The generosity of T-Mobile and other retailers

I received an email from T-mobile today telling me that they were kindly passing the 2.5% cut in the VAT rate on to their customers and I would see the reduction in my next bill. They are not the first to make this statement.

Excuse me, but is somebody a bit confused here?

T-mobile is not my bank. Nor are any of the retailers now offering to pass the VAT cut onto customers.

The 2.5% cut in the rate of VAT is not a shift in the rate at which they buy energy from the government, which they may then choose to pass on or not depending on their own whim and the details of my contract.

VAT is a tax on consumption of luxuries (at least in theory). In fact, at the bottom of every receipt it says how much of the bill is tax. Therefore, a cut in VAT should automatically be passed onto consumers.

In fact, it is not the phone company or the retailer that is charging me the 17.5% (or now 15%) VAT in the first place. It is government. So for the retailers to “not pass it on” they would have to raise their prices by just under 2.5%.

So let us thank T-mobile and other retailers for not taking the opportunity of a reduction in VAT to raise their prices in a manner that would either have left them individually less competitive or collectively guilty of operating a cartel.

Why the poor need tax-cuts for rich people, too

There has been a lot of (welcome) talk recently about the Liberal Democrats’ pledge to cut taxes for low- and middle-income earners. This has been broadly welcomed in the party, though many have only accepted it as long as it is accompanied by a promise that the overall tax-take will remain the same, and that richer people should shoulder more of the tax burden.
This kind of “redistributionist” approach is always very popular, as most people are in the poorer rather than the richer category. It is easy to take from the minority to give to the majority, and there is no minority less sympathetic than the rich.

A counter argument might be that the only fair thing to do (and “fairness is something that the Liberal Democrats claim to take very seriously) would be to cut taxes for everybody if we are cutting them for some. But that kind of fairness - that everybody be treated equally no matter how wealthy they are - generally only cuts one way.

However, economists such as George Reisman make a far more startling claim: that it is tax cuts for rich business people and for corporations that are in the long-term interests of low and middle income wage earners; more so, in fact, than tax cuts aimed directly at the poor themselves.

Reisman’s initial point is a simple one, but one that is too often forgotten: that human society enables one to benefit from other people’s success. “The view of redistributionists…” he explains, “is that the only wealth from which an individual can benefit is his own…” The redistributionists are mistaken, however: “in order to benefit from privately owned means of production, one does not have to be an owner of the means of production… one benefits from other people’s means of production – [not only] every time one buys the products of those means of production [but] also as a seller of labor (sic.).” Capitalists invest in improving the efficiency of production so that they can enhance their profits, but in the process they make the goods we buy cheaper and make our labour more productive, so increasing real wages.

The reason that redistribution looks so attractive is because one tends to think of redistribution in terms of individual sums being transferred from a rich person to a poor person; and there can be little doubt that £1,000 is more valuable to a poor person than a rich person. But it does not follow that £100 billion is worth more in the hands of poor people overall than in the hands of rich people overall.

The problem is that “most people tend to think of themselves as members of the class of wage earners rather than separate individual wages earners, and to think of their interests as indistinguishable from the interests of other wage earners.”

In fact, while it is more in my interests that I have £1,000 than that Richard Branson does, it is no more valuable to me that a poor man in Liverpool has that £1,000 than Mr. Branson. And it is far more likely to serve my interests that a few rich people have £100 billion than huge numbers of poor people, even if £1,000 of that £100 billion ends up in my hands. The reason for this is that poor people spend a greater proportion of their money on consumption, and are more likely to consume than to invest additional sums. As Nick Clegg said in a recent interview with The Times, "give tax cuts to the better off [and] they will just save them. You have to give [tax cuts] to people on lower incomes who will transfer them into consumption on food and fuel.”

This is ceertainly true and is entirely predictable: those on the breadline would be happy for the opportunity to buy new shoes, while those who already own a yacht are free to invest extra money in their business. This is especially true for businesses themselves: business taxes leach away the money that would either be invested in improving productivity or would be paid out in the profits that attract further investment.

There is a point here that Reisman does not fully draw out, but which we can recognise today after a decade of Labour economic mismanagement. Money in the hands of the poor would create greater wealth in the short term, as a result of a consumer boom. But these consumer booms are unsustainable: buying more clothes and electronic goods does not make their production significantly more efficient. Investment makes them more productive, but this requires an investment boom. In fact, during the past decade the consumer boom has been accompanied by a dangerously low and shrinking savings rate: the West has saved almost nothing. Consequently, productivity has not risen as it should have done, which is one reason why real wages for less skilled workers (which are set by their productivity and thus by the investment in them and in the tools that they use) has not risen. Simply taking the money that would be invested in businesses and giving it to others to consume is “eating the seed corn.”

By comparison, “A tax reduction on businessmen and capitalists will promote capital accumulation, far, far more than a tax reduction on the mass of the individual wage earner's fellow wage earners. The average businessman and capitalist will save and invest the taxes he no longer has to pay, in far greater proportion than would the average wage earner, [and the businessman] will be induced to introduce more improvements in products and methods of production, which are also a major cause of capital accumulation…” In addition, “cutting the taxes of businessmen and capitalists [will] significantly … raise the demand for labor and … reduce or eliminate unemployment”. The result of increased innovation will be to enhance “the ability of upstart new firms to grow rapidly and thus to challenge old, established firms.”

Overall, “The effect of this combination is … a continually rising productivity of labor… and thus prices of consumers' goods that are progressively lower relative to the wages of labor, which means progressively rising real wage rates, so that in not too many years the average wage earner is far ahead of where he would have been on the strength of a cut in his own taxes.”

So ironically, it seems that cutting taxes for the labourers makes capitalists rich in the short term, whereas cutting taxes for the capitalists makes labourers rich in the long term.

The reason that Reisman’s argument is so challenging is that it seems to suggest that tax cuts for the poor are not in their own best interests. This isn’t mere sophistry. If productivity does not rise, real wages cannot rise. All “labour” can do is fight with “capital” and “land” for the share of wealth. This seems to be the be-all-and-end-all solution for redistributionists, who argue that the poor can only benefit at the expense of the rich. This would be true in a static economic system. But they forget that economies are (or at least should be) dynamic. The route to prosperity is through economic growth: “The average standard of living would double in a single generation if economic progress at a rate of just 3 percent a year could be achieved. Such economic progress would also mean a halving of the average wage earner's tax burden in the same period of time — if government spending per capita in real terms were held fixed.”

