Tag Archives: taxes

We should not oppose some stealth taxes

The autumn statement on 17th November will probably provide reassurance for the markets, but bad news in other respects.  We don’t yet know how the unpleasant ‘medicine’ will be mixed, but it will include higher taxes (including stealth tax rises through long term freezes to personal allowances), cuts to services and to government investment, and real terms cuts to some welfare payments.

Elements of our response to the forthcoming statement are easy.  1 The Tories got us into this mess through the Truss shambles, through Brexit, and through the lack of policies to build a decent economy over many years of poor stewardship.  2 We don’t want cuts to services and to welfare.  3 We should increase levies on companies which have happened to have benefitted from the war in Ukraine.  But when it comes to any tax rises that may be proposed in the statement, we need to think carefully.  We need to balance the short term expediency of pointing out everything the government is doing which could be unpopular, against longer term considerations of how to deliver a better society.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 26 Comments

Higher-rate tax and Danny Alexander’s time-limited dead body

This was the couldn’t-be-clearer headline in the Mirror today, atop an interview with Lib Dem chief secretary to the treasury Danny Alexander:

danny alexander mirror headline

Defiant Danny Alexander today opened up a fresh rift within the Coalition Government by vowing to block Tory plans for yet another tax cut for the rich. … His comments will enrage Conservative MPs who are pushing to slash the rate from 45p ahead of next year’s General Election. It comes just days after David Cameron refused, on three occasions, to rule out cutting tax. But

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LibLink: Jonathan Portes on wealth taxes & ensuring the ‘rich’ pay their fair share

Jonathan Portes, director of NIESR and former senior Treasury official, is not a Lib Dem — he recently contributed to LibDemVoice to critique the Coalition’s economic policy — but he is addicted to robust evidence. And the recent spate of right-wing commentators rubbishing the Lib Dems’ call for increased wealth taxes to help tackle the current economic crisis has roused his ire:

The Liberal Democrats call for a “mansion tax” (that is, a higher rate of council tax for the most expensive properties), possibly supplemented by some form of wealth tax seems to have provoked a peculiarly illogical misuse of

Posted in LibLink | Also tagged , , , and | 6 Comments

The Tories’ and Labour’s collective tax omnishambles

Labour is against reducing the 50p top-rate tax to 45p for those earning more than £150,000. What could be clearer? As it happens, quite a lot could be clearer.

First, the omnishambles…

Given how widely predicted George Osborne’s decision to reduce the top-rate was you would have thought Labour would have anticipated it and worked out their line. They failed to — as Mark Pack noted here, Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna contradicted himself within 24 hours, while Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls declined to declare his hand.

When Labour did …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , and | 3 Comments
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