Archive for category Tax and Spend
Some Looney Tunes Cartoons Are Not So Loony
Posted by David Conway in Economics, Education, Politics, Tax and Spend on 05/01/2010
Schools Secretary Ed Balls recently announced that, under the rubric of the new Personal, Social, Health and Economic curriculum to be introduced from September 2011, children as young as five will be given lessons on how to save.
Editorial columns have greeted the announcement with derision, rightly commenting on the irony involved.
A Very Big ‘If’
Posted by David Conway in Health, Politics, Tax and Spend on 23/06/2009
Since 1999, the size of the NHS workforce has increased by 29 per cent. One in every 19 people in Britain now works for it.
A chief architect of that increase is Ed Balls, between 1990 and 2004 chief economic adviser to Gordon Brown. Last week in a widely reported radio interview, Mr Balls said: “If we can get the economy right – as I believe we are doing – I think we can see spending rising on health and schools in real terms after 2011.”
Since public borrowing increased last month by more than it has ever done since monthly figures began, this seems a very big ‘if’.
The public’s tax priority: stability
Posted by Nick Cowen in Tax and Spend on 28/05/2008
After Brown’s £2.7 billion bailout over the 10p tax debacle, the multiple taxes on motorists are now coming under greater scrutiny. In the early years, the majority of attacks directed against the Labour Government were the introduction of stealth taxes. That criticism no longer applies. A doubling in vehicle excise duty on ordinary family cars fails to achieve what any ‘decent’ stealth tax would do: creep into the family budget, bite a little chunk out of it and sneak it back to the Treasury, preferably without the public noticing. The ruse will probably be discovered months later but by then is relegated to a mere bullet point in a Tax Payers Alliance briefing. They are not meant to generate newspaper campaigns against them. So the Government’s tax strategy appears to have de-cloaked and, although it has taken on a green mantle, it does not appear any less ugly for it.
Big Brother’s beady eyes
Posted by Nick Cowen in Civil Liberty, European Union, Health, Tax and Spend on 14/05/2008
Is summer now the season for publications pushing increased government intrusion into private conduct? The warm air has been accompanied by the somewhat chillier sensation of the release of two reports with some joyously Orwellian titles: The Politics of Public Behaviour from Demos and Creatures of Habit? The Art of Behavioural Change from the Social Market Foundation. From the mechanisms discussed in both these titles, it seems that the aspiration to get the state more involved in people’s lives remains as strong as ever among many policymakers, but combined (perhaps dangerously) with fresh research into behavioural economics.
Should Inheritance Tax be defended?
Posted by Nick Cowen in Tax and Spend on 30/04/2008
Yesterday evening, I attended the Fabian Society’s debate ‘How can we defend the inheritance tax?’ although it might have been more aptly labelled a strategy meeting on how to set-up a pro-tax alternative to the Taxpayers Alliance. For when I had a chance to speak, the only one present to deny the explicit premise that inheritance tax was morally justifiable, the room itself seemed briefly to close in on me. While responses to my argument were never less than polite and well mannered, the initial incensed glares from the front of the room gave the impression that in a less civilized age I could have wound up being sacrificed inside a giant wicker construct of George Bernard Shaw.
Blair’s legacy, Brown’s economy?
Posted by Nick Cowen in Tax and Spend on 06/06/2007
Via Daniel J. Mitchell at Cato, we learn that the last seven years has seen a climb in total taxation the equivalent of ten pence in every pound:
‘What developed nation has taken the biggest steps in the wrong direction since the turn of the century? The answer is not France, Germany, or Sweden. The United Kingdom has that dubious honor. Government spending has jumped from less than 38 percent of GDP in 2000 to more than 45 percent of economic output today. That is the largest increase among OECD nations, and the United Kingdom now has a bigger burden of government than Germany.’