Consequently, the long-term prosperity of the average worker is best served by capitalists who invest for their own benefit. In seeking to further increase their own profits, capitalists invest extra money in improving productivity, which they do by buying new and better plant machinery, "upskilling" their staff and employing new and better business systems. Improvements to productivity in turn push up real wages and so benefit labourers far more than tax cuts on their own wages would. If Government can avoid the urge to “share the proceeds of growth” then wage earners will see their taxes fall anyway – not in absolute terms, but as a proportion of their rising incomes.

If there is a problem in Reisman's plan, it is that in advocating this policy of easing taxes on business and high incomes first, he overlooks the political economy of the 21st Century. No matter how correct he may be about the long term economic effects, it would be impossible to implement such tax cuts in the face of the vast majority of voters who will understandably ask why their taxes are not being cut while those of £billion businesses and rich oligarchs are. What is needed, therefore, is a sort of liberal realism that recognises that lowly paid workers, who form the bulk of the electorate, will want to see some of the short-term gain that their richer peers will enjoy as they wait for the longer term growth-benefits to kick in. One might suggest that a little honey today will keep them sweet until tomorrow’s jam arrives.

Thus if the Liberal Democrats really want to improve living standards for those on low incomes, we need to look not just to redistribution but to cutting the overall level of taxation in the economy. And we must do this by reducing taxes on businesses and among those wealthy enough to invest as well as those who will feel the benefits most in the short term. This is not about larding the rich for their own sake; it is about recognising a fundamental lesson of liberalism – that we all benefit from one another’s success – while also understanding that it is investment, not consumption, that makes future prosperity possible.

Reisman concludes that

Of course, in a further display of their ignorance and blindness, members of the Left will undoubtedly characterize the line of argument I've presented in this article as the "trickle-down theory." There is nothing trickle-down about it. There is only the fact that capital accumulation and economic progress depend on saving and innovation and that these in turn depend on the freedom to make high profits and accumulate great wealth. The only alternative to improvement for all, through economic progress achieved in this way, is the futile attempt of some men to gain at the expense of others by means of looting and plundering. This, the loot-and-plunder theory, is the alternative advocated by the redistributionist critics…. It is time to supplant it with ... sound economic theory….

Quote of the Day?

Today’s it’s-easy-if-you-cheat competition for which there is no prize is….

Guess which politician or world leader said the following recently:

"The money that we put in the education budget, I say let the [people] take it…

"Put it in your pockets and teach your kids as you wish. You take responsibility.

"As long as money is administered by a government body, there would be theft and corruption".

Sounds like common sense to me.

Lib Dem’s turn to have Darling steal their policies

The great policy thief looks like he is about to strike again!

Alistair Darling, Labour Chancellor and policy plagiarist, is rumoured to be about to “unveil a host of new measures in his first budget on Wednesday aimed at cutting carbon emissions” in what is to be billed as “Labour’s greenest [budget] to date.”

Should we be surprised? Of course not. In his first pre-Budget report, Darling ditched months of Labour plans in a naked attempt to out-Tory the Conservatives by offering an Inheritance Tax cut that Nick Clegg argues will help just 6 per cent of the population. Nick suggests that these are richest 6 per cent, though the most South Easterly 6 per cent might be nearer the mark!

Now, Darling appears poised to out-Lib Dem the Liberal Democrats by finally addressing Climate Change in his budget. Naturally, however, the real motivation is not the global but the financial climate, as he faces a hole in his budget that will require tax rises of £8 to £9 billion a year

In truth what we can look forward to is a token gesture on the environment in a budget that will not satisfy environmentally or equitably.

The Liberal Democrats have proposed a massive shift of taxation from income to pollution. Lib Dem proposals would seek to raise (if I remember correctly) £18bn a year from new environmental taxes, with which we would finance a massive tax cut off the basic rate, reducing it to the lowest level since… well… the last time the Liberals were in power. The personal allowance would soar to well over £7,000 a year, so that those on very low wages would pay almost nothing. And the Council Tax would be abolished forever – a long overdue measure.

By comparison, we can expect a rather lukewarm series of ill-thought-out measures from Darling. For example, the rumoured "showroom tax" of £2,000 on the price of the most gas-guzzling cars may indeed discourage consumers from buying them, but it is not the purchase of these cars but driving of them that is the source of pollution: this measure will not only unnecessarily penalize those who drive very short distances in very flash cars, but will also create no incentive to those who have already bought such a car, or who choose to do so despite the new tax, to economise on fuel. Indeed, perversely, economic theory suggests that if the car is more expensive, the owner needs to drive it more to ensure that they get their money’s worth!

By far a more effective means of tackling carbon emissions would be to abolish all taxes on the purchase of cars, and raise the money instead by increased in fuel duties. As somebody who has become painfully aware of the cost of petrol recently, I can attest to the fact that there is nothing more effective at encouraging economic use of fuel than seeing the counter on the petrol pump spin round.

Sadly, while it is unlikely that Darling will satisfy anybody with his budget, it is equally unlikely that the media will recognise that he is beginning to accept the wisdom of Lib Dem policy. And with a General Election probably two years away, we are saddled with Labour incompetence for some time to come.

Nobody wants higher taxes

I met a Dane once who introduced me to a new salutation. Every time somebody called for a toast he would raise his glass and say “To world peace and lower taxes”.

Recently this had me thinking. There are people in the world who claim to want higher taxes, but nobody really does. That might seem an odd statement at first (especially if you are Dr. Evan Harris). People constantly call for increases in taxation. The Liberal Democrats themselves called for an extra penny in the pound to pay for education!

But this confuses means and ends. Nobody wants higher taxes, but plenty of people want more public spending (or really, better services) and other want less income inequality (though what they really want is an end to poverty).

Now, one could of course argue that nobody wants lower taxes either. What they want is more freedom; a greater ability to improve their own lives; more control over how they contribute to the common good. But this is not quite true.

There are two ways to skin a cat, as they say at the RSPCA. Better social welfare can be delivered, to use an old metaphor, by increasing the size of the slice or by increasing the size of the cake. So those who claim to want higher taxes could just as easily be satisfied with a bigger economy. By comparison, those who want lower taxes will not get what they really want from a smaller economy; they too would need a larger economy to give them more to spend were taxes stay the same.

Happily, both can be satisfied. Taxes crowd out private investment and spending, so they tend to have a negative impact on the economy. Consequently, whereas reducing taxes will in the long run give both parties what they want (more money for both individual consumption and public welfare), high taxes will in the long run help neither.

So do not be fooled when people say that they want higher taxes. They may say that they do – they may even genuinely believe it – but if you drill down to find what they truly want you will discover that they really are not half as bad as you thought.

