The idea that difference tax evasion and avoidance are clear cut is misguided. Companies like amazon and those individuals who profit most from tax evasion are the kind of people who fund lobbyists and think tanks like IEA to help create the tax loopholes which they then take advantage of.
Yes, 40 years on Ronald Reagan who increased Government spending and ran up massive debts is still put forward as some kind of role model for laissez-faire low tax economy. Never let the facts get in the way of a fairytale.
Wage competition has little impact on wages. There you go again spouting Marxist economics as if businesses were machines working to predetermined and unchanging economic laws of profit maximisation.
There you go again spouting your Marxist theory of how business operates. The problem with your take though is that it has been tried repeatedly throughout history in many countries and it doesn't lead to higher wages.Its almost as if the only way to get workers to be paid the kind of wage they could afford to live on with state subsidy is to give the workers control of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
Take one example, amazon, people work for below subsistence wages in his warehouses and no matter how rich the founder gets, none of it trickles down.
"All of this was totally predictable."
Time for a united Ireland or an independent Northern Ireland, anything to spare us from the whinging DUP.
Are we to expect this policy to be adopted in England ? Perhaps the author is unaware that planning decisions are made on the basis of the National Planning Policy Framework, Government set housing targets a lack of an entirely arbitrary five years 'housing' supply and that developers still go to appeal, which on major application is determined by the Government. And yet still the Government is determined to 'streamline' the process because it still isn't stacked enough in favour of developers. Oh and we haven't even got onto the issue of land ownerships.
Here's one for the TPA, cut military spending to 1% of GDP, in line with the EU27 average. That would shave more off government spending than the entire Thatcher era. Interesting sin't it, that Thatcher failed so miserably to cut spending as a proportion of GDP, its almost as if some of her policies didn't work or had other consequence. An obvious difference is that Churchill and Attlee had just fought a world war, whereas the recent economic problems have been largely self inflicted. It is easy to cut taxes, Regan and Trump did it, they just ran up huge deficits and government debt. Boris has achieved a first though, he has inflicted the greatest economic damage in the shortest space of time of any UK government.
Given the Government didn't know which if any vaccines would work when they were ordered and given they accept no responsibility for any deaths, having done everything they could to prevent them, isn't it a bit sickening to claim credit for saving lives which haven't yet been saved?
"these liberalisations are chiefly tokens of intent" - so why does the author draw ludicrous conclusions from them, could it be he can't bare to admit that Brexit isn't the fantasy he imagined.
The idea that the EU was a 'slow growth area' is flawed as it compares utterly different economies. A economy growing from £10 to £12 has grown by 20%, it is high growth, whereas an economy that grows from £100 to £110 has grown by 10%,it is low growth, but, where are you better off ? Added to which, using GDP as the sole measure of growth is like using a speedometer to judge whether your car will pass its MOT.
"Stamp duty is a property tax which is an attack on aspiration and ownership" that's one way of looking at it, get rid of the emotive language and the sentence is meaningless. Stamp duty is one way in which the very richest pay a tiny bit of tax because it is harder for them to avoid, although it doesn't stop them trying.
"someone living in a house worth £100,000 pays around five times more tax as a share of property value than someone living in a home worth £1 million." That is an utterly bogus statistic. Clearly even after 30 years we have MPs who don't understand how council tax operates.
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