Current affairs - Land Value Tax Campaign

Chancellor rules out solution to economic crisis

Written on 16 October 2010. Posted in Taxation.

“I intend to continue taxing wages, good and services.” Ahead of the spending review to be announced in Parliament on Wednesday, the Chancellor, George Osborne, stated last night that he was prepared to do anything to solve the unprecedented financial crisis – except consider the one reform that would help regenerate the economy and lead to a long term solution.

QE back on the agenda – £ drops to record low

Written on 29 September 2010. Posted in Banking.

The first bout of quantitative easing having achieved nothing useful, there is now discussion about restarting this policy. One effect seems obvious – the £ has dropped from about SEK 14 in 2006 to SEK 11.7 in June to SEK 10.7 today, a record low. Wisdom has it that this is good for exports but there is no sign of any more British goods in the shops in Sweden. There are a few newspaper articles...

New political party forming

Written on 25 September 2010. Posted in Politics.

“The crisis facing our country needs a new approach,” says spokesman. A new political party with the slogan ‘No taxation without repression’ has been formed by rebel MPs taking a lead from Sarah Palin’s runaway success in America . Although too late to have a conference this year, the new party plan to issue a Press Release stating their objectives. We have been fortunate...

Government ducks Council Tax revalautions

Written on 25 September 2010. Posted in Taxation.

There will be no revaluation of Council Tax bands in England during the current parliament, the coalition government has said. This looks like cowardice but we should welcome the news nevertheless. Council Tax is a badly conceived property tax and investment in a revaluation would have simply provided another excuse for avoiding the real reform that is needed.

World poverty talking shop

Written on 21 September 2010. Posted in Welfare.

World leaders are meeting at the United Nations in New York for a three-day summit (20-22 September) on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the main framework for development policy over the past decade, with the aim of eliminating poverty. Ten years after their launch, and five years before the target date, many of these goals – especially those on child and maternal health –...

Swedish election result stalemate

Written on 19 September 2010. Posted in Politics.

The Swedish election result has produced no overall majority for the two main party groupings. The alliance parties (Moderaterna, Centerpartiet, Folkpartiet, Kristdemokraterna), have a combined strength of 49% in the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag. The Social Democrats (Socialdemokraterna) have done badly, with only 30% of the votes, a drop of 5% since 2006. This leaves them no longer the largest...

Whither welfare?

Written on 17 September 2010. Posted in Welfare.

In Britain as elsewhere in the west, the rising cost of welfare has reached the point that governments are looking for reform. Ian Duncan-Smith, for instance, the welfare secretary wants to take all those complex, creaking benefits and merge them into a single, simple system – a system which he plans to call a universal credit. It is a good idea but is not going to achieve anything worthwhile....

We were right about mass unemployment

Written on 14 September 2010. Posted in Economics.

Just two years ago we predicted that unemployment would soon rise about two million. It now stands at 2.8 million, so our estimate was evidently on the cautious side. Nobody in a position of power and influence has so far made the connection between unemployment and land tenure.

Labour leadership candidate speaks up for LVT

Written on 26 August 2010. Posted in Politics.

Be prepared! Anyone advocating LVT needs to have ready answers to the objections given here in this article speaking up for LVT. Better still, we need to have a programme for the introduction of LVT that is not vulnerable to these objections. Many of them are actually invalidated if LVT is based on annual instead of capital values.

Tax avoidance – ignoring the obvious

Written on 21 August 2010. Posted in Taxation.

Tax avoidance has came back into the news with “revelations” that some of the government’s advisers have been doing it. The journalists and commentators who have latched on to this have, almost without exception, failed to notice that the tax system is inherently leaky. One might have at least thought that these champions of the people’s rights would have marked the fact...

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