Government’s good intentions encourage greed and criminality

This interesting article in today’s Times caught my eye. On the face of it, it is a simple case of fraud that should stir the ire of any right-thinking person. But it nonetheless highlights the inherent problems that result from government meddling.

I was not aware of the fact, but apparently the government has exempted disabled drivers from paying VAT on new cars. This immediately strikes me as odd, in that there is no inherent reason why a disabled person – even one with mobility difficulties – would have greater need for a car than any particular other person. For one thing, it smacks of lumping all disabled people together and assuming that their needs are identical, whereas in fact the need for motorised transport probably varies as widely among disabled people as it does among the general population. Secondly, there are plenty of non-disabled people who desperately need a car – perhaps to convey their children to school, to go to work or attend hospital. They do not get tax breaks to buy one, however. One might also question why the benefit is not being channelled into public transport, as the government claims to want to encourage us out of cars.

More to the point, it is an excellent example of where it would be better to give people money rather than perks. In this case, rather than give disabled people a tax break on buying a car, why not give them money to contribute to the car, or if they prefer a rail ticket, a mobility scooter, their heating bill, entertainment or whatever they consider to be their priority.

The paternalism is only half of the problem, however. The other half is that, unsurprisingly, enterprising people have learnt to game the system. Firstly, the VAT exemption does not appear to be capped. Thus it applies not only to a Nissan Micra, on which the VAT might be just over £1,000. It appears it also applies to “top-of-the-range Land Rovers, Bentleys, Maseratis and Lamborghinis, costing up to £70,000. That means that [disabled drivers] could save as much as £12,250 on each transaction in VAT.”

Now, I think it is pretty clear that the government never intended to give a tax break to those buying luxury cars that cost almost two and a half times the average household income. But there is more to come.

Some of these disabled drivers are so enterprising that they have taken to selling their un-driven cars on at a cost that is higher than the VAT-exempt price that they paid, but not as high as the VAT-included price that a typical dealer would charge. On a luxury car, that difference could be as much as £10,000. Even if the buyer and the disabled re-seller split that difference equally, that means that the disabled driver is able to turn his government perk into a £5,000 cash profit.

Unethical it may be (and very possibly illegal too), but it is also a fine example of how government intervention creates moral hazard and ultimately generates immorality and criminality where previously there was none. As ever with government, the intentions are all fine and dandy, but the outcomes are very different from what was intended.

No more Income Tax (at least for another year)

Back in the Middle Ages there was a terrible practice called “Serfdom” or “Villeinage” whereby peasant farmers were forced to work one or even two days a week on somebody else’s land, and were only allowed to work their own land on the remaining four days. Thus was their labour taxed to pay for the public goods that their political masters thought vital to the wellbeing of society: cathedrals, castles and wars with the French.

By comparison, our far more civilised society has found a way of taxing the labour of the common man far more subtly, by taking approximately two fifths of every pound we earn. Funnily enough, it still equates to two working days a week. It’s as though nothing has changed.

To make it entirely clear to us just how much of our labour our masters take from us for their own ends, the Adam Smith Institute has devised a jolly wheeze. Reversing the trick by which the Government moved from making us work for them directly for two days a week to taking a portion of our hourly wage, they have taken to calculating it annually.

According to ASI, if we worked solidly for the Government until our annual tax bill was paid, and only then began to work for ourselves, we would have to work on the royal demesne (or rather, at the behest of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) until 31 May. Then, from 1 June, we’d be working for ourselves, able to keep every penny we make.

So happy Tax Freedom Day everybody! From here on in, you’re working for yourselves, and not for the feudal masters.

How the “Asset rich, income poor” can afford their Land Value Tax

Julian H. has asked a perennial question about Land Value Taxation, which I will seek to answer below, namely

…how it's possible to tax something so illiquid.

For example: suppose I have owned the land my house is on since 1990 - in which time its value has increased from £100k to £1m. Yet I am a school teacher and my income during that period has merely risen from £18k to £28k per annum; enough to live off but no more. I have no money investments beyond my pension. How do I pay a LVT on the £900k that my land's value has increased by? I have not seen that £900k cash and never will do because my lazy kids are still living at home and anyway I am sentimentally attached to the house so I'll live in it until I die.

In doing so, he has highlighted the one serious obstacle that land value taxation faces, which is how it affects those with big assets but small income: fashionably called the “Asset rich, income poor”. The most obvious example of these people are pensioners – those whom we cite so often when criticising the Council Tax (which is, when all is said and done, a property tax, albeit a badly flawed one).

There are two possible solutions to the knotty problem of paying tax on an illiquid asset. One would be to permit the taxpayer to defer payment indefinitely, with a proviso that the debt must be paid when the asset is sold, including giving the tax debt priority in the estate of deceased landowners still owing land tax debts. This would result in low yields from LVT in the first few years, but after a while it would begin to settle down and average out. It would also reduce house prices, as profits would be significantly curtailed as significant portions of any profit earned could be owed in back tax.

The other solution would be to create a far more sophisticated market for turning illiquid into liquid assets. Better than the above – which is effectively a government loan scheme – would be for markets to lend money secured on the property. This would require only a small change to existing rules. One can currently withdraw equity on a property; the only difference would be for asset-rich, income-poor households that would wish to defer payment on the new loan. That problem is hardly insurmountable.

Creditors (be they state or private) could either charge a set return, as they do now (5% per annum; 0.75% over the base rate; etc.) or take a stake in the premises (perhaps without charging a fee, as they would then be sharing in the impressive return on the land values themselves). After all, if LVT was set at 1%, and fell only on the land value rather than improvements (considered to average less than two thirds of property prices), then even if one bought a house and lived in it for 30 years, never paying one’s own LVT, when one came to sell/died after 30 years one would only have ceded less than a fifth of the (value of the) property to the person or institution that had paid 30 years of LVT on your behalf.

In answer Julian’s specific example, then:

Assuming a typical property, £60,000 of Julian’s original £100,000 was the stake for the land rather than the building on it. This has grown to £600,000 over 17 years, giving Julian half a million pounds in unearned growth. Consequently, either:
a) 17% of the land (but not the buildings thereon) is owned by somebody else – government or financial institution, or
b) Julian borrowed the money at a commercial rate of interest, and currently has a financial commitment (which I can’t be bothered to calculate because it is complex) which he has no need to pay until he sells the house or dies.

