Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
"...at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing..."
Being pedantic, this is not true.
A theoretical collective state might take 100% of everyone's earnings in tax and distribute it through free housing, food, clothing, transport, entertainment, education, infrastructure etc. etc. (public spending). The population wouldn't stop working, producing, and earning albeit on behalf of the Revenue, because (presumably) there would be sanctions against any who did, as there are today.
My point is a 100% tax rate would not result in zero tax revenue.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not advocate it for one moment.
(The laffer 'curve' btw is a clever conceit of utter fiction - I suspect said 'curve' is much closer to a straight line.)
See you are completely in cloud cuckoo land here...why would I continue working in my better paid (currently) job and suffer the long hours and stress when I can just go shelf stacking for 40 hours a week and be just as well off. Clue I wouldn't.
I suspect the same would be said of most people such as teachers and doctors, why put yourself through it when you can just get a mundane job where you go on time and is relatively stress free if you get the same anyway
So a footballer who didn’t win the World Cup wins SPOTY. Classic.
It’s about “personality” in sport isn’t it?
Not really - the ‘personality’ is a convenient way of saying sportsman/sportswoman.
And getting England to a World Cup final and winning the Golden Glove in the process is one of the biggest English sporting achievements this year.
Had another England team won the World Cup then yes that'd be a bigger achievement, but none did.
SPOTY isn’t just England. Josh Kerr should have been on the list.
Meh.
I think what Earps did is more impressive that Kerr personally anyway, but its pretty moot.
More impressive than winning the World Champioships 1500m? Really? Do you just not care for athletics?
No, I don't care for athletics.
Someone who wins a few golds, in multiple races, is more impressive but winning one race? Well done, its great going and they deserve the gold, but its not beating everyone else for being a successful sports person.
Athletics is the most democratic form of individual competition there is. Being the fastest in the world over 1 mile/1500m always used to mean something, particularly given our heritage in the sport.
For the BBC to exclude Kerr is an example of them losing their way, and they surely wouldn't have done it if he scored more woke points.
I’ve never heard of him. I’ve at least heard of Mary Earps.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
I’m skeptical about tax rates as high as that for more libertarian reasons, but I think the Laffer argument against them largely dishonest, or deluded.
The original Laffer Curve was to illustrate a philosophical point.
Analytics were then done to estimate the shape of the curve (this is behavioural science so never precise).
Politicians and activists have tortured it well beyond what it was ever intended to be.
Not really true. Laffer consistently argued during his career - and advised Republican administrations - that a cut in US tax rates would increase the tax take. There is no good empirical evidence for his assertions.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
I’m skeptical about tax rates as high as that for more libertarian reasons, but I think the Laffer argument against them largely dishonest, or deluded.
The original Laffer Curve was to illustrate a philosophical point.
Analytics were then done to estimate the shape of the curve (this is behavioural science so never precise).
Politicians and activists have tortured it well beyond what it was ever intended to be.
The Laffer Curve absolutely is 100% real.
Almost all claims (by left and right) about it are 100% bullshit.
65% I suspect is far, far too high a tax rate as people engage in tax avoidance at that rate or emigrate if they can. They higher the rate, the greater the reward for engaging in tax evasion, if you have a moderate tax rate there's no point evading taxes so people pay it - if its an obscene rate, then people find evading it very valuable.
What use is it, when there’s a hump in the middle and where you think we are in relation to the hump rests almost entirely upon the commentator’s pre-judged opinion and not at all on any actual evidence?
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
I’d be happier with 50p at £100k than the current moronic system where they claim 40p but attack the PA. I agree that greater than that it gets rather imbalanced.
Indeed. The people impacted that I talk to find the withdrawal of the personal allowance intrinsically unreasonable in the way that a penny or two on the rate isn’t
So a footballer who didn’t win the World Cup wins SPOTY. Classic.
It’s about “personality” in sport isn’t it?
Not really - the ‘personality’ is a convenient way of saying sportsman/sportswoman.
And getting England to a World Cup final and winning the Golden Glove in the process is one of the biggest English sporting achievements this year.
Had another England team won the World Cup then yes that'd be a bigger achievement, but none did.
SPOTY isn’t just England. Josh Kerr should have been on the list.
Meh.
I think what Earps did is more impressive that Kerr personally anyway, but its pretty moot.
More impressive than winning the World Champioships 1500m? Really? Do you just not care for athletics?
Kerr should have been on the list and even speaking as a golf fan and a McIlroy fan he shouldn't.
Yep, Kerr beat Ingebrigsten for the gold, who has the fourth quickest ever time over the distance. Johnson Thompson defended her heptathlon gold though - she probably should have won of the medallists. Simply mad to include Mcilroy this year ahead of Kerr when he didn't win a major.
The Labour candidate is called “Gen Kitchen” and the LibDems have chosen a former police officer with the surname “Savage Gunn”. Looks like an interesting one….
So a footballer who didn’t win the World Cup wins SPOTY. Classic.
It’s about “personality” in sport isn’t it?
Not really - the ‘personality’ is a convenient way of saying sportsman/sportswoman.
Okay. 🙂
Meanwhile, tomorrow’s metro has Prince Andrew sweating over the Christmas holiday 💦
The “I” has MI6 announcing water is wet - to borrow a phrase.
Teaching children they can be born in the wrong body is harmful - Kemi Badenoch owns the Daily Mail tomorrow.
This is just easily ignored guidelines from the government though, so tough talk and headlines like this is cheap sometimes, isn’t it?
Telegraph - Starmer frees dangerous criminals. “What Starmer did has a terrible impact on my family. It shouldn’t have been allowed.”
Sunak has spent a lot Tory money on election guru’s, to hollow out Starmer with this stuff slipped into friendly media. Why does it feel like it won’t work?
So a footballer who didn’t win the World Cup wins SPOTY. Classic.
It’s about “personality” in sport isn’t it?
Not really - the ‘personality’ is a convenient way of saying sportsman/sportswoman.
And getting England to a World Cup final and winning the Golden Glove in the process is one of the biggest English sporting achievements this year.
Had another England team won the World Cup then yes that'd be a bigger achievement, but none did.
SPOTY isn’t just England. Josh Kerr should have been on the list.
Meh.
I think what Earps did is more impressive that Kerr personally anyway, but its pretty moot.
More impressive than winning the World Champioships 1500m? Really? Do you just not care for athletics?
No, I don't care for athletics.
Someone who wins a few golds, in multiple races, is more impressive but winning one race? Well done, its great going and they deserve the gold, but its not beating everyone else for being a successful sports person.
Athletics is the most democratic form of individual competition there is. Being the fastest in the world over 1 mile/1500m always used to mean something, particularly given our heritage in the sport.
For the BBC to exclude Kerr is an example of them losing their way, and they surely wouldn't have done it if he scored more woke points.
I’ve never heard of him. I’ve at least heard of Mary Earps.
Maybe he should have screamed ‘fuck off’ when he won his big race, that’s the only reason I’ve heard of Mary Earps
So a footballer who didn’t win the World Cup wins SPOTY. Classic.
It’s about “personality” in sport isn’t it?
Not really - the ‘personality’ is a convenient way of saying sportsman/sportswoman.
And getting England to a World Cup final and winning the Golden Glove in the process is one of the biggest English sporting achievements this year.
Had another England team won the World Cup then yes that'd be a bigger achievement, but none did.
SPOTY isn’t just England. Josh Kerr should have been on the list.
Meh.
I think what Earps did is more impressive that Kerr personally anyway, but its pretty moot.
More impressive than winning the World Champioships 1500m? Really? Do you just not care for athletics?
No, I don't care for athletics.
