Well, isn't this an early Christmas present?
We here at the ASI have been arguing for many years now that the most absurd part of our income tax system is that people working part time on the minimum wage are inside the income tax system. We've been arguing it so loudly that something is about to happen:
None of the four main UK parties are proposing a tax cut package that would predominantly benefit low earners, the Resolution Foundation thinktank said on Monday.A report analysing the impact of the main tax cuts being proposed by the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the UK Independence party (Ukip) said they would not benefit nearly 5m low-paid employees who do not pay income tax.
Although it found the Labour and Lib Dem proposals were less regressive than the Conservative and Ukip ones, it said that the poorest 50% of households would only get a quarter of the overall benefits even under the fairer plans. The foundation said a more progressive approach would be to raise the national insurance threshold and to lift the work allowance within universal credit. Even though the government is running a deficit of nearly £100bn, all the main parties will be proposing tax cuts in their election manifestoes.
The Conservaties and the Lib Dems both want to raise the basic rate income tax threshold to £12,500. The Conservatives also want to lift the higher rate threshold to £50,000. Labour wants to introduce a 10p tax band. And Ukip wants to raise the basic rate threshold to £13,500, and to introduce a new 35p tax band for those earning between £47,000 and £61,000.
Three of those four proposals to raise that personal allowance come from us here. No, not directly (in one case, yes directly) necessarily but we can point to the Lib Dem we convinced and the path of the proposal through that party. And of course the Tories are just following on. Hurrah! etc.
That the idea, that if we want the working poor to have more money we should simply stop taxing them so much, has caught on is lovely. That it annoys the Resolution Foundation so much is just icing on the cake.
However, they do make one good point:
Kelly also said it would be fairer to prioritise raising the national insurance threshold, because this would benefit the 1.2m people who earn enough to pay national insurance but not enough to pay income tax (for which the threshold is higher).
Yep, raise that NI limit (including the employers' part) to again that full time, full year, minimum wage. Sure, it would be "expensive" if you take that horribly statist attitude that all money really belongs to the State and thus that not taxing it off people is a cost. But out here in the real world most people do get the basic idea. If there is some minimum amount that it is righteous and just (an idea we're not sure about ourselves) that the State insists people are paid then it is equally righteous and just that the State doesn't dip its fingers into those wallets getting that righteous and just minimum amount.
Or, as we've been saying for these long years now. If you want the working poor to have more money then stop taxing them so bloody much.
Another reason why Keynesian economics doesn't work
Let us imagine that this Keynesian idea that government should spend more money in a recession stands. Not that we'd want to give in to the case in general, but let us assume it for the moment. Why might it still not be a good idea to depend upon this tactic? As Larry Elliot explains:
The second drawback is that the investment – even assuming it happens – will take time to arrive. Every EU country has sent in a list of pet projects and these will have to be assessed by a panel of experts before a final list can be drawn up. This is a recipe for bureaucratic delay and the customary horse-trading as each country demands its share of the action. It is unlikely work will begin on a single project until 2016, when what Europe needs is an immediate boost to demand.That could come in three ways. It could come from a more meaningful push from the centre, perhaps through the European Investment Bank. It could come from nation states if they were given more budgetary leeway by Brussels to run bigger deficits until growth has returned. And it could come from the European Central Bank through a quantitative easing process. The latter is by far the most likely and will dwarf in size what the commission has just announced.
Government, most especially at the EU level, is simply such a lumbering and inefficient giant that it's not possible for it to get such fiscal stimulus moving in the required timescale. Very much like the American experience of insisting that there were all sorts of "shovel ready" projects out there, then finding that government rules mean that nothing is ever shovel ready. There's always a year or more of paperwork to fill out before anything can be done.
With us still accepting the basic premise, that the deficit should widen, that there should be a greater gap between tax revenues and government expenditure in a recession, perhaps we should be looking for something that acts near immediately instead of increased spending? Like, say, an automatic reduction in national insurance payments in a recession? Like, umm, Keynes himself said would be a good idea?