Either way, Julian need not worry. If, as he says, he is “sentimentally attached to the house so [will] live in it until [he] die[s]”, he need never pay off the debt. Instead, he can die still owing the tax/debt, and his “lazy kids” can pay it off out of the enormous sum of money they make selling the family home.

Even if Julian lives for 100 years after he buys the house, his children will still get the return on the buildings (a third of the overall value - £400,000 so far according to his original example), which will still provide a nice start in life now that they have to go out there and fend for themselves.

I hope that explains how LVT might be affordable for the asset-rich, income poor. It’s a better position than they currently find themselves in when the Council Tax bill arrives. And it would help damp down the housing market, too.

A house-price crash will save the Government from finding a policy solution

I’m sure Henry George was spinning in his communally-owned grave last night (though having seen this, I wonder if he’s been spinning for some time!).

Newsnight devoted most of their programme last night to housing. (Not that you’d guess by reading the first comment on the Newsnight blog, which drips anti-Semitic bile). Gavin Estler chaired a debate between Housing Minister Yvette Cooper, a Tory shadow less aristocratic than Michael Gove, the owner of a chain of estate agents and somebody from pricedout.org. It was interspersed with a few reports.

In the first instance, just about everybody agreed that more housing was needed. The Government recognised that 220,000 new houses were needed each year, but blamed Tory councils for blocking planning permission. One commentator then noted that it had taken the Government ten years to raise house-building from 100,000 to 110,000, whereas in the 1950s the Tories managed to raise house-building from 200,000 to 300,000 in a couple of years. The lady from pricedout.org agreed that more housing was needed. Everybody agreed that there was a supply problem, but nobody explained how it was to be solved, or why we are tearing down houses in the North of England while building new ones in the South.

There followed a series of truly bizarre proposals, including the usual anti-capitalist assault on second-homers and those buying to let (in an example of economic illiteracy, Ms. pricedout argued that more supply would merely be mopped up by wealthy buy-to-let landlords and so would not benefit first time buyers, which showed a total ignorance of the most basic principle of economics). Poor hippies could no longer afford to buy houses in the bohemian paradise of Totnes, lamented one Newsnight reporter, who seemed to wilfully ignore the fact that those selling their houses to property magnates and .com millionaires were the very hippies and artists who had given the place its character, and were now happily cashing in on the very material windfall that they had enjoyed.

It’s all the fault of the money-lenders, went up a cry that would not have been out of place in twelfth century York. House prices are over inflated because people are now able to borrow vast sums of money (up to ten times their salaries!). The words “credit control” appeared on the screen. The panellists happily discussed whether there should be a cap on the amount one is allowed to lend. Apparently, it is the job of the lender to lend responsibly. I had always though that it was the job of the borrower to borrow responsibly – it is they, after all, who must meet the repayments or lose their house – but nobody spoke up for the freedom of the individual to borrow whatever sum they deem necessary (or desirable) to make whatever arrangements they see fit.

At one point the Newsnight team mentioned property taxes. Apparently, they solve the whole problem. But Middle England wouldn’t like it, so it was brushed aside with a politically expedient waive. There was only one thing for it, they concluded. A nice house price crash will sort it out; but lets hope its not too hard, added the politicians.

It is a shame that Dan Rogerson was not available, as a Lib Dem might have tried to keep the discussion about property taxes alive for just a little longer. Like the issue of road user pricing (which is a Lib Dem manifesto pledge, though we have cooled to it since two million people signed a petition objecting to it), it is the right policy and one that needs to be defended, explained and pursued.

Land is a finite resource that owes nothing to the ingenuity or effort of mankind. It has more in common with fossil fuels or spectrum band-width than labour or capital. Because it is both limited and essential (unless one is a pirate radio station), it’s value constantly rises as society grows richer: money chases more and better goods, so prices actually fall in real terms (imagine how much a brand new ZX Spectrum would be worth now – kitsch value aside); wealth outstrips population growth, so real incomes slowly rise; but land is static, so rising wealth and demand must push prices up. Land value inflation is inevitable.

The most efficient way to prevent land becoming the preserve of the wealthy few (which George argues must inevitably lead to the impoverishment of those who do not own land, as any extra wealth they produce will be taken in rent) is for the state to capture rent and distribute it among the populous. The Lib Dem proposals are rather more modest; they would tax property values at 1 per cent per annum, with a view in the long-run to taxing only land values and not the value of improvements.

The result would be to calm house price fluctuation. It would discourage hoarding; it would be costly to own land that was not in use. It also rewards improvement: a field would have the same land tax whether or not a block of flats were built on it, so the owner’s interest would be in developing his land. It would capture a proportion of the wealth (as opposed to income) that would otherwise entrench privilege in families, and would capture unearned income (that deriving just from owning a rising asset). From an economic perspective, it would have a far more benign effect than taxation of labour or capital, both of which we should encourage. And it is devilishly hard to evade.

Middle England’s objection comes primarily from the fear that it will lead to a net increase in taxation. This is – or at least, ought to be – misguided. If land value taxation were the preserve of local authorities, it could replace the hated Council Tax. If it yielded higher returns than the Council Tax, the Government should respond by reducing the grant it gives local authorities and tax labour and capital correspondingly less (that is to say, reduce income, capital gains and business taxes). This would additionally hand much more fiscal authority to councils and so promote the devolution agenda. Tax changes should be at worst neutral, but would be altogether fairer, simpler, greener, more local and more efficient. Sound familiar?

Tax, the Family and Economics

Another evening, another lecture. Tonight I listened to Professor Harold James speak about Tax, the Family and Economics: The Global Dimension, though there seemed very little about the global dimension and a lot of general theory. Nonetheless it was an interesting lecture on what is a hot topic of the day, and if you are truly desperate you can apparently watch the whole thing on 18, Doughty Street (looking out for the back of a handsome head in the front row on the right, if the lights aren’t reflecting off it too sharply).

As the title would suggest, Professor James’s concern was how government policy impacts upon family relations. “Societies that do not reproduce are bad societies” he noted, echoing many other critics who have expressed concern about the fact that most Western European countries, as well as (especially) Japan, have birth rates below the replacement rate (which is just over two children per woman). The state’s impact upon the family is important because for James the family is one of the three essential elements of society: just as we have come to recognise that markets are necessary to enable us to satisfy our desires, and public policy is necessary for us to meet essential needs, so the family serves a vital purpose.

One of the main purposes he cited was the family’s unique ability to solve the question of inter-generational transfers. Lest we get bogged down in jargon (a habit I am trying to avoid), this is the question of to what degree any generation must consider the needs of the next: can we burn all the coal or should we leave some to our children; should we sacrifice our own economic growth because of concerns about the atmosphere our grandchildren will inherit; classically, to what degree should each generation pays for its predecessors’ pensions and its successors’ education? The family is uniquely placed to address these issues. Indeed, that is their main value (from an economic point of view).