Someone who wins a few golds, in multiple races, is more impressive but winning one race? Well done, its great going and they deserve the gold, but its not beating everyone else for being a successful sports person.
Athletics is the most democratic form of individual competition there is. Being the fastest in the world over 1 mile/1500m always used to mean something, particularly given our heritage in the sport.
For the BBC to exclude Kerr is an example of them losing their way, and they surely wouldn't have done it if he scored more woke points.
I’ve never heard of him. I’ve at least heard of Mary Earps.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
I’d be happier with 50p at £100k than the current moronic system where they claim 40p but attack the PA. I agree that greater than that it gets rather imbalanced.
Indeed. The people impacted that I talk to find the withdrawal of the personal allowance intrinsically unreasonable in the way that a penny or two on the rate isn’t
And there’s also the reduction and then the loss of the savings allowance, which happens as soon as you earn another £1 that gets you to the trigger point (being where the higher and upper rate bands kick in) - the effective tax rate on that extra £1 is way above 100% and indeed many thousands of %.
Most of my team are scottish, the ones affected by the new tax rate are already looking at paying more into penisons/salary sacrifice schemes. One also remarked when I mentioned it that most of what it collected was going to be spent on collecting it
1. I thought you were always moaning about how your wages had stagnated and were piss-poor because of globalisation. Yet your team are all earning over £75k?
2. The cost of collection is trivial surely? Plug the figures in, run the calculation and either the employer deducts and pays the tax or the self-employed pay it direct to HMRC.
I don't think it's trivial. I wouldn't like to be the IT team in charge of assessing whether everyone's tax was subject to Scottish tax rates or English ones. But it's small compared to the amount raised by taxation. But my expectation is that this will be a net loss to the Scottish exchequer - they will lose more in discouraging people to earn than they will raise in people paying more tax, even if the cost of collection is ignored. But it will be an interesting experiment.
Differential tax rates have been in effect for years, so the transactional cost of these changes will be marginal.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
My effective tax rate is well north of 50%. Close to 54% when I last looked.
The devil is in the details but that analysis informed the 45+2 rate as the revenue maximising top rate
Which is when you’re on PAYE and that’s your actual rate. But unfortunately, counter to what most people might expect, if you’re treated as self employed with substantial non-deductible costs and some taxable income that you don’t actually receive as it’s paper profit, actual ETR can go to 54, 55 even 56%. On all income. Not the marginal rate. The total rate.
For every single £1 I earn the exchequer gets 54p.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
I’d be happier with 50p at £100k than the current moronic system where they claim 40p but attack the PA. I agree that greater than that it gets rather imbalanced.
Indeed. The people impacted that I talk to find the withdrawal of the personal allowance intrinsically unreasonable in the way that a penny or two on the rate isn’t
You only need to have one unexpectedly good year due to natural variation and you are suddenly doing administrative somersaults to ensure your clients pay you late. It’s utterly crackers. I’m amazed it’s survived for so long, so bonkers is it.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
"...at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing..."
Being pedantic, this is not true.
A theoretical collective state might take 100% of everyone's earnings in tax and distribute it through free housing, food, clothing, transport, entertainment, education, infrastructure etc. etc. (public spending). The population wouldn't stop working, producing, and earning albeit on behalf of the Revenue, because (presumably) there would be sanctions against any who did, as there are today.
My point is a 100% tax rate would not result in zero tax revenue.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not advocate it for one moment.
(The laffer 'curve' btw is a clever conceit of utter fiction - I suspect said 'curve' is much closer to a straight line.)
See you are completely in cloud cuckoo land here...why would I continue working in my better paid (currently) job and suffer the long hours and stress when I can just go shelf stacking for 40 hours a week and be just as well off. Clue I wouldn't.
Probably not, which is why I don't advocate it.
But you'd still do your shelf-stacking* or similar, still earn something, still have it taxed at 100% or face a sanction and maybe starve or lose your accommodation, so my point still stands: the state would still get more than zero income from a tax rate of 100%.
(*In fact, in such a system, and after consideration, you may choose to keep your current, more interesting and less physically demanding IT job rather than the utter boredom of shelf-stacking even if you were financially no better off. I know I would.)
So a footballer who didn’t win the World Cup wins SPOTY. Classic.
It’s about “personality” in sport isn’t it?
Not really - the ‘personality’ is a convenient way of saying sportsman/sportswoman.
Okay. 🙂
Meanwhile, tomorrow’s metro has Prince Andrew sweating over the Christmas holiday 💦
The “I” has MI6 announcing water is wet - to borrow a phrase.
Teaching children they can be born in the wrong body is harmful - Kemi Badenoch owns the Daily Mail tomorrow.
This is just easily ignored guidelines from the government though, so tough talk and headlines like this is cheap sometimes, isn’t it?
Telegraph - Starmer frees dangerous criminals. “What Starmer did has a terrible impact on my family. It shouldn’t have been allowed.”
Sunak has spent a lot Tory money on election guru’s, to hollow out Starmer with this stuff slipped into friendly media. Why does it feel like it won’t work?
What a start! Windies chasing 268 and first ball is a golden duck. 🤣
Oh, hello Bart. I was just thinking I hadn't seen you in a while. Have you been taking a break or have I just failed to coincide with you lately?
A pedant would point out that 'first ball is a golden duck' is a tautology.
Been taking a break.
Only partially tautological, you can have both a golden duck that's not the first ball of an innings of course, as well as a first ball of an innings that's not a wicket so not a golden duck either.
This match has everything though, Windies making quick work of scoring now to stay in the match for now at least.
Well welcome back. What you say is true - you can have a golden duck which isn't first ball - but you can't have a first ball wicket which isn't a golden duck.
On another subject, I've just remembered mackerel. Mackerel is delicious. Though possibly it's the smoke you can taste and without that it would just taste fishy. And mackerel pate is delicious too, and very easy to make.
What if the 1st ball is a no-ball and you're out to the 2nd?
That would neither be a golden duck nor a wicket to the first ball of the innings, surely?
Well it's a wicket to the 1st legal ball of the innings. I wonder if it's ever happened. Probably not and we don't need a term for it until it does. It's akin to scoring a maximum break at snooker starting with a free ball. That would be a 155 not a 147. Again we don't need a term for it (super maximum?) unless and until we see it.
So a footballer who didn’t win the World Cup wins SPOTY. Classic.
It’s about “personality” in sport isn’t it?
Not really - the ‘personality’ is a convenient way of saying sportsman/sportswoman.
And getting England to a World Cup final and winning the Golden Glove in the process is one of the biggest English sporting achievements this year.
Had another England team won the World Cup then yes that'd be a bigger achievement, but none did.
SPOTY isn’t just England. Josh Kerr should have been on the list.
Meh.
I think what Earps did is more impressive that Kerr personally anyway, but its pretty moot.
More impressive than winning the World Champioships 1500m? Really? Do you just not care for athletics?
No, I don't care for athletics.
Someone who wins a few golds, in multiple races, is more impressive but winning one race? Well done, its great going and they deserve the gold, but its not beating everyone else for being a successful sports person.
Athletics is the most democratic form of individual competition there is. Being the fastest in the world over 1 mile/1500m always used to mean something, particularly given our heritage in the sport.
For the BBC to exclude Kerr is an example of them losing their way, and they surely wouldn't have done it if he scored more woke points.
I’ve never heard of him. I’ve at least heard of Mary Earps.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
I’m skeptical about tax rates as high as that for more libertarian reasons, but I think the Laffer argument against them largely dishonest, or deluded.
The original Laffer Curve was to illustrate a philosophical point.
Analytics were then done to estimate the shape of the curve (this is behavioural science so never precise).