The problem with Pigou Taxes
As regular readers will know (often to their great annoyance) I am a great supporter of Pigou Taxes to deal with externalities: most especially a carbon tax to deal with climate change. More generally around here at the ASI we're all agreed that they're a very useful tool if not quite the perfect one stop solution economists sometimes portray them as. the problem being, well, it's the problem with so many things actually: politics. As an example, here's the latest little populist campaign being floated:
More than 30 MPs of all parties are backing a motion to stop charging Air Passenger Duty on flights for children who are between the ages of two and 11.
They say that families with school-age children already pay a premium for having to travel in the school holidays, and should not have to pay extra punitive taxes.
It's true that APD is set at too high a level which is one problem. The existence of an externality (in this case, emissions from flying) does not mean that that activity should be taxed at some punitive rate. It means that there is a correct level of taxation to apply to it. And it was several rises in APD ago that it was at that correct (Stern Review derived, $80 per tonne CO2-e) level.
So that's the first problem with a Pigou Tax. Give a politician an excuse to tax and he'll over-tax.
But the second problem is illustrated neatly by this current campaign. Assuming that emissions are a problem are those made by children flying any less damaging than those made by adults doing so? Not for any reason that we can see, no. Therefore there shouldn't be an exemption. But it's all too easy for a politician in the run up to an election to miss the point and purpose of such taxation and promise sweeties to the electors.
Politics really is a problem with Pigou Taxes.
However, this doesn't mean that they're contra-indicated, only that we've got to be both careful and precise with them. After all, all other taxes are subject to exactly the same political interference. But providing that we've identified an externality accurately we're at least doing some good with a Pigou Tax: which is more than can be said about taxes upon capital, corporations, incomes or general consumption. And yes, we do need to get the revenue from somewhere.
The problem with wealth taxes is that they don't actually work very well
The bit of that recent Piketty magnum opus that had economists scratching their heads was his demand for a wealth tax. For it's a standard commonplace within the subject that you really don't want to tax capital. Doing so makes the future a great deal poorer than it could be. Just like that old windows tax made the future a lot darker than it needed to be. There's an opportunity to explain why in some numbers being attributed to the likely effect of Red Ed's mansion tax:
Mansion tax could wipe an average of 5pc off homes worth more than £2m should Labour win the next general election and make the proposals a reality.The plans touted by the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, could mean a 10pc drop for properties valued at £10m or more, and an 8pc fall for homes valued above £5m according to a new report from Savills.
The property group has also estimated a 6pc decline for those homes worth more than £3m.
People who own homes with a price tag above the £2m threshold could see their property value fall 4pc following Mr Balls' announcement that they will face a monthly levy of £250, a sum which gets progressively larger for more expensive properties.
£250 a month on a £2 million property is 0.15%. This drops the capital value of the asset under discussion by 5% or so. But the sort of wealth tax being demanded by Piketty is 1-2% annually, ten times larger than this tax. Now no, straight line predictions aren't all that good, there's changes in elasticity to consider, but it would be reasonable enough to think that a ten times the tax would have ten times the effect as a first stab at a guess.
So, in Piketty's desired world we'll be taxing wealth, or capital (they're rather the same thing) at 1.5% a year and thus the value of that capital, those bonds, stock and shares, that are being taxed will fall 50%. And that's why wealth taxes don't work very well. For consider the effect upon investment of a fall of 50% in the value of having made a successful investment.
It's still just as difficult to come up with a good business idea. It's still just as difficult to make that idea work, still just as expensive to make it do so. But the payoff from being one of the one in five that do manage to get something real going has just halved. Obviously, fewer people are going to make the effort and take the risks. Meaning that the future will be poorer by the lack of the effects of those new businesses that never were started.
Wealth taxes don't work very well for the simple reason that they make all our children poorer than they would have been even if they do make our children more equal. It's not a good bargain, not a good trade off.
