Wednesday, Jan 14, 2009
It's not just me then (?)
Adam Smith Institute Blog: Tax simplification: the case for a land value tax
The ASI have kindly allowed me to give this idea another whirl, backed up with the conclusions of Adam Smith himself.
Posted by mark wadsworth @ 11:16 AM (418 views) Add Comment
7 Comments
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1. paul said...
Make sure you retain some sort of ownership of the idea - if it catches on there will be people pretending to have 'thought of it some time ago'.
2. mark wadsworth said...
Adam Smith put the rationale for it two and a half centuries ago, and Tom Paine said it three centuries ago, so I'm hardly leading the pack.
3. troy said...
The Adam Smith Institute copies a US right wing think tank in publishing a ‘tax freedom day’ for the UK. They claim it is on 2nd June.
But that’s a very selective view of ‘tax freedom day’. That happens to be the day when, they say, a taxpayer on average income, including indirect taxes, local taxes and National Insurance contributions, has paid all their taxes for the year, their remaining earnings being theirs to spend as they then will.
But there’s a major problem in that calculation. Not everyone pays tax at the rate a person on average earnings pays. Far from it in fact.
One third of the UK’s largest companies do not pay tax. For them tax freedom day arrived on the stroke of midnight, this morning.
There are millions of offshore companies in the world, many of them used to fraudulently evade tax. They pay no tax on their profits. For them tax freedom day also arrived on the stroke of midnight, this morning.
Richard Murphy January 1st 2009
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2009/01/01/tax-freedom-day-for-some/
4. inbreda said...
I am hoping Mr Obama is true to his word and prevents US citizens/compaanies from making use of offshore tax havens. Now THAT will bring house prices down in teh channel islands!
5. mark wadsworth said...
To the extent that Richard Murphy's ramblings are of any relevance to this, that's the beauty of LVT - you can't roll up a plot of land and take it to the Cayman Islands.
6. paul said...
Oh yes I see what you mean! I wasn't talking about Adam Smith, more about ASI.
Smith's work is constantly opened up to revision and re-interpretation, making it easy for new-found supporters of the theory du jour to say "well of course xxx thought of this some time ago".
For example, Adam Smith (as it has been argued by some) and by extension ASI was a proponent of laissez faire capitalism - exactly what we didn't need recently, but we don't see ASI arguing for more market liberalization right now, as Smith wrote (although admittedly there is a bit more to this - its just an example).
7. braindeed said...
Tax 'avoidance'.....conserted g7 effort there, and you've solved the problem.' I'll take my money abroad...' they'll scream..arrivederchi - go live in botswana...enjoy