Politicians and activists have tortured it well beyond what it was ever intended to be.
The Laffer Curve absolutely is 100% real.
Almost all claims (by left and right) about it are 100% bullshit.
65% I suspect is far, far too high a tax rate as people engage in tax avoidance at that rate or emigrate if they can. They higher the rate, the greater the reward for engaging in tax evasion, if you have a moderate tax rate there's no point evading taxes so people pay it - if its an obscene rate, then people find evading it very valuable.
What use is it, when there’s a hump in the middle and where you think we are in relation to the hump rests almost entirely upon the commentator’s pre-judged opinion and not at all on any actual evidence?
Option A: look at the evidence
Option B: make a comment based on a pre-judged opinion and not at all on any actual evidence
Perhaps the best evidence we have at present is that produced by HMRC, and signed off by the Office for Budget Responsibility, in 2012. This suggested that cutting the 50p rate to 45p could reduce revenues by about £3.5 billion in 2015–16 if there was no change in behaviour by affected individuals. However, once one allows for behavioural response, their central estimate was a cost of just £100 million – a very small amount of money. The best available estimate of what reversing the cut would raise is therefore about £100 million too.
Most of my team are scottish, the ones affected by the new tax rate are already looking at paying more into penisons/salary sacrifice schemes. One also remarked when I mentioned it that most of what it collected was going to be spent on collecting it
1. I thought you were always moaning about how your wages had stagnated and were piss-poor because of globalisation. Yet your team are all earning over £75k?
2. The cost of collection is trivial surely? Plug the figures in, run the calculation and either the employer deducts and pays the tax or the self-employed pay it direct to HMRC.
I don't think it's trivial. I wouldn't like to be the IT team in charge of assessing whether everyone's tax was subject to Scottish tax rates or English ones. But it's small compared to the amount raised by taxation. But my expectation is that this will be a net loss to the Scottish exchequer - they will lose more in discouraging people to earn than they will raise in people paying more tax, even if the cost of collection is ignored. But it will be an interesting experiment.
It’s really simple, if your address has a Scottish postcode your tax code has an S in front of it and you are subject to Scottish tax rates.
Payments need to be reported to HMRC via RTI and the money is paid directly to HMRC alongside payments for other employees
Supposedly the amount raised is £80m or so which is accurate if IR35 remains as it is because (as was pointed out elsewhere) it’s hard to switch to dividends if you are an employee being paid via PAYE
Fair enough. It IS trivial then. I stand corrected.
But, well, yes, it might nominally raise £80m based on tax paid right now. But it will soon have the effect of driving down the amount of tax paid. What would you do if you were earning £80k and tax rates went up to 45% for earnings above £75k? You would cut back the amount you earned, surely - either by paying into pension, or, more likely, doing less work. Or, longer term you might move to England. Certainly your high paying employer would find they could offer more attractive packages to English based staff than Scottish based. And highly paid work would dribble southwards.
Highly paid people are highly paid because they are motivated by money. I find it hard to imagine this won't have an effect.
So a footballer who didn’t win the World Cup wins SPOTY. Classic.
It’s about “personality” in sport isn’t it?
Not really - the ‘personality’ is a convenient way of saying sportsman/sportswoman.
Okay. 🙂
Meanwhile, tomorrow’s metro has Prince Andrew sweating over the Christmas holiday 💦
The “I” has MI6 announcing water is wet - to borrow a phrase.
Teaching children they can be born in the wrong body is harmful - Kemi Badenoch owns the Daily Mail tomorrow.
This is just easily ignored guidelines from the government though, so tough talk and headlines like this is cheap sometimes, isn’t it?
Telegraph - Starmer frees dangerous criminals. “What Starmer did has a terrible impact on my family. It shouldn’t have been allowed.”
Sunak has spent a lot Tory money on election guru’s, to hollow out Starmer with this stuff slipped into friendly media. Why does it feel like it won’t work?
Because Labour are such heavy odds on favourites, it doesn’t make sense to think that they won’t win. I can’t see how they won’t win myself.
But NOM was 1/10 in 2015, and people on here were talking of it as free money for months before the GE
Remain was big odds on and tipped as value at 2/9 on here in 2016. It was 1/12 at the close of polling and it lost
Then Theresa May’s Tories were 1/6 to get a majority in 2017 and that didn’t happen either
The only successful fav has been Boris’s GE, and this site was getting bombarded with Corbynites saying it was going to be a lot closer than the betting made it
So, I’m with you, I think it’s all over. But three of the last four big favs in elections have been turned over when they seemed certain to win
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
I’m skeptical about tax rates as high as that for more libertarian reasons, but I think the Laffer argument against them largely dishonest, or deluded.
The original Laffer Curve was to illustrate a philosophical point.
Analytics were then done to estimate the shape of the curve (this is behavioural science so never precise).
Politicians and activists have tortured it well beyond what it was ever intended to be.
The Laffer Curve absolutely is 100% real.
Almost all claims (by left and right) about it are 100% bullshit.
65% I suspect is far, far too high a tax rate as people engage in tax avoidance at that rate or emigrate if they can. They higher the rate, the greater the reward for engaging in tax evasion, if you have a moderate tax rate there's no point evading taxes so people pay it - if its an obscene rate, then people find evading it very valuable.
What use is it, when there’s a hump in the middle and where you think we are in relation to the hump rests almost entirely upon the commentator’s pre-judged opinion and not at all on any actual evidence?
What use is any economics by that logic?
The key is that there is a middle and yes there's no objective evidence to settle any disputes but that's true of almost all economics anyway.
The key is to understand the principles, then subjectively evaluate the evidence available and use your own evidence, logic and beliefs to come to an opinion.
If you believe that raising taxes always raises revenue, then you're wrong. If you believe that cutting taxes always raises revenue (because Laffer Curve), then you're wrong.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
I’m skeptical about tax rates as high as that for more libertarian reasons, but I think the Laffer argument against them largely dishonest, or deluded.
The original Laffer Curve was to illustrate a philosophical point.
Analytics were then done to estimate the shape of the curve (this is behavioural science so never precise).
Politicians and activists have tortured it well beyond what it was ever intended to be.
The Laffer Curve absolutely is 100% real.
Almost all claims (by left and right) about it are 100% bullshit.
65% I suspect is far, far too high a tax rate as people engage in tax avoidance at that rate or emigrate if they can. They higher the rate, the greater the reward for engaging in tax evasion, if you have a moderate tax rate there's no point evading taxes so people pay it - if its an obscene rate, then people find evading it very valuable.
Fairies absolutely are 100% real.
65% of them I suspect live at the bottom of my garden.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
My effective tax rate is well north of 50%. Close to 54% when I last looked.
The devil is in the details but that analysis informed the 45+2 rate as the revenue maximising top rate
Which is when you’re on PAYE and that’s your actual rate. But unfortunately, counter to what most people might expect, if you’re treated as self employed with substantial non-deductible costs and some taxable income that you don’t actually receive as it’s paper profit, actual ETR can go to 54, 55 even 56%. On all income. Not the marginal rate. The total rate.
For every single £1 I earn the exchequer gets 54p.
Maybe you should have a word with a good tax accountant that is well connected to the Labour Party then?
The Labour candidate is called “Gen Kitchen” and the LibDems have chosen a former police officer with the surname “Savage Gunn”. Looks like an interesting one….
Savage Gunn should really be the GOP candidate somewhere like Mississippi!
So a footballer who didn’t win the World Cup wins SPOTY. Classic.
It’s about “personality” in sport isn’t it?
Not really - the ‘personality’ is a convenient way of saying sportsman/sportswoman.
And getting England to a World Cup final and winning the Golden Glove in the process is one of the biggest English sporting achievements this year.