Isn't it EUronic
I actually can’t tell if they’re kidding or not. From the BBC:
The UK has been told it must pay an extra £1.7bn (2.1bn euros) towards the European Union's budget because the economy has performed better than expected in recent years.
Replace ‘UK’ with ‘worker’, slot in a different extremely high number, change ‘EU budget’ to ‘UK budget,’ and the system starts to resemble something quite similar to tax law in the UK.
The article continues:
The payment follows new calculations by the EU that determine how much each member state should contribute.
It would add about a fifth to the UK's annual net contribution of £8.6bn.
A government source said the demand was "not acceptable" while one Tory MP said the UK should simply refuse to pay it.
“UKIP leader Nigel Farage said the UK had been "hammered again" while Labour said it was imperative that the European Commission must reconsider the "backdated bill".
It appears UK politicians are in complete shock that hard work and serious efforts to pull out of the recession are being threatened by a big, bureaucratic government body that feels it’s entitled to some of those earnings.
This is priceless.
On the issue itself, I agree it’s “not acceptable”, and I dearly hope the UK “simply refuse(s) to pay it.” What a wonderful precedent that would set for next year’s tax season, when hard-working taxpayers (who, according to this year’s stats, will have been working for the Chancellor for 148 days to pay off their obligations), decide that they, too, don't want to be penalised for working harder and being a bit better-off financially.
Politicians can be slow on the uptake, so I guess there’s no deep surprise that it took them this long to understand the mechanics of ‘hard work = rewards.’ I just hope they whistle the same tune come next tax season.
To Polly the populace are just the milch cows of the State
Polly Toynbee is bemoaning the manner in which UK wages aren't rising:
On Wednesday Steve Machin, research director at the LSE’s centre for economic performance, laid out to a meeting of economists the collected evidence on the nature of falling pay – and warned that this is beginning to look not like a slow recovery in wages, but a permanent, structural feature of the UK economy. He showed how the group-think of economic forecasters has consistently and wildly over-estimated an expected increase in wages: the OBR forecast for March this year was a wage rise of 4.3%. What happened has been a continuing real fall.“There has been a startling and unprecedented lack of wage growth as unemployment falls,” Machin says. The “herd mentality” of forecasters is always to expect things to improve, but there is no sign they are right. This begins to look like the new permanent, as flatlining real median pay began back in 2003, long before the crash. Nor, finds Machin, is immigration a cause of falling pay: areas with high or low immigration saw pay fall equally.
Polly does at least pay lip service to the idea of being a Keynesian but I'm sure she would be surprised to find that Keynes would have been fully supportive of all of this happening. If people are unemployed then those people have to be priced back into work: and it was exactly Keynes who pointed out that people get very touchy indeed about falls in nominal wages but will put up with falls in real wages if they're lightly disguised by a bit of inflation. Further, the Phillips Curve comes out of very much the same sort of thinking. That there's a trade off between the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. We reach NAIRU (the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment) and if unemployment dips below that then inflation will rise. If it's above it then inflation will fall. And if we're seeing ever-falling unemployment and no sign of wages rises then we can conclude that NAIRU has fallen: which is absolutely great, for it means fewer people have to be consigned the the scrap heap of unemployment in order to keep inflation at bay in the future. We've had a favourable change in the basic structure of the economy.
However, the real shocker to us here is this:
Low pay is not just unjust, it’s crippling the country’s finances.
That's dangerously close to insisting that the populace are just the milch cows there to pay for the State, the sheep to be shorn of their incomes to pay for public employees. Actually, given that it's Polly saying it that's not dangerously close, that's what she means.
The tax system is the biggest barrier to growth
Outside of academic papers that too rarely see the light of day, most "research" is unremarkable in its optimism about the state of entrepreneurship in the UK. That’s why the RSA’s Growing Pains: How the UK became a nation of “micropreneurs” caught my eye. It paints a stark picture. The UK, according to the report, has become a nation of micro businesses, while the proportion of high-growth businesses has plummeted: “UK businesses are becoming increasingly micro in size – reducing the overall potential for economic output and future growth, and increasing the economy’s reliance on a relatively small number of larger businesses.”
