Cutting business rates is a terrible idea - but, sigh, politics

One more little example of why politics is such a terrible way to run the economy. We’re in an election campaign, two candidates, the electorate is the membership list of the Conservative Party. So, we get promises and pledges:

Rishi Sunak on Tuesday night vowed to slash business rates this autumn as he warned Liz Truss’s economic plans would see the Tories get “absolutely hammered” at the next election.

The former chancellor said that supporting high streets would be “top of my mind” when asked by a Conservative member whether he would cut taxes on struggling shops.

He committed to extending the current 50 per cent reduction in his first Budget as Prime Minister, saying that small retailers are the “beating hearts of all our communities”.

That’s a terrible idea even as it might indeed aid in winning that election.

For business rates are a repeated tax on real property values - or, in other language, as close to the UK tax system gets as a land value tax. This is the least bad form of taxation out there so reducing it - to presumably tax more elsewhere - is a terrible idea.

It’s also not paid by retailers but by landlords. Yes, we do know this, no, there is no argument about it. Business rates are incident upon landlords of shops, not shopkeepers or retailers.

So, why would we want to reduce the taxation of landlords and shift that taxation burden to someone else? The answer being we don’t but politics might well mean we do it anyway.

Sadly there’s not really any other way than politics of doing this running a country thing. But it does need to be acknowledged that it can lead to very bad policy.