Had another England team won the World Cup then yes that'd be a bigger achievement, but none did.
SPOTY isn’t just England. Josh Kerr should have been on the list.
Meh.
I think what Earps did is more impressive that Kerr personally anyway, but its pretty moot.
More impressive than winning the World Champioships 1500m? Really? Do you just not care for athletics?
No, I don't care for athletics.
Someone who wins a few golds, in multiple races, is more impressive but winning one race? Well done, its great going and they deserve the gold, but its not beating everyone else for being a successful sports person.
Athletics is the most democratic form of individual competition there is. Being the fastest in the world over 1 mile/1500m always used to mean something, particularly given our heritage in the sport.
For the BBC to exclude Kerr is an example of them losing their way, and they surely wouldn't have done it if he scored more woke points.
I’ve never heard of him. I’ve at least heard of Mary Earps.
Have you heard of Katrina Johnson-Thompson?
Yes, she's won many gold medals not just one, which is part of why she's more famous I suspect.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
If hmrc ever tried taking two pound out of every 3 I earned I would say fuck it and make money illegaly and wouldn't pay them a penny. If they can act like a bandit then they can fuck right off and so will I
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
My effective tax rate is well north of 50%. Close to 54% when I last looked.
The devil is in the details but that analysis informed the 45+2 rate as the revenue maximising top rate
Which is when you’re on PAYE and that’s your actual rate. But unfortunately, counter to what most people might expect, if you’re treated as self employed with substantial non-deductible costs and some taxable income that you don’t actually receive as it’s paper profit, actual ETR can go to 54, 55 even 56%. On all income. Not the marginal rate. The total rate.
For every single £1 I earn the exchequer gets 54p.
Nearly as steep as UC claimants who lose 55p for every additional £1 they earn.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
I’d be happier with 50p at £100k than the current moronic system where they claim 40p but attack the PA. I agree that greater than that it gets rather imbalanced.
Indeed. The people impacted that I talk to mfind the withdrawal of the personal allowance intrinsically unreasonable in the way that a penny or two on the rate isn’t
You only need to have one unexpectedly good year due to natural variation and you are suddenly doing administrative somersaults to ensure your clients pay you late. It’s utterly crackers. I’m amazed it’s survived for so long, so bonkers is it.
For the first time every last year the HMRC wrote me a cheque following my tax return
(Technically a wire transfer but saying that doesn’t feel as good)
Most of my team are scottish, the ones affected by the new tax rate are already looking at paying more into penisons/salary sacrifice schemes. One also remarked when I mentioned it that most of what it collected was going to be spent on collecting it
1. I thought you were always moaning about how your wages had stagnated and were piss-poor because of globalisation. Yet your team are all earning over £75k?
2. The cost of collection is trivial surely? Plug the figures in, run the calculation and either the employer deducts and pays the tax or the self-employed pay it direct to HMRC.
I don't think it's trivial. I wouldn't like to be the IT team in charge of assessing whether everyone's tax was subject to Scottish tax rates or English ones. But it's small compared to the amount raised by taxation. But my expectation is that this will be a net loss to the Scottish exchequer - they will lose more in discouraging people to earn than they will raise in people paying more tax, even if the cost of collection is ignored. But it will be an interesting experiment.
It’s really simple, if your address has a Scottish postcode your tax code has an S in front of it and you are subject to Scottish tax rates.
Payments need to be reported to HMRC via RTI and the money is paid directly to HMRC alongside payments for other employees
Supposedly the amount raised is £80m or so which is accurate if IR35 remains as it is because (as was pointed out elsewhere) it’s hard to switch to dividends if you are an employee being paid via PAYE
Fair enough. It IS trivial then. I stand corrected.
But, well, yes, it might nominally raise £80m based on tax paid right now. But it will soon have the effect of driving down the amount of tax paid. What would you do if you were earning £80k and tax rates went up to 45% for earnings above £75k? You would cut back the amount you earned, surely - either by paying into pension, or, more likely, doing less work. Or, longer term you might move to England. Certainly your high paying employer would find they could offer more attractive packages to English based staff than Scottish based. And highly paid work would dribble southwards.
Highly paid people are highly paid because they are motivated by money. I find it hard to imagine this won't have an effect.
It’s a distraction to get people to ignore the £300m plus being raised by fiscal drag with the 42.5% threshold. Seems to be working.
The Labour candidate is called “Gen Kitchen” and the LibDems have chosen a former police officer with the surname “Savage Gunn”. Looks like an interesting one….
Savage Gunn should really be the GOP candidate somewhere like Mississippi!
Isabel Oakeshott @IsabelOakeshott · 14h Has anyone taken a train journey recently that did not involve a litany of excuses and apologies? I was commuting as a kid in the late 80s, and it was better than this. Privatisation has not worked.
The Labour candidate is called “Gen Kitchen” and the LibDems have chosen a former police officer with the surname “Savage Gunn”. Looks like an interesting one….
Savage Gunn should really be the GOP candidate somewhere like Mississippi!
Former Police Constable Savage Gunn? Pull the other one.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
I’m skeptical about tax rates as high as that for more libertarian reasons, but I think the Laffer argument against them largely dishonest, or deluded.
The original Laffer Curve was to illustrate a philosophical point.
Analytics were then done to estimate the shape of the curve (this is behavioural science so never precise).
Politicians and activists have tortured it well beyond what it was ever intended to be.
The Laffer Curve absolutely is 100% real.
Almost all claims (by left and right) about it are 100% bullshit.
65% I suspect is far, far too high a tax rate as people engage in tax avoidance at that rate or emigrate if they can. They higher the rate, the greater the reward for engaging in tax evasion, if you have a moderate tax rate there's no point evading taxes so people pay it - if its an obscene rate, then people find evading it very valuable.
Fairies absolutely are 100% real.
65% of them I suspect live at the bottom of my garden.
The Laffer Curve is categorically real, there's is absolutely no evidence against it and an abundance of evidence and logic in favour of it.
What there is evidence against is times when people have misused it. That doesn't make it less real.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
"...at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing..."
Being pedantic, this is not true.
A theoretical collective state might take 100% of everyone's earnings in tax and distribute it through free housing, food, clothing, transport, entertainment, education, infrastructure etc. etc. (public spending). The population wouldn't stop working, producing, and earning albeit on behalf of the Revenue, because (presumably) there would be sanctions against any who did, as there are today.
My point is a 100% tax rate would not result in zero tax revenue.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not advocate it for one moment.
(The laffer 'curve' btw is a clever conceit of utter fiction - I suspect said 'curve' is much closer to a straight line.)
Yes the 'curve' imbues it with an unmerited air of scientific gravitas.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
I’m skeptical about tax rates as high as that for more libertarian reasons, but I think the Laffer argument against them largely dishonest, or deluded.
The original Laffer Curve was to illustrate a philosophical point.
Analytics were then done to estimate the shape of the curve (this is behavioural science so never precise).
Politicians and activists have tortured it well beyond what it was ever intended to be.
The Laffer Curve absolutely is 100% real.
Almost all claims (by left and right) about it are 100% bullshit.
65% I suspect is far, far too high a tax rate as people engage in tax avoidance at that rate or emigrate if they can. They higher the rate, the greater the reward for engaging in tax evasion, if you have a moderate tax rate there's no point evading taxes so people pay it - if its an obscene rate, then people find evading it very valuable.
What use is it, when there’s a hump in the middle and where you think we are in relation to the hump rests almost entirely upon the commentator’s pre-judged opinion and not at all on any actual evidence?