Sadly, James argues, that role is being eroded. There are three sources of this erosion. The first is attitude and culture: we have come to see families as a commodity, much as we do houses and cars. We do not expect to be saddled with them forever; gone are the days when people really did marry “until death do us part”. We may all go into marriage hoping and believing that it is forever (otherwise, what’s the point?), but in the back of every bride or groom’s mind is the knowledge that these days we do have an emergency exit. We know full well that marriage need not be for life; if we change our minds, we can. As plain speaking Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany observed, "Every man whose wife grows old has earned a younger woman."

[And every man whose wife reads his blog would like to disassociate himself from any such sentiment.]

The welfare state has also undermined the family, because it has removed its main (economic) raison d’être. No longer do we need families to provide for our old age; this is provided by the state. For perhaps the first time in human history, one need not breed to ensure a comfortable dotage; the state will pick up the cost, and cheap immigrant labour will provide the daycare. This has skewed the cost-benefit analysis that (perhaps subconsciously) goes into the decision to reproduce. It can be no coincidence that it is the prosperous countries that see declining birth-rates, while the poor still need to produce large numbers of offspring to ensure that they will be looked after in the future. With (some of) the benefits removed, the opportunity cost appears greater. In (at least the back of) the minds of people in the developed world, the question has become whether one spends £166,000 on raising a child or whether more satisfaction would be achieve by buying a holiday villa near Paphos.

The third issue facing married couples is taxation. Fiscal influences shape decisions (in some cases, that is the point). Our tax system, for perfectly laudable reasons, emphasises helping the poorest and most needy. As a result, it tends to tax working couples hard while rewarding unemployed singles (especially parents). This has been exacerbated by tax credits, which see people paying very high marginal rates of tax if they return to work (because income tax is compounded by loss of benefits which between them erode most of the gain of earning extra money).

High taxes generally generate a rent-seeking and lobbying culture: a lot of time and effort is expended on trying to shape the system and exploit it as much as possible. What is more, because of the unintended consequences that all taxation creates, efforts are made to compensate for these effects that in turn make the system ever more Byzantine. The simplest way of reducing the harm taxes do is to simplify them and minimise them, but that is not government’s way. Instead it seeks to create new exemptions and benefits and tinker and re-jig the system until it is painfully complicated, while each new clause and every new tax does further harm.

It is interesting to see both how this has encouraged the legislation of gay marriage and what further impact this has had. One of the arguments for creating civil unions was to give homosexual couples the tax benefits as heterosexual couples (for example, giving them exemptions from inheritance tax when one partner dies and leaves wealth to the other). This has in turn created new demands from other groups that lived together – for example siblings, non-sexual partners, parents and children – that wish also to enjoy the same tax benefits. The system becomes ever more complicated.

Professor James’s argued that taxes should not be used to shape society. He did not (as I had expected) argue that taxes should be adjusted to support marriage or the family; merely that elements that discriminate against or penalise marriage or the family should be eliminated. Instead, tax policy should aim to be neutral as to marital and family status. By eliminating the imbalances that already skew these decisions, it would remove barriers that currently exist to marriage, co-habitation, responsible parenting and so forth. But it would not create the unintended consequences that follow from efforts to tinker with the system for the purposes of social engineering.

What Professor James did not recommend, though it was implied by his lecture and is what one would have expected from Politeia (which hosted the event), was that the easiest way to reduce the negative impact of complex taxation is to reduce and simplify the it. I wholeheartedly agree that taxation needs to be applied fairly and should not be used as a means of shaping society in the government’s image.

However, just as David B. Smith has noted that efficiency savings are almost impossible unless rates are reduced, so in the same way it seems likely that complexity is a result of high government taxation and spending, which leads to lobbying, rent-seeking and a belief that governments need to tinker to compensate for problems that are, at the end of the day, of their own making. Lower and simpler taxes would rectify these problems, and at the same time free individuals to spend their own money to meet their needs as they see fit. That alone would do more to help the family than any benefit or tax break.

Corporation Tax and Payroll Tax: the stealthiest taxes of them all

Imagine, if you will, a society made up of two types of citizen: the taxpayers and the voters. Taxpayers cannot vote, and voters do not pay tax. What will the result be? It seems fairly obvious that voters will vote for high taxes to pay for public services from which they will benefit at the expense of the taxpayers. Such a society would quickly fall apart, as the taxpayers agitated for more representation and refused to pay “taxation without representation”

Such a society would seem anathema to us, nowadays. Which is surprising, because we live in such a society. In one respect, devolution has created such a situation: Scottish voters choose representatives that will implement policies – say, free care for the elderly – that will be paid for in part by non-Scottish British taxpayers who have no control over the decision. This is a dangerous situation that is undoubtedly contributing to the loss of faith in the Union among English voters.

However, there is an older and more fundamental form of this: the taxation of companies. Companies do not have a vote, and yet they are taxed on their income, and required to pay additional taxes when employing staff. This seems a rather clear example of “taxation without representation” – it is true that the owners have votes, but they only have as many votes (one each) as non-owners, and consequently are being taxed in a manner additional to that of their non-company-owning fellow voters. If there was a tax on people over 2m in height, we would consider this arbitrary and unfair. A tax on business-ownership is ignored.

To be clear, it is not as if the income that owners derive from their investments is not taxed. Share dividends are subject to income tax at the same rate as salaries. However, when companies turn a profit they have to pay Corporation Tax before paying dividends, which are then subject to Income Tax. This double taxation can only be justified by treating the company as a legal entity distinct from its owners – it is taxed in its own right. But this legal status does not stretch to being permitted to vote.

Socialist economists and policy makers would probably argue that it is only reasonable to tax businesses, as they are the products of capital and that to exempt capital from taxation when the other “factors of production” (land and labour)
are taxed would represent an unfair tax exemption for rich investors (and poor investors, but socialists tend to ignore them!). This is certainly true, and it is not my intention here to suggest that capital should not be taxed. However, there is no justification for taxing it twice: if capital or profits are taxed when earned, they should not be re-taxed when they are paid out. This “double taxation” (distinct from the double taxation that arises when people and capital operate in different jurisdictions) is unfair and ultimately should be ended.

