejected as a member of the Lords by the political honours scrutiny committee. But successive Conservative leaders [...]

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Will you look at this?
Royal Dutch Shell today said it would cut another 1,000 jobs this year after reporting a 69% slide in annual profits to $9.8bn (£6.1bn).
The Anglo-Dutch firm also reported a steep drop in fourth quarter earnings – down 75% to $1.18bn – after pressure on margins in refining offset a year-on-year increase [...]

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The FTSE company, which owns Smirnoff vodka and Guinness, has rejected the offer which is understood to be just one of a series of proposals that it has received in recent months. However, the terms of the offer from the Swiss canton of Zug highlight how aggressive foreign authorities have become in their attempts to [...]

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One of the things that I’ve been ragging Ritchie about is his insistence that corporations and companies do so too pay tax. I say they don’t, that it’s some combination of workers, customers and shareholders that do.
When I present something that show sthat economists are absolutely certain about this he usually mutters something about it [...]

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They really mean death tax:
Twenty-three Britons have died at Dignitas, a suicide clinic in Zurich, in the past year alone, while several hundred more are believed to be on its waiting list.
Under the plans groups such as Dignitas face large fines for assisting anyone who has [...]

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Britain’s leading companies are devising pay schemes that enable top executives to escape the new 50p rate of income tax for high earners that takes effect in April, the Guardian has learned.
Really, who would have thought it?
The details look rather interesting though:
A number of pay plans are currently on the drawing board and differ subtly [...]

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Now of course, on this matter I am highly partisan. My office used to be just across a narrow street from theirs and I’ve puffed many a fag and shot the breeze on the pavement with them.
However, this is really a tad odd.
A campaign group which claims to represent the interests of ordinary taxpayers is [...]

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Google, the internet giant whose informal corporate motto is “don’t be evil”, did not pay any tax on its £1.6 billion advertising revenues in Britain last year.
The firm, which has a substantial presence in London, diverted all its advertising earnings from customers in Britain to its Irish subsidiary.
The arrangement allowed Google legally [...]

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Pre-Budget report: Bankers may evade Alistair Darling’s bonus tax
Bankers will avoid…..
We’re just not sure how as yet.
Also worth pointing out that predicting tax evasion is predicting a criminal offence: not quite the right verb to use there given that.

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Why can’t tax avoidance be illegal?
Because if it’s illegal then it isn’t tax avoidance, it’s tax evasion.
Then again, who really expects linguistic accuracy from a piece of cutlery?

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