Since 2000, the proportion of businesses classified as micro (0-9 employees), as a share of all UK businesses has grown from 94.3 per cent of all private sector companies to 95.4%. This represents an additional 1.4 million micro firms and an increase over the same period of 43%.
“At the same time, the proportion of high-growth enterprises has declined sharply, falling by more than a fifth in the majority of regions since 2005.”
Although the number of high-growth firms is expected to rise over the coming years, the report cautions optimism: “performance is expected to remain below 2005 levels in all regions except London”.
So how can we solve the problem? According the entrepreneurs, the tax system (44%) is the biggest barrier to growth – ahead of a lack of bank lending (38%) and the cost of running a business (36%).
Another problem highlighted by the report is that entrepreneurs don't know what the government is up to:
“Around three-quarters (73%) of small business leaders also say the Government must make it easier for SMEs to access the right information and support for growth. While several of the Government’s recent incentives to support SMEs are designed to address the top-cited barriers, perhaps this information is not reaching the people who need it the most.”
Two polices are put forward in the conclusion to help entrepreneurs. First, “continued reform of the apprenticeship scheme could help micro firms to grow out of this business size category”. Second, “more tax relief like the National Insurance holiday could also pay real dividends.” It would be worth exploring the former in detail (something I plan to work on), but I don’t think another NI holiday goes nearly far enough: Employers' National Insurance should be scrapped entirely. And no just for small businesses.
Being an entrepreneur is tough. As the report points out, “the majority (55%) of new businesses don’t survive beyond five years.” Scrapping Employers' NI is the logical place to start.
Philip Salter is director of The Entrepreneurs Network.
Another exercise in rewriting economic history
It is just so fun watching people rearranging the historical deckchairs to make sure that their tribe looks good and that the tribe of their opponents can be portrayed as those nasty, 'orrible, people over there. And so it is with this latest from Ha Joon Chang:
First, let’s look at the origins of the deficit. Contrary to the Conservative portrayal of it as a spendthrift party, Labour kept the budget in balance averaged over its first six years in office between 1997 and 2002. Between 2003 and 2007 the deficit rose, but at 3.2% of GDP a year it was manageable.
Quite: in those first few years Blair and Brown held to the spending limits that had been suggested by the previous, outgoing, Tory government. On the basis that if anyone thought they were the spendthrift Labour party of old then they wouldn't get elected. So there was, in there, a period of a public sector surplus. It's only after the second election that they ripped up that idea of fiscal restraint and became that Labour party of old again. So "balance" over the six years is actually a couple of years of Tory policy then spend, spend, spend.
And a deficit of 3.2% a year might be manageable: except of course it wasn't, was it? But more importantly it is a grave violation of the precepts of Keynesian economics to be having a deficit of any sort at that point in the economic cycle. If we are to take Keynesian demand management seriously (we don't, but let us do so arguendo) then yes, there should be fiscal expansion in the slumps. But the counterpart to that is that in the boom there should be restraint: a surplus, not a deficit. This is not to pay off the previous debt, it's not to create the borrowing room to provide the firepower for that next slump. It's because demand management means that you temper the booms as well as the busts. Given that the middle part of the Brown/Blair Terror was in fact the tail end of the longest modern peacetime boom then the public accounts should have been healthily in surplus. In order to temper that boom.
Chang is doing an edit to history here, to show that his tribe is better than the other one. Given the circumstances of the time Labour really were sailor-type drunken loons going on a spree with the nation's chequebook and don't let anybody tell you different.