Option A: look at the evidence
Option B: make a comment based on a pre-judged opinion and not at all on any actual evidence
Perhaps the best evidence we have at present is that produced by HMRC, and signed off by the Office for Budget Responsibility, in 2012. This suggested that cutting the 50p rate to 45p could reduce revenues by about £3.5 billion in 2015–16 if there was no change in behaviour by affected individuals. However, once one allows for behavioural response, their central estimate was a cost of just £100 million – a very small amount of money. The best available estimate of what reversing the cut would raise is therefore about £100 million too.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
"...at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing..."
Being pedantic, this is not true.
A theoretical collective state might take 100% of everyone's earnings in tax and distribute it through free housing, food, clothing, transport, entertainment, education, infrastructure etc. etc. (public spending). The population wouldn't stop working, producing, and earning albeit on behalf of the Revenue, because (presumably) there would be sanctions against any who did, as there are today.
My point is a 100% tax rate would not result in zero tax revenue.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not advocate it for one moment.
(The laffer 'curve' btw is a clever conceit of utter fiction - I suspect said 'curve' is much closer to a straight line.)
Yes the 'curve' imbues it with an unmerited air of scientific gravitas.
Also known as "economics".
There's a reason economics is a social science and not a true science.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
"...at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing..."
Being pedantic, this is not true.
A theoretical collective state might take 100% of everyone's earnings in tax and distribute it through free housing, food, clothing, transport, entertainment, education, infrastructure etc. etc. (public spending). The population wouldn't stop working, producing, and earning albeit on behalf of the Revenue, because (presumably) there would be sanctions against any who did, as there are today.
My point is a 100% tax rate would not result in zero tax revenue.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not advocate it for one moment.
(The laffer 'curve' btw is a clever conceit of utter fiction - I suspect said 'curve' is much closer to a straight line.)
See you are completely in cloud cuckoo land here...why would I continue working in my better paid (currently) job and suffer the long hours and stress when I can just go shelf stacking for 40 hours a week and be just as well off. Clue I wouldn't.
I suspect the same would be said of most people such as teachers and doctors, why put yourself through it when you can just get a mundane job where you go on time and is relatively stress free if you get the same anyway
Personal satisfaction. Or is money all that matters to you?
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
My effective tax rate is well north of 50%. Close to 54% when I last looked.
The devil is in the details but that analysis informed the 45+2 rate as the revenue maximising top rate
Which is when you’re on PAYE and that’s your actual rate. But unfortunately, counter to what most people might expect, if you’re treated as self employed with substantial non-deductible costs and some taxable income that you don’t actually receive as it’s paper profit, actual ETR can go to 54, 55 even 56%. On all income. Not the marginal rate. The total rate.
For every single £1 I earn the exchequer gets 54p.
Maybe you should have a word with a good tax accountant that is well connected to the Labour Party then?
I’m living proof that the laffer curve is, as Bart says, neither true nor false. It depends on context and individual situations.
I’m not in a line of work, or zone of business ethics, where it would be desirable or easy to switch the nature of income, for example into capital gains. Nor would it be easy or desirable for me to move country to reduce tax. So I stump up the tax. But others do have choices, partly because our tax system is riddled with distortions like the gap between capital and income tax. So behavioural responses to tax are not universal or uniform.
I might do an article on this in January actually, but focused on business taxation. Interesting topic.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
I’m skeptical about tax rates as high as that for more libertarian reasons, but I think the Laffer argument against them largely dishonest, or deluded.
The original Laffer Curve was to illustrate a philosophical point.
Analytics were then done to estimate the shape of the curve (this is behavioural science so never precise).
Politicians and activists have tortured it well beyond what it was ever intended to be.
The Laffer Curve absolutely is 100% real.
Almost all claims (by left and right) about it are 100% bullshit.
65% I suspect is far, far too high a tax rate as people engage in tax avoidance at that rate or emigrate if they can. They higher the rate, the greater the reward for engaging in tax evasion, if you have a moderate tax rate there's no point evading taxes so people pay it - if its an obscene rate, then people find evading it very valuable.
What use is it, when there’s a hump in the middle and where you think we are in relation to the hump rests almost entirely upon the commentator’s pre-judged opinion and not at all on any actual evidence?
Option A: look at the evidence
Option B: make a comment based on a pre-judged opinion and not at all on any actual evidence
Perhaps the best evidence we have at present is that produced by HMRC, and signed off by the Office for Budget Responsibility, in 2012. This suggested that cutting the 50p rate to 45p could reduce revenues by about £3.5 billion in 2015–16 if there was no change in behaviour by affected individuals. However, once one allows for behavioural response, their central estimate was a cost of just £100 million – a very small amount of money. The best available estimate of what reversing the cut would raise is therefore about £100 million too.
The Labour candidate is called “Gen Kitchen” and the LibDems have chosen a former police officer with the surname “Savage Gunn”. Looks like an interesting one….
Savage Gunn should really be the GOP candidate somewhere like Mississippi!
Is this where Constable Savage ended up?
The last I heard, he was the Police Commissioner for Northamptonshire.
So a footballer who didn’t win the World Cup wins SPOTY. Classic.
It’s about “personality” in sport isn’t it?
Not really - the ‘personality’ is a convenient way of saying sportsman/sportswoman.
And getting England to a World Cup final and winning the Golden Glove in the process is one of the biggest English sporting achievements this year.
Had another England team won the World Cup then yes that'd be a bigger achievement, but none did.
SPOTY isn’t just England. Josh Kerr should have been on the list.
Meh.
I think what Earps did is more impressive that Kerr personally anyway, but its pretty moot.
More impressive than winning the World Champioships 1500m? Really? Do you just not care for athletics?
Kerr should have been on the list and even speaking as a golf fan and a McIlroy fan he shouldn't.
Yep, Kerr beat Ingebrigsten for the gold, who has the fourth quickest ever time over the distance. Johnson Thompson defended her heptathlon gold though - she probably should have won of the medallists. Simply mad to include Mcilroy this year ahead of Kerr when he didn't win a major.
Yes it really was. Perhaps they're still trying to make it up to him for 2014 when he should have won but didn't. I think Rory himself was embarrassed to be nominated this year given he didn't even do a video link.
What a start! Windies chasing 268 and first ball is a golden duck. 🤣
Oh, hello Bart. I was just thinking I hadn't seen you in a while. Have you been taking a break or have I just failed to coincide with you lately?
A pedant would point out that 'first ball is a golden duck' is a tautology.
Been taking a break.
Only partially tautological, you can have both a golden duck that's not the first ball of an innings of course, as well as a first ball of an innings that's not a wicket so not a golden duck either.
This match has everything though, Windies making quick work of scoring now to stay in the match for now at least.
Well welcome back. What you say is true - you can have a golden duck which isn't first ball - but you can't have a first ball wicket which isn't a golden duck.
On another subject, I've just remembered mackerel. Mackerel is delicious. Though possibly it's the smoke you can taste and without that it would just taste fishy. And mackerel pate is delicious too, and very easy to make.
What if the 1st ball is a no-ball and you're out to the 2nd?
That would neither be a golden duck nor a wicket to the first ball of the innings, surely?
Well it's a wicket to the 1st legal ball of the innings. I wonder if it's ever happened. Probably not and we don't need a term for it until it does. It's akin to scoring a maximum break at snooker starting with a free ball. That would be a 155 not a 147. Again we don't need a term for it (super maximum?) unless and until we see it.
Hm. Maybe it would be a golden duck, on reflection. But it surely wouldn't be the first ball of the innings. Remember the Ashes back in 2007? I bet you can remember the first ball of the innings - Steve Harmison's wide. I bet you can't remember the first legal ball of the innings. It would be notable, but it wouldn't be a first ball wicket which wasn't a golden duck. So I maintain that it's a tautology, if only a one-way one.
