“Mansion Tax” is a misnomer, as it is just a tax on quite ordinary houses in London and the South East. A real mansion would be a seat like Hinderton Hal in Cheshire. Hinderton Hall in the photograph is a Great Western Railway locomotive, 5900 built in 1931. What is the connection? The Great Western’s Hall Class locomotives were named after posh country mansions. There were over...

More ass to kick, this time in the Guardian.

The budget will be discussed and dissected for the next couple of weeks, as usual. People are naturally concerned about how it will affect them. There will no doubt be unintended winners and losers in this annual game. But most of the discussion about the wider economic impact will be off the point, because it ignores the phenomenon of tax incidence: that the individual or body nominally responsible...

The leading tax experts who conducted the Mirrlees Review came to the conclusion that Land Value Taxation is such a powerful idea, and one that has been so comprehensively ignored by governments, that the case for a thorough official effort to design a workable solution seems to be overwhelming. In particular, the report noted, significant adjustment costs would be merited if the inefficient and...

The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) is urging George Osborne, in his Autumn Statement on December 5, to freeze business rates for the next two years. The business group wants the government to review and reform the business rates system by 2015, with a more “responsive and transparent” system enacted early in the next parliament.   Is this humbug or pure ignorance? The BCC could say...

I have just tried to fill in my tax return, which includes a section for foreign income. I was advised to study these 86 pages of accountancy jargon ironically referred to as “explanatory”.

IPPR, the Institute for Public Policy Research, describing itself as “the UK’s leading progressive thinktank”, has just released an essay by a Chris Nicholas, “Fairer taxes for a better economy” This sounded promising. There is a section on taxing wealth. Nicholas writes “Closing the circle both fiscally and progressively, a general wealth tax would be introduced....

The tax avoidance industry has been spawning a tax avoidance protest industry, with the Guardian in the lead. It focusses on the non-crimes committed by firms such as Google, Amazon and Apple, who have de-localised their activities so that it is impossible to establish exactly where they are trading. The Guardian has run a whole series of features this week about the online trading company Amazon. Amazon...

CAROLINE LUCAS WRITES“My Bill wasn’t discussed on Friday 26th April as it wasn’t a sitting day in the end. It was down on the Parliamentary papers for that date as a way of keeping the Bill ‘live’ for as long as possible. However, I knew that it wouldn’t have any chance of actually being debated. The Bill has now fallen as the Parliamentary Session has formally...

The US Senate is apparently considering legislation to require online retailers to pay state sales taxes. It would be misguided. Politicians and bureaucrats should accept contemporary realities. Transaction taxes have been made obsolete by technology. Corporation taxes have been made obsolete by globalisation, again partly through technology. Taxes on people have been made obsolete because they...