Ironically, those who support business taxes (and here I add in payroll taxes, such as employers’ National Insurance contributions) are actually harming UK consumers more than UK business. After all, the inevitable consequence of business taxes is that they will drive up prices. If tomorrow a Chancellor of the Exchequer announced a 5 per cent rise in corporation taxes, it is not going to result in Tesco generating commensurately less profits next year. The board may take the decision to absorb part of the cost of the additional taxes as a public relations stunt, but ultimately they are going to hand the extra costs down to customers. The same is true of payroll taxes.

The real danger in this is that the tax is therefore invisible. Consumers are aware of the 17.5 per cent VAT they pay on most goods, and most receipts even explicitly state the amount of VAT paid – next time you are looking at you wage slip in despair and your eye flicks enviously over the part that says how much tax you’ve paid, remember also to get those old receipts out of your wallet and factor in the bit at the bottom. This is only (or rather, less than) half the story, however, as the 82.5 per cent of your bill that isn’t VAT includes other business taxes, without which your supplier would be able to (and due to competition would be obliged to) charge lower prices.

Thus Corporation and Payroll Taxes are the ultimate stealth tax: the Chancellor sells them to us on the grounds that they are levied on businesses, and so we are led to believe that they are free money – taken from “someone else”, a faceless organisation with no vote; in fact, they are taken from us every time we open our wallets and purses. Our Income Tax bill confronts us regularly; our VAT bill every time we spend; but taxes on business slip in under the radar, taking money for the state disguised as money for the supplier.

This is ultimately damaging, as visible taxes have more obvious impact and so teach us to exercise more fiscal discipline. If our receipts also told us how much Corporation Tax we were paying, and if we received larger gross salaries but paid higher National Insurance (i.e. the employer contribution was instead factored into our salaries and personal contribution) we would have a more honest view of how much tax we paid. While we were at it, it would be nice if there were a means of quantifying the number of jobs foregone because payroll taxes made marginal employment (i.e. jobs which are only barely going to generate more revenue than they cost – usually the lowest paid jobs) unviable, thus driving up unemployment for the poorest and least skilled. Only then would we have an honest idea of the costs and effects of the policies our leaders are perusing, and for which many of us have voted.

BBC readers think Brown's budget is a disaster

As regular readers (or should that be "reader"!) will know, I am the first to point out that the BBC does not represent the views of the public, and its viewers/listeners/readers are not an acurate cross-section of the populous.

However, after 3697 votes cast in a BBC poll on the budget, over 57% believe the budget has not been good for them, while barely 20% think that they have benefited. Over at Have Your Say, the commentators are furious!

The British people are clearly more perceptive than than the cheering Labour backbenches. Or is it simply that Gordon Brown is unlikely to offer them a job (or even make it easy for them to find one!).

Brown’s “sleight of hand” budget hurts the poor as well as the rich

It came as no surprise that Gordon Brown delivered a few headline-grabbing surprises in his last budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer. By far and away the most eye-catching (though not unpredicted) measure was the grand finale, the cut in the basic rate of income tax from 22p to 20p in the pound. It seems like the tax cut that Middle England has been waiting for, but in truth it is what Menzies Campbell called a “sleight of hand”, giving with one hand while taking away with the other.

Tax measures are never equal, however – there are always winners and losers – and this one appears to squeeze those on low incomes the hardest.

Without having the leisure to browse the Red Book, a brief analysis of the measures looks like this:

• The 10p lowest rate of income tax is abolished, applying the basic rate from the very beginning
• The basic rate is cut to 20p
• The upper rate allowance is set at £43,000 from 2008
• National Insurance is aligned with income tax
• Tax credits are increased

The effect of the first two measures is to take more income tax from the roughly £2,000 one earns after one’s personal allowance is used up, but less from the next £30,000 (or £35,000 from 2008). So an extra 10% of £2,000 but a saving of 2% on £35,000, which means that if you are earning around £40,000 you will pay slightly less income tax, but if you are earning just £10,000 you will pay a lot more.

Ed Balls, the Chancellor’s closes ally, admitted that it was “not a very big tax cut”. It was worse than that, however. The poor are squeezed to pay for an income tax cut for the rich. But the National Insurance changes undermine what benefit higher earners see. By applying the 11p rate of National Insurance on earnings up to £43,000, instead of £35,000, an extra 10% of that last £8,000 is taxed, undermining much of the gain from the income tax cut outlined above.

Thus those earning very little will end up paying more tax, as will those earning a goodly sum. Only those in the very middle appear to gain (though it is interesting to note that other commentators seem to have interpreted this differently, so I would welcome an explanation as to why others seem to think that it is those earning in the twenty thousands who will suffer most).

The budget raises taxes on low-income earners and so presumably raises the barriers to people leaving benefits and returning to work. Brown’s solution is to fall back on his tried-and-tested-and-frankly-failed Tax Credits. He promises to increase the amount of tax credits, but the tax credit system is already costing £16bn and requiring 8,000 civil servants to administer. Yet last year half of the awards were wrong. Furthermore, too many of the poorest do not even claim the benefits, so complicated and obscure are they.

In other budget news, Brown has raised taxes on small businesses while alleviating them on bigger firms. The latter a welcome measure if we are to compete with low-tax emerging economies, but to increase taxes on struggling small enterprises if frankly perverse and pernicious.

Public spending will remain at record highs of 42% – not far off a level where the state takes every other pound we generate to distribute in on our behalf – yet there has been precious little to show for it.

The environmental taxation remains both parlous and interventionist: while the overall level remains lower than under the Conservatives, the measures introduced are meddling (levied specifically at Tory-voting car owners, for example) rather than economically (which is not to say fiscally) neutral (taxing all carbon and so allowing people to decide how to cut back – the policy I have advocated).

Despite the bluster of the Chancellor and the raucous support of his party, this budget is a disappointment. The tax code remains more complex than anywhere but in India as Brown intervenes and meddles in ways that distort the economy and make work for civil servants. It may serve his personal goal of looking good as he moves next door to No. 10, Downing Street, but it does little to address the real problems in Britain: excessive and ineffective public spending, taxes (not just headline rates but overall burdens) that are too high, an over-regulated economy and an underclass of poor people increasingly struggling to provide for themselves and their loved ones.

As an exercise in Public Choice Theory it is exemplary: the politician serves his own interests rather than those of the nation. As an economic plan for Britain’s future it is a sham.

Our parents have mortgaged our future

It’s a good job my father doesn’t read my blog, because I’m about to point the finger of blame firmly at his and his parent’s generation.

Over Christmas I read Living with Leviathan: Public Spending, Taxes and Economic Performance, by David B. Smith, Visiting Professor in Business and Economic Forecasting at the University of Derby and a visiting lecturer at the Cardiff University Business School.