I can't believe we've found a subject on which you a Bart are lining up together against me.
I don't particularly mind a tautology. 4am in the moring, you say, Mike Oldfield? Fine by me. I just enjoy pointing them out.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
I’m skeptical about tax rates as high as that for more libertarian reasons, but I think the Laffer argument against them largely dishonest, or deluded.
The original Laffer Curve was to illustrate a philosophical point.
Analytics were then done to estimate the shape of the curve (this is behavioural science so never precise).
Politicians and activists have tortured it well beyond what it was ever intended to be.
The Laffer Curve absolutely is 100% real.
Almost all claims (by left and right) about it are 100% bullshit.
65% I suspect is far, far too high a tax rate as people engage in tax avoidance at that rate or emigrate if they can. They higher the rate, the greater the reward for engaging in tax evasion, if you have a moderate tax rate there's no point evading taxes so people pay it - if its an obscene rate, then people find evading it very valuable.
What use is it, when there’s a hump in the middle and where you think we are in relation to the hump rests almost entirely upon the commentator’s pre-judged opinion and not at all on any actual evidence?
What use is any economics by that logic?
The key is that there is a middle and yes there's no objective evidence to settle any disputes but that's true of almost all economics anyway.
The key is to understand the principles, then subjectively evaluate the evidence available and use your own evidence, logic and beliefs to come to an opinion.
If you believe that raising taxes always raises revenue, then you're wrong. If you believe that cutting taxes always raises revenue (because Laffer Curve), then you're wrong.
So what ? In the real world, everyone knows that raising tax rates tends to raise revenue, and reducing them tends to reduce it.
Second order effects depend on the circumstances of the economy at the time. And indeed, in some limited circumstances can tend to reverse the above effects.
Anything much beyond that is political rhetoric, not economics.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
If hmrc ever tried taking two pound out of every 3 I earned I would say fuck it and make money illegaly and wouldn't pay them a penny. If they can act like a bandit then they can fuck right off and so will I
In which case you'd go to prison.
You are aware that many people in the benefits trap (limited hours a week or lose benefits) do additional hours for their employers off the books, if they can?
If they can’t get that, they find someone else to employ them “on the black”.
The lack of enforcement suggests that either HMRC can’t be bothered or don’t have the resources to fight it.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
If hmrc ever tried taking two pound out of every 3 I earned I would say fuck it and make money illegaly and wouldn't pay them a penny. If they can act like a bandit then they can fuck right off and so will I
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
I’m skeptical about tax rates as high as that for more libertarian reasons, but I think the Laffer argument against them largely dishonest, or deluded.
The original Laffer Curve was to illustrate a philosophical point.
Analytics were then done to estimate the shape of the curve (this is behavioural science so never precise).
Politicians and activists have tortured it well beyond what it was ever intended to be.
The Laffer Curve absolutely is 100% real.
Almost all claims (by left and right) about it are 100% bullshit.
65% I suspect is far, far too high a tax rate as people engage in tax avoidance at that rate or emigrate if they can. They higher the rate, the greater the reward for engaging in tax evasion, if you have a moderate tax rate there's no point evading taxes so people pay it - if its an obscene rate, then people find evading it very valuable.
What use is it, when there’s a hump in the middle and where you think we are in relation to the hump rests almost entirely upon the commentator’s pre-judged opinion and not at all on any actual evidence?
Option A: look at the evidence
Option B: make a comment based on a pre-judged opinion and not at all on any actual evidence
Perhaps the best evidence we have at present is that produced by HMRC, and signed off by the Office for Budget Responsibility, in 2012. This suggested that cutting the 50p rate to 45p could reduce revenues by about £3.5 billion in 2015–16 if there was no change in behaviour by affected individuals. However, once one allows for behavioural response, their central estimate was a cost of just £100 million – a very small amount of money. The best available estimate of what reversing the cut would raise is therefore about £100 million too.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
My effective tax rate is well north of 50%. Close to 54% when I last looked.
The devil is in the details but that analysis informed the 45+2 rate as the revenue maximising top rate
Which is when you’re on PAYE and that’s your actual rate. But unfortunately, counter to what most people might expect, if you’re treated as self employed with substantial non-deductible costs and some taxable income that you don’t actually receive as it’s paper profit, actual ETR can go to 54, 55 even 56%. On all income. Not the marginal rate. The total rate.
For every single £1 I earn the exchequer gets 54p.
Maybe you should have a word with a good tax accountant that is well connected to the Labour Party then?
I’m living proof that the laffer curve is, as Bart says, neither true nor false. It depends on context and individual situations.
I’m not in a line of work, or zone of business ethics, where it would be desirable or easy to switch the nature of income, for example into capital gains. Nor would it be easy or desirable for me to move country to reduce tax. So I stump up the tax. But others do have choices, partly because our tax system is riddled with distortions like the gap between capital and income tax. So behavioural responses to tax are not universal or uniform.
I might do an article on this in January actually, but focused on business taxation. Interesting topic.
It is interesting, but I think you are mistaking the issue by looking at tax-switching of moving country. I also believe you will be on a lockstep structure based on a previous comment you made which means you are atypical.
Fore most people it’s none of the above.
It’s do I work that extra overtime vs go to the park with my kid? Do I contribute extra to my pension?
An extreme example might be the quandary doctors faced with their pensions - since fixed - where extra work had a disproportionate impact on tax
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
I’m skeptical about tax rates as high as that for more libertarian reasons, but I think the Laffer argument against them largely dishonest, or deluded.
The original Laffer Curve was to illustrate a philosophical point.
Analytics were then done to estimate the shape of the curve (this is behavioural science so never precise).
Politicians and activists have tortured it well beyond what it was ever intended to be.
The Laffer Curve absolutely is 100% real.
Almost all claims (by left and right) about it are 100% bullshit.
65% I suspect is far, far too high a tax rate as people engage in tax avoidance at that rate or emigrate if they can. They higher the rate, the greater the reward for engaging in tax evasion, if you have a moderate tax rate there's no point evading taxes so people pay it - if its an obscene rate, then people find evading it very valuable.
What use is it, when there’s a hump in the middle and where you think we are in relation to the hump rests almost entirely upon the commentator’s pre-judged opinion and not at all on any actual evidence?
What use is any economics by that logic?
The key is that there is a middle and yes there's no objective evidence to settle any disputes but that's true of almost all economics anyway.
The key is to understand the principles, then subjectively evaluate the evidence available and use your own evidence, logic and beliefs to come to an opinion.
If you believe that raising taxes always raises revenue, then you're wrong. If you believe that cutting taxes always raises revenue (because Laffer Curve), then you're wrong.
So what ? In the real world, everyone knows that raising tax rates tends to raise revenue, and reducing them tends to reduce it.
Second order effects depend on the circumstances of the economy at the time. And indeed, in some limited circumstances can tend to reverse the above effects.
Anything much beyond that is political rhetoric, not economics.
... in the short term. But has the opposite effect in the long term.
But as someone in the lower-taxes-to-drive-growth-and-increase-wealth-in-the-long-term camp, I do note that quite often the state needs some money now, rather in some golden future.
Isabel Oakeshott @IsabelOakeshott · 14h Has anyone taken a train journey recently that did not involve a litany of excuses and apologies? I was commuting as a kid in the late 80s, and it was better than this. Privatisation has not worked.
Does she think Richard Tice is the man we need to make the trains run on time?
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
If hmrc ever tried taking two pound out of every 3 I earned I would say fuck it and make money illegaly and wouldn't pay them a penny. If they can act like a bandit then they can fuck right off and so will I
In which case you'd go to prison.
