Ealing Council is advertising for a new Media Officer paying £144.00 – £148.34 per hour. At least that’s what the advert says. Having checked with the council, I can confirm the figures quoted are the daily rate, and not the hourly rate.  The council told me they have informed the recruitment agency of the error, however it has not been rectified. No wonder there are so many expressions of interest!  Continue Reading

Commentators are continuing to respond to the 2020 Tax Commission and one of the questions raised is whether the single rate of Income Tax we have proposed is really fair. There would be a big cut in the real Basic Rate, so low and middle income earners would be left with more money in their pockets, but it is a single rate rather than Basic, Higher and Additional Rate bands as we have now.

It is easy to get tangled up in the theory here, and we talk about a number of philosophical perspectives in the report, but I think the basic intuition is simple: if you earn twice as much, you should pay twice as much; if you earn ten times as much, you should pay ten times as much. What is so unfair about that? Continue Reading

It’s time to be bold, argues John O’Connell: tear up our tax system and start again.

George Osborne called our tax system a “spaghetti bowl” in 2010. He had a point. We have one of the world’s longest tax codes at over 11,500 pages, and this has real consequences for families and businesses in the UK. If someone sat down to design a tax system from scratch, they wouldn’t come up with the one we have now. It exists because of years of tweaking at the edges to raise more revenue from more and more people, and offering breaks to preferred industries.

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Very successful Action Day in Cardiff on Saturday May 19^th. TPA supporters gathered in Queen Street opposite Cardiff Castle and helped voice the concerns of local shopkeepers by raising a petition against the 5p plastic bag tax introduced by the Welsh Assembly six months ago. Lee Canning, Welsh grassroots co-ordinator spoke to camera teams from both ITV and the BBC, explaining how the bag tax is causing problems for small businessmen and traders.

‘No-one wants to see plastic bags littering the streets of Wales,’ Lee told ITV, ‘but this is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It adds an unacceptable burden on small businesses that are forced to comply with the regulation or risk a hefty fine. The Welsh Government should be encouraging families to reduce their reliance on bags, not punishing them when they don’t.’ Continue Reading

Some of the criticisms of the 2020 Tax Commission have argued that we are wrong to claim that lower taxes and spending are associated with higher growth. In particular, Nick Pearce – Director of the IPPR – argues that “the empirical evidence doesn’t support” that view. Unfortunately he hasn’t seen fit to address the mountains of evidence that we included in the report looking at exactly that issue. In just one table in the report we included eighteen reputable studies that show a negative effect of higher taxes or spending on the level or growth of income. That’s a lot of empirical evidence.

Nick Pearce fudges the point about the Scandinavian economies by citing tax revenue as a share of national income when, for a whole load of reasons, spending is a much more reliable variable in this instance. Lower taxes can produce better than expected tax revenues, after all, and public sector deficits can also crowd out private investment. The overall tax burden is very important in some ways, but he is just using it to play down a genuine and substantial cut in the total burden on the private economy in this case. Continue Reading