Tim Worstall

This is one of those things where I simply cannot understand why anyone is complaining. The current method of assessing the impact of tax changes on the real economy is relatively primitive. Six years ago, a senior Conservative politician complained that Treasury officials assumed, in effect, that any change in tax rates would lead to [...]

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A new tax raising the price of Cornish pasties by 20 per cent could cost jobs and harm the economy in the south-west, campaigners and MPs have warned. That’s odd. I thought hot food takeaways already paid VAT, while cold did not….

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What he may not have realised as he announced a charge on such properties was that Samantha Cameron’s stepfather could be among those affected by the proposed tax. Viscount Astor, who is married to Mrs Cameron’s mother Annabel, has a home on the 19,500-acre Tarbert estate on the island of Jura, off the west coast [...]

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Labour says that of the 400 people earning £10m, only 16% pay any tax at all. But where in buggery does it come from? I can imagine that non-residents don’t pay any UK income tax, I can imagine that some of them have exclusively capital gains and thus pay CGT not income tax, even that [...]

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I’m a little unclear as to what it is that Osborne has done with pensions. There’s the move to the £140 a week pension, OK, that’s good. The lower pension topped up with credits just diminished the incentive to save. But there’s something about “losing the second state pension”? Is he thus abolishing SERPS? All [...]

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The increase in the tax-free personal allowance is the biggest single item of expenditure in the Budget. Under the Coalition deal, the allowance had been due to rise from £6,475 in 2010 to £10,000 by 2015. It previously only rose in line with inflation or rises in wages. No, no, not at all. And it’s [...]

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More than 585 films, including the Harry Potter movies, have benefited from the tax breaks which have cost £570 billion over the past decade. If we weren’t splurging a £billion a film we’d have paid off quite a lot of the national debt. Sadly the Telegraph is out by three orders of magnitude….

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Makes me wonder about my own support for the Mirrlees Review. For Willy is indeed a normally perfect indicator of what not to do. But perhaps this is his stopped clock moment. In fact, the outlines of what such a reforming chancellor might do were recently set out in an extraordinary review of the tax [...]

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The Deputy Prime Minister says he has uncovered evidence that hundreds of millionaires are paying a tax rate of less than 20 per cent on their earnings by using an “army of lawyers and accountants”. In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Clegg indicates he is willing to support the scrapping of the 50p top [...]

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Umm, no, not really: A great deal of those costs fall on individuals rather than the government, bereavement, noise, congestion, air quality, essentially standard of living costs borne by the wider society. …. In fact, if you raised that extra £20bn in taxes from motorists (increase fuel duty by 40p, probably more like 50-60p to [...]

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How many words are there on a page of Tolley’s guide to UK taxation?

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Michael Portillo, the former Conservative defence secretary, also said the statistics had taken him by surprise. “The tax system is more progressive than I had imagined,” he said. How long have you been in friggin’ politics? Shouldn’t you actually know by now that the UK tax system is markedly more progressive than those of most [...]

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Companies House documents show that Mr Livingstone, who is Labour’s candidate for the London mayoralty, earned £232,000 in 2009, the first year after his defeat to Boris Johnson at the last mayoral election. The money, from personal appearances, speechmaking and hosting a radio show, was paid directly into a new company set up by Mr [...]

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Does the 50p tax rate actually increase total revenues? The Treasury received £10.35 billion in income tax payments from those paying by self-assessment last month, a drop of £509 million compared with January 2011. Most other taxes produced higher revenues over the same period. Senior sources said that the first official figures indicated that there [...]

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An interesting way to deal with that residual business vote in the City Corporation: Businesses pay taxes in the form of corporation tax (£48bn), local business rates (£25bn) and employer National Insurance Contributions (£55bn) but have no say in the running of local or national government. It’s taxation without representation. It’s an interesting thought certainly. [...]

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Here’s where the earlier denial that anyone got paid through a services company went off the rails: She said: “We can confirm that no civil servant who is an employee of the Department of Health is paid in this way. To this extent it was certainly not our intention to mislead anyone involved. Well of [...]

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No, I’m sorry, this does not work. Could she possibly be right? Is the U.S. tax system unusually progressive? That is an interesting question. And this is the wrong way to answer it: Looks to me like only 6 OECD countries have less progressive systems, and 21 OECD countries have more progressive systems… Because the [...]

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I am absolutely certain that this distinction will get lost: Last night, HMRC confirmed the arrests: “As a result of an on going HMRC investigation into tax-related criminal offences, HMRC has arrested a number of people, some of whom work for UK banks. This investigation relates to the actions of the people arrested in relation [...]

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Third, poll after poll shows overwhelming public support for a tax on bankers’ bonuses; a mansion tax on multimillion-pound properties; a windfall levy on the oil and utility companies; a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions; and a one-off wealth tax of 20% on the richest 10% of households (which would raise a whopping £800bn [...]

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Under UK tax rules, any non-resident athlete performing in Britain is subject to income tax on both their appearance fee and any associated worldwide endorsement payments. However, Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury, said the Government has decided to waive the rule to attract the best talent to the Games. It is not the [...]

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