You are aware that many people in the benefits trap (limited hours a week or lose benefits) do additional hours for their employers off the books, if they can?
If they can’t get that, they find someone else to employ them “on the black”.
The lack of enforcement suggests that either HMRC can’t be bothered or don’t have the resources to fight it.
I suspect that his award to the state of New York for "disgorgement" is now going to be nearer a billion than $500m. There will be no room for Trump to hide from being found guilty of fraud on multiple counts. Sure, his supporters will scream he has been attacked by the state. But that band will be ever dwindling.
It will be the big political story whilst the first primaries are happening.
Nikki Haley will have a major challenge in rowing back from saying Trump was fit to be President. The only candidate coming out of this with any wider credit is Chris Christie, but the chances of the Republican's saying "you know, he was right about Trump all along" are below zero.
Most of my team are scottish, the ones affected by the new tax rate are already looking at paying more into penisons/salary sacrifice schemes. One also remarked when I mentioned it that most of what it collected was going to be spent on collecting it
1. I thought you were always moaning about how your wages had stagnated and were piss-poor because of globalisation. Yet your team are all earning over £75k?
2. The cost of collection is trivial surely? Plug the figures in, run the calculation and either the employer deducts and pays the tax or the self-employed pay it direct to HMRC.
I don't think it's trivial. I wouldn't like to be the IT team in charge of assessing whether everyone's tax was subject to Scottish tax rates or English ones. But it's small compared to the amount raised by taxation. But my expectation is that this will be a net loss to the Scottish exchequer - they will lose more in discouraging people to earn than they will raise in people paying more tax, even if the cost of collection is ignored. But it will be an interesting experiment.
It’s really simple, if your address has a Scottish postcode your tax code has an S in front of it and you are subject to Scottish tax rates.
Payments need to be reported to HMRC via RTI and the money is paid directly to HMRC alongside payments for other employees
Supposedly the amount raised is £80m or so which is accurate if IR35 remains as it is because (as was pointed out elsewhere) it’s hard to switch to dividends if you are an employee being paid via PAYE
Fair enough. It IS trivial then. I stand corrected.
But, well, yes, it might nominally raise £80m based on tax paid right now. But it will soon have the effect of driving down the amount of tax paid. What would you do if you were earning £80k and tax rates went up to 45% for earnings above £75k? You would cut back the amount you earned, surely - either by paying into pension, or, more likely, doing less work. Or, longer term you might move to England. Certainly your high paying employer would find they could offer more attractive packages to English based staff than Scottish based. And highly paid work would dribble southwards.
Highly paid people are highly paid because they are motivated by money. I find it hard to imagine this won't have an effect.
Not everyone is motivated by money. I’m paid what I get because it’s the going global rate for my specialist skill set
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
I’m skeptical about tax rates as high as that for more libertarian reasons, but I think the Laffer argument against them largely dishonest, or deluded.
The original Laffer Curve was to illustrate a philosophical point.
Analytics were then done to estimate the shape of the curve (this is behavioural science so never precise).
Politicians and activists have tortured it well beyond what it was ever intended to be.
The Laffer Curve absolutely is 100% real.
Almost all claims (by left and right) about it are 100% bullshit.
65% I suspect is far, far too high a tax rate as people engage in tax avoidance at that rate or emigrate if they can. They higher the rate, the greater the reward for engaging in tax evasion, if you have a moderate tax rate there's no point evading taxes so people pay it - if its an obscene rate, then people find evading it very valuable.
What use is it, when there’s a hump in the middle and where you think we are in relation to the hump rests almost entirely upon the commentator’s pre-judged opinion and not at all on any actual evidence?
What use is any economics by that logic?
The key is that there is a middle and yes there's no objective evidence to settle any disputes but that's true of almost all economics anyway.
The key is to understand the principles, then subjectively evaluate the evidence available and use your own evidence, logic and beliefs to come to an opinion.
If you believe that raising taxes always raises revenue, then you're wrong. If you believe that cutting taxes always raises revenue (because Laffer Curve), then you're wrong.
So what ? In the real world, everyone knows that raising tax rates tends to raise revenue, and reducing them tends to reduce it.
Second order effects depend on the circumstances of the economy at the time. And indeed, in some limited circumstances can tend to reverse the above effects.
Anything much beyond that is political rhetoric, not economics.
In the real world raising taxes tends to raise revenue in the short term, yes.
Whether it does in the medium term, is very much debatable and no we don't know that, there's whole swathes of economics done to debate this.
Your logic is like suggesting that firms raising prices tends to increase profits. Of course if the firms who raise prices lose market share to competitors with lower prices, then they can lose their profits rather than gain them - and taxes are no different. There is a naivety to the notion that there's no competitors, there absolutely are whether they be legal (don't do the work), legal avoidance (do the work but engage in legal avoidance like putting in pensions), illegal evasion (cash in hand, absolutely widespread especially for people on obscenely high tax rates on benefits), or other countries (emigration or locating jobs elsewhere).
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
If hmrc ever tried taking two pound out of every 3 I earned I would say fuck it and make money illegaly and wouldn't pay them a penny. If they can act like a bandit then they can fuck right off and so will I
In which case you'd go to prison.
You are aware that many people in the benefits trap (limited hours a week or lose benefits) do additional hours for their employers off the books, if they can?
If they can’t get that, they find someone else to employ them “on the black”.
The lack of enforcement suggests that either HMRC can’t be bothered or don’t have the resources to fight it.
The lack of enforcement at almost every level of law and regulation is, I think, quite to our detriment. And in many ways the cause of our current malaise.
But, well, yes, it might nominally raise £80m based on tax paid right now. But it will soon have the effect of driving down the amount of tax paid. What would you do if you were earning £80k and tax rates went up to 45% for earnings above £75k? You would cut back the amount you earned, surely - either by paying into pension, or, more likely, doing less work. Or, longer term you might move to England. Certainly your high paying employer would find they could offer more attractive packages to English based staff than Scottish based. And highly paid work would dribble southwards.
Highly paid people are highly paid because they are motivated by money. I find it hard to imagine this won't have an effect.
IME highly paid people (by which here I mean "people earning enough to be affected by a tax boundary at 75K", not people on 300K+, which is a world I don't know about) are highly paid because they're in an industry where their skills are in high demand compared to supply; which isn't going to be very strongly correlated with how much they're motivated by money. Some of these people will care enough at the margin to e.g. move house or change job for an extra 5K, but I'd expect in fact proportionally fewer 75K lawyers and computer programmers to find the 5K significantly motivating, compared to how many people on 30K would change their behaviour or circumstances for an extra 5K. (Obviously this depends on the scale of the change -- a lot of people would spend an afternoon fiddling with the details of their pension contributions, fewer would up sticks and move out of the area where their social circle is and their kids are in school.)
So a footballer who didn’t win the World Cup wins SPOTY. Classic.
It’s about “personality” in sport isn’t it?
Not really - the ‘personality’ is a convenient way of saying sportsman/sportswoman.
Okay. 🙂
Meanwhile, tomorrow’s metro has Prince Andrew sweating over the Christmas holiday 💦
The “I” has MI6 announcing water is wet - to borrow a phrase.
Teaching children they can be born in the wrong body is harmful - Kemi Badenoch owns the Daily Mail tomorrow.
This is just easily ignored guidelines from the government though, so tough talk and headlines like this is cheap sometimes, isn’t it?
Telegraph - Starmer frees dangerous criminals. “What Starmer did has a terrible impact on my family. It shouldn’t have been allowed.”
Sunak has spent a lot Tory money on election guru’s, to hollow out Starmer with this stuff slipped into friendly media. Why does it feel like it won’t work?