The mansion tax is theft, a bit at a time
Strange, is it not, how politicians never ask how they could cut their own spending, but only think about how they can raise taxes from other people. Mr Balls reckons he can raise £1.2bn from the tax, which he says would come in handy for the NHS, he reckons (though the emerging black hole in the NHS budget is much larger than that). How does he know? He says much of the tax would come from foreigners with big houses in London, but does not seem to know how many of them there are. No, as usual, it will be the Great British public who foot most of the bill, and not just the rich. Tens of thousands of homes in London will be caught by it, for example, where the average price in a 'prime area' will probably hit the £2m mansion tax threshold by the time of the 2015 election. And 'prime' includes areas like Battersea and Clapham, not just swanky Kensington and Chelsea.
There are already plenty of taxes on property. Not only is there the council tax, but there is stamp duty when you buy a house and inheritance tax when you give it to your kids. Now the plan is to add another, of perhaps £4,000 a year.
We all know what will happen. The tax will be imposed on properties of £2m, and over the years, thanks to (politician-created) inflation and (politician-created) planning restrictions, the cost of property will rise. More and more properties will be hit by the 'mansion' tax (yes, including broom cupboards in Kensington), just as more and more people now pay the 40% higher rate of income tax, which was originally targeted at the wealthy but is now paid by people like teachers and police officers.
And our tax (and subsidy) system is already highly progressive. Wealthier people pay higher taxes of many kinds, while poorer areas get subsidies through the local government finance system.
The mansion tax is theft, a bit at a time. There will be many people who happen to live in large houses but have little or nothing in the way of income (such as those on pensions) with which to pay the tax. Perhaps the house was their childhood home and they can't face moving. Moving is a strain even for the most robust of us. Ed Balls says, well maybe poorer people could defer the tax until they sell the house or pass it on after their death. But that makes the tax even more complicated - it is going to need a means test and a lot of extra bureaucracy, more lines on the tax form and all the stuff that has already got us in such an overtaxed bureaucratic pickle. This is a tax we could well do without.
HMRC, you had one job
It can be frustrating to state the obvious. But, typical to its nature, HMRC has forced me to do just that. In 2013, the average Briton had to work 150 days into the year to pay their total tax bill. Not until May 30th did UK residents stop working for the Chancellor and started earning for themselves
It’s simple, really. Brits earn the money, and HMRC arranges to have it taken away through a variety of different taxes—VAT, National Insurance, and of course, income tax.
It's a tough job the HMRC has—to tax and tax some more—but it’s probably safe to say the average earner has the harder job – to supply both the government with the funds it needs to run the country, and the funds she (and potentially her family) need to live on.
So it should be expected, at the very least, that the taxation process be as smooth and simple for the earner as possible; that those 150 days worth of earnings be transferred without fuss…
If only. From The Telegraph:
“Four months ago, HM Revenue & Customs admitted it had collected the wrong amount of tax from more than five million people in the 12 months to April 2014.
Since then, the taxman has sent those affected notification letters explaining how it would claw back or issue refunds for on average £300.
In an email leaked to The Telegraph, a select group of senior HMRC staff and accountants were told "thousands" of mistakes were made.
The recipients were advised to tell taxpayers who questioned their bills "not to repay any underpayment" of tax.
It said anyone who had overpaid tax should not cash any cheques they had received. Anyone who has already cashed a cheque will see the money potentially clawed back if a mistake has been made.”
Mistakes happen, sure. But such levels of incompetence, without any offer of compensation, can only be the work of the public sector.
In almost any exchange between a customer and a private business, over-charges and under-charges play out in the customer’s best interest. If a hotel or restaurant accidentally over-charges you, a refund is surely made (often with sincere apologies and some form of compensation for the trouble). If a grocery store under-charges you for fruit purchased, no letter comes through the post asking you to make up the sum.
But when HMRC makes not one bad calculation, but a series of wrong calculations for millions of customers, the inconvenience falls on the taxpayer, who will have to make up the difference calculated or wait months for her rebate.
Of course, taxation isn't a voluntary transaction, the taxpayer isn’t considered a customer, and the government’s a monopoly—so blatant incompetency shouldn't be a surprise at all.