The book is a long and detailed investigation of the pernicious effects of high levels of taxation and public spending on the economy. There are many findings and quite a few prescriptions, some of which even the author recognises are not politically viable.

However, the one bit that sticks out is the results of a piece of econometric modelling in which he estimates that “If government spending, as a proportion of national income, had been held at the level experienced in 1960, econometric evidence suggests that output in the UK would, today, be nearly twice as high as current levels. Total public expenditure would then be higher, albeit as a lower proportion of a much bigger national output.”

This is a startling finding for two reasons. Firstly, the suggestion that the policies of successive UK governments have cost us £1 trillion of GDP per annum defies adjectives. Indeed, I struggle to imagine what this would mean for UK standards of living today. Suffice to say that we would be half as rich again as citizens of the United States, and somewhat higher than Dubai. David B. Smith notes that we could spend far more on public services and still have lower taxes as a result. I might go further and suggest that most, if not almost all, of us would be able to afford to buy private healthcare and education of higher quality than our present, tax-funded system can afford, and still have more left over for fun and frolics.

The second startling fact here is that this lafferesque story of counter-factual economic history does not require us to have foregone our welfare state. By 1960 the welfare state was over a decade old, public expenditure was a third of GDP and our hospitals and schools were in rude health. So the argument often deployed by people who oppose supply-side measures that those proposing them would condemn the poor to ignorance and disease simply does not hold up.

"What's the bleeding time?"

"Ten past ten, sir!"

Sadly, as is so often the way with bureaucracies, costs began to escalate. In the 1960s and 1970s welfare expenditure ballooned until by 1980 it reached nearly half of national output, and despite the “small state” rhetoric of the Thatcher/Major years, it stuck well over 40 per cent. Under Gordon Brown it has risen again to over 45 per cent and shows every sign of rising further.

This massively bloated welfare system has not created schools or hospitals significantly better than were enjoyed in the 1950s. Healthcare is of course better – it is not so clear that the same can be said of schools – but this is as a result of technological advancement and the increased wealth our nation has enjoyed. Indeed, this latter factor would have been far higher had our parents and grandparents show a little more restraint.

Voters since the 1960s have cost those leaving home today half the potential wealth they might have enjoyed, with the higher living standards that would have resulted. We would all be better off had they shown more prudence. It is not too late to learn that lesson and to adopt a growth plan for future generations.

Economics 101: The difference between “Fiscal Drag” and “Bracket Creep”

Gordon Brown is a tricky soul, isn’t he?

He maintains that he has been raising the income tax brackets in line with inflation – in fact, that this has been the case since 1977. Yet somehow over a million more people are paying higher rate income tax than when he became Chancellor. How has he managed to square both?

The key is in the difference between Bracket Creep and Fiscal Drag (often called Real Fiscal Drag, with the clue being in the “Real”). Bracket Creep is the effect of inflation on taxpayers: if tax thresholds stay the same, but inflation raises wages, people are carried into higher tax brackets even if they are earning the same real income (because inflation affects outgoings as well as incomes).

Real Fiscal Drag is something different. Inflation may be harmful, but as the years pass we would all hope that our wages would rise because we ultimately expect to become richer. If this simply referred to individuals getting richer as they get older then this may not be a concern – richer people pay more tax in our progressive system, and age is no defence.

But we do not simply expect to get richer as individuals. We expect to get richer as a society; I expect an average 34 year old to have a far higher real income in 2020 than the average 34 year old now. For this to be the case – and it generally is, if one does not live in a blighted country such as Zimbabwe or Venezuela – incomes must rise faster than prices and so faster than inflation as a whole.

This is where Real Fiscal Drag kicks in. Because our real incomes are rising, more of us will end up paying higher rates of income tax even if the tax thresholds are raised in line with price inflation.

So the Chancellor can claim to be raising tax thresholds in line with inflation while using the growing prosperity of society to draw ever more people into higher rates of taxation. In a parody of a David Cameron expression, Brown expects the share the proceeds of our growth with us by taking ever larger portions of our increasing wealth.

I’m not generally a fan of the phrase “Stealth taxes” but Gordon Brown’s ability to increase by 56 per cent the number of people burdened with marginal taxes of 40 per cent is frankly underhanded.

Who knows what tricks he’ll pull once he’s moved next door!

The end of the free society?

I came across some disturbing statistics over the weekend. Apparently, less than half of the eligible voters in the UK work in the private sector. The rest are either state employees or on state benefits.

This is important because a free society requires the citizens to keep their government in check. It is easy for those who do not rely on welfare and who are not paid a salary by the government to insist that their rulers take a long term view of their needs, look to the health of the economy and not just the wealth of the public finances, and rule in the interests of the nation and not simply serve a host of special interests. But a client nation where the citizens rely on receiving money from the state cannot exercise the same restraining hand.

Of the 44 million on the electoral register, only 20 million are either employed in the private sector or are self-employed. Over a third as many (7.1 million) are employed by government, and their interests lie in pushing up public sector salaries and benefits at the expense of taxpayers; we have already seen the effect of this in the government’s spineless and unprincipled decision not to properly reform the civil service pension scheme. The rest are made up of 11.8 million pensioners, 2.7 million on incapacity benefit and 3.2 million on various other benefits, many of whom pay very little direct taxes and yet all of whom have a vested interest in seeing public spending – and consequently direct taxes – rise.

Benjamin Franklin described democracy as “two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” In this case, the welfare dependent and those on the government payroll now outnumber those whose productivity must ultimately pay the government’s bill. Yesterday I wrote that “It may seem at present that intervention and the large state dominates, but the tide will turn. The voters, be they the over-taxed middle class or working class playthings of bureaucracy, want freedom.” However, if over half the voters are dependent on the government’s ability to squeeze money out of the remaining less-than-half, that is not the case.

Ultimately, freedom relies on autonomous individuals agreeing to pass over a proportion of their wealth to the public good. This is not the case if a predatory government can use the votes of its clients to extract ever more from a minority of independent wealth producers. The results will not only be spiralling taxes and unemployment and a generally worsening economy, which we are already seeing. It will be to draw ever more people into government control, ever expanding its power until we are all its subjects.

Three-out-of-three is bad

Before Christmas I reported that the Labour Government has managed to increase both taxes and unemployment. In my enthusiasm for the festive fun, I overlooked a third painful statistic: inflation, too is rising.

That taxes and unemployment were rising simultaneously should come as no surprise, as high income and corporate taxes squeeze entrepreneurs and businesses, while high employment taxes (National Insurance to my British audience) raise the price of labour and make expansion unprofitable or shift the balance in favour of capital (i.e. it is cheaper to mechanise than to employ).

In the dark and dismal past, however, it was generally held that unemployment and inflation were opposing sides of a great balance. Between the 1940s and 1970s economists – inspired by J M Keynes – convinced governments that unemployment could be countered by inflationary policies (which surreptitiously reduce real earnings and so free up capital to employ extra workers). This was a flawed thesis, as demonstrated by Nobel economics laureates such as Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek, who persuasively argued that policies aimed at full employment were both misguided and counter-productive.

Even more flawed, perhaps, was the resulting myth that inflation and unemployment were a trade-off. In theory, unemployment could be reduced only by inflationary policies, while the eventual need to rein in inflation would cause unemployment. It did not, however, follow that the two were in balance. In fact it is possible to have both rising unemployment and rising inflation. Our current Labour government is in the process of proving it.

Britain’s consumer-price inflation rate in November was 2.7 per cent, the highest rate since records began and also the highest rate since Labour took office. Combined with the rise in unemployment to 5.6 per cent from 4.7 per cent a year ago, a budget deficit of 3 per cent, further expected tax rises and GDP that is predicted to fall in 2007 and this is a pretty miserable picture of Labour economic failure.

Another old Labour story: taxes are rising

Yesterday I reported that unemployment was rising under Labour. Today, it’s the turn of income taxes. Hard working taxpayers are being squeezed as never before.

Taxes on average incomes are at their highest since records began in 1987. The Office of National Statistics reports that taxes on incomes are now 23.6 per cent of wages and salaries.

This must be borne in perspective; taxes on average incomes have hovered between 20 and 23 per cent throughout the two decades in which they have been measured. But taxes are creeping up, with no sign now that in the near future they will be reigned in.

The squeeze is especially painful for two reasons. Firstly, it is outpacing rises in wages: taxes rose by 6.7% compared to wage rises of 4.6%. Secondly, this comes as other inescapable costs are also rising: interest rates are rising; inflation is rising; utility bills are rising. Consumers are under intense strain. This year’s Christmas cheer is increasingly being funded by savings rather than income, which can only be a short-term solution.

2007 is likely to be a very happy new year for Gordon Brown as he finally realises his lifetime ambition and moves into Number 10. In doing so, he will leave behind a Treasury in a parlous state. Whomever he makes his Chancellor (and my bet is on Alistair Darling) will inherit a poisoned chalice; inflation, unemployment and taxes are all rising as Brown’s public sector profligacy bites home. A happy new year for Mr. Brown, perhaps, but for the rest of us, the long hangover is coming.

Labour isn't working

It’s an old story, but it appears that they’re remaking it again. No, it’s not the BBC dramatisation of Dracula. It’s rising unemployment.

Youth unemployment is particularly troubling. In November this year 11,200 young people had been claiming benefits for more than a year. Youth unemployment is now worse than it was when Labour came to power. Figures from the Office of National Statistics are instructive:

1997 2006 Change
16 – 24 year olds unemployed 665,000 702,000 + 37,000
16 – 24 unemployment rate 14.4% 14.5% + 0.1%
16 – 24 unemployment rate – London 22.5% 42.9% + 20.4%


Labour MPs are rushing to blame the usual suspects – immigrants. With simple but flawed logic they suggest that hundreds of thousands of East Europeans have flooded in and taken jobs that might otherwise be filled by British workers. However, if this were the case, why was it that two thirds of a million 16 – 24 year olds were unemployed before the East Europeans arrived? How has Britain managed to absorb hundreds of thousands of East European workers when unemployment has only risen by tens of thousands?

This scapegoating of hard working, tax paying immigrants is a sordid attempt to shift attention from the real culprits: the Labour government. Youth unemployment is on the rise because Labour has strangled business with masses of extra regulation and rising taxation. It is rising because our schools are still failing to teach basic skills to far too many of our children; a quarter are functionally illiterate, innumerate and leave school at 16 with no qualifications worth speaking of. And it is rising because the government’s New Deal is a disaster, costing more and proving less effective than similar schemes in comparable countries, while massaging the jobless statistics by placing young people in jobs that last less than 13 weeks, so that returning jobless do not appear to be long-term unemployed.

In 1997 Gordon Brown described the levels of youth unemployment that Labour inherited from the Conservatives as “sickening”, a “human tragedy”, “an economic disaster”. After nine years of his chancellorship, it is now worse. It is an old Labour story, and each time we read it we feel the same despair. Labour isn’t working.

Brown’s retrospective taxes are affront to the rule of law

I’ve been stung!

I’d better declare my interest now, as I believe one should be open about one’s interests. A few weeks ago my wife and I bought two airline tickets to Cape Town. Gordon Brown has since announced that people like me – airline passengers who bought their tickets before this month’s pre-budget report – will be taxed. This gives us no option to change our behaviour to avoid the tax – unless we sacrifice the £450 ticket to avoid the £20 fee – so not only is it unfair and arbitrary, it will not in any way reduce carbon emissions.

The Times reports that “Airline passengers face long delays at airports from February because check-in staff will be required to collect the increase in departure tax announced last week. More than seven million people had already booked flights before the announcement in the Pre-Budget Report that Air Passenger Duty will double from February 1. Those passengers will have to pay the extra tax when they check in for their flights.”

This is a blatant violation of the legal principle that laws must be prospective. By applying this new tax ex post facto to airline tickets bought before the pre-budget report, it has denied purchasers to ability to make informed decisions knowing in advance how the Government would tax their activity. Those who have bought airline tickets in all innocence prior to the pre-budget report are now landed with extra fees that they could not predict – indeed, that they had every reason to assume would not apply, as ex post facto taxation violates the principle of the rule of law.

It is an excellent example both of the Chancellor’s lack of principle and of his mendaciousness. The alleged justification for this tax hike is to reduce pollution caused by rising air travel. But those who bought their ticket prior to the pre-budget report could not predict the new tax and so it can have had no impact upon their decision. Thus, in its retrospective application, it is merely another arbitrary expropriation of private wealth without justification on either environmental grounds or on the principle that taxes are applied generally.

Applying this new tax retrospectively is another example of the Chancellor’s arbitrary seizure of private wealth.It is an entirely unprincipled effort to make a seemingly randomly selected group of citizens help finance his public spending profligacy. That I am one of those caught in his web is my bad luck. I hope those more fortunate than I will nonetheless share my disgust.