Because Labour are such heavy odds on favourites, it doesn’t make sense to think that they won’t win. I can’t see how they won’t win myself.
But NOM was 1/10 in 2015, and people on here were talking of it as free money for months before the GE
Remain was big odds on and tipped as value at 2/9 on here in 2016. It was 1/12 at the close of polling and it lost
Then Theresa May’s Tories were 1/6 to get a majority in 2017 and that didn’t happen either
The only successful fav has been Boris’s GE, and this site was getting bombarded with Corbynites saying it was going to be a lot closer than the betting made it
So, I’m with you, I think it’s all over. But three of the last four big favs in elections have been turned over when they seemed certain to win
It’s also a case how long polls have been set on something, that makes the turn around a shock. Neither leave or remain had a long history of being 15% or more ahead in 2016.
My point though wasn’t so much the attempt to hollow out Starmer by spinning titbits of his record from 5 year stint as DPP actually flipping the polls around, but will this strategy even hurt Starmer? It feels like a political campaign going through the motions, like a sports team in the middle of a slump.
All the usual donors have come to the pub to watch Rishi strip and drop up and down on a poll. A jugs gone round that’s fill to the brim. The usual strategists hired. The usual outlets publishing what’s been given them. But it just looks so bland and half hearted on the page, considering how much it all costs.
Trump on the other hand would make all this actually work. Saville, Saville, Saville.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
I’m skeptical about tax rates as high as that for more libertarian reasons, but I think the Laffer argument against them largely dishonest, or deluded.
The original Laffer Curve was to illustrate a philosophical point.
Analytics were then done to estimate the shape of the curve (this is behavioural science so never precise).
Politicians and activists have tortured it well beyond what it was ever intended to be.
The Laffer Curve absolutely is 100% real.
Almost all claims (by left and right) about it are 100% bullshit.
65% I suspect is far, far too high a tax rate as people engage in tax avoidance at that rate or emigrate if they can. They higher the rate, the greater the reward for engaging in tax evasion, if you have a moderate tax rate there's no point evading taxes so people pay it - if its an obscene rate, then people find evading it very valuable.
Fairies absolutely are 100% real.
65% of them I suspect live at the bottom of my garden.
The Laffer Curve is categorically real, there's is absolutely no evidence against it and an abundance of evidence and logic in favour of it.
What there is evidence against is times when people have misused it. That doesn't make it less real.
Ok, it's late and I suspect we could be arguing about the Laffer into the next century, let alone the next day, so I am off to bed now.
I have never seen any convincing evidence that the 'taxation rates against receipts' line is not more or less a straight line.
I can see reasons why high rates of taxation on income are a bad thing but Laffer is not one of them.
Mr Sunak will use the LE as a test run for a June election. When the results are, ahem, not quite what he needs then he will panic and delay until November.
It doesn't matter. Neither immigration nor oysters will save him
My assumption all along had been that he would go late. Why wouldn't he? But then came the autumn statement, and we have plenty of evidence that Plan A is 2nd May.
Sunak needs momentum - not just to try and recover the polls, but also to bowl out the lunatics in the five families / ReFUK. A push towards an election is the best momentum he will get.
By March they will know that the Rwanda bill has bogged down. That's its purpose. Blame the Blob / Labour / Woke, run an immigration election, "the people's priorities vs Labour" etc and hope that Starmer trips himself up.
Or, don't. Wait it out. Rwanda bogs down with no end in sight. 5 Families out for blood, Farage out for more. Polls not closing. And no cards left to play.
And his choice is either to put down his one remaining chip in May, when it almost certainly loses, or bide his time until October when he even more almost certainly loses. The effect of people remortgaging trumps any tax cuts he can pretend to offer.
Even if May leads to a smaller defeat for the party, October leads to a better, longer stay in No 10 for Sunak and a longer time in Parliament for many of his MPs.
And that's his dilemma.
Interesting polling today on homeowners.
I expected that the owners without mortgages would be either wealthy or retired or both. Nonetheless Labour running a pretty close second in a core Tory demographic.
Can Starmer get out the grey vote?
By definition, anyone who has a house with no mortgage significantly before retirement in today's housing market must be fairly wealthy.*
A much bigger problem is they may not feel as if they are.
*As of today, this could include me although having fixed for 5 years at 1.6% two years ago I'm in no hurry to actually do so.
Or it just means that you're married, don't live in the SE and live within your means. I'm 36, mortgage free* having bought 11 years ago. Wife did the same, when we got married, we sold her house and paid off the mortgage on mine. Neither of us ever earnt more than £30k pa. If I hadn't got married I was still on track to clear my mortgage in my early 40s on just my income, although the current bust of high interest rates would have hurt a bit.
*Technically, I've still got a mortgage of £20k, but only because it's fixed at a stupidly low rate and it's cheaper to pay the interest on it and claim the interest on £20k in a savings account than to pay the ERC to clear it.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
"...at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing..."
Being pedantic, this is not true.
A theoretical collective state might take 100% of everyone's earnings in tax and distribute it through free housing, food, clothing, transport, entertainment, education, infrastructure etc. etc. (public spending). The population wouldn't stop working, producing, and earning albeit on behalf of the Revenue, because (presumably) there would be sanctions against any who did, as there are today.
My point is a 100% tax rate would not result in zero tax revenue.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not advocate it for one moment.
(The laffer 'curve' btw is a clever conceit of utter fiction - I suspect said 'curve' is much closer to a straight line.)
Yes the 'curve' imbues it with an unmerited air of scientific gravitas.
Also known as "economics".
There's a reason economics is a social science and not a true science.
Indeed. Does the boiling point of water at sea level depend on who owns the kettle? No it doesn't.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
If hmrc ever tried taking two pound out of every 3 I earned I would say fuck it and make money illegaly and wouldn't pay them a penny. If they can act like a bandit then they can fuck right off and so will I
In which case you'd go to prison.
Quite cute that you believe that.
I'm trying to be socially responsible in what I say to people.
The downthread comments on SPOTY are correct. What Kerr did the at Worlds in pure field of endeavour terms is a bigger achievement than what Mary Earps has done in her career. The counter of course is the wider impact within her sport that Earps has had.
As a boxing fan, I would wonder why Leigh Wood wasnt in there in sporting achievement terms given what he has done in the last couple of years. This, though, is just how the cookie crumbles. Profile counts.
Most of my team are scottish, the ones affected by the new tax rate are already looking at paying more into penisons/salary sacrifice schemes. One also remarked when I mentioned it that most of what it collected was going to be spent on collecting it
1. I thought you were always moaning about how your wages had stagnated and were piss-poor because of globalisation. Yet your team are all earning over £75k?
2. The cost of collection is trivial surely? Plug the figures in, run the calculation and either the employer deducts and pays the tax or the self-employed pay it direct to HMRC.
I don't think it's trivial. I wouldn't like to be the IT team in charge of assessing whether everyone's tax was subject to Scottish tax rates or English ones. But it's small compared to the amount raised by taxation. But my expectation is that this will be a net loss to the Scottish exchequer - they will lose more in discouraging people to earn than they will raise in people paying more tax, even if the cost of collection is ignored. But it will be an interesting experiment.
It’s really simple, if your address has a Scottish postcode your tax code has an S in front of it and you are subject to Scottish tax rates.
Payments need to be reported to HMRC via RTI and the money is paid directly to HMRC alongside payments for other employees
Supposedly the amount raised is £80m or so which is accurate if IR35 remains as it is because (as was pointed out elsewhere) it’s hard to switch to dividends if you are an employee being paid via PAYE
Fair enough. It IS trivial then. I stand corrected.
But, well, yes, it might nominally raise £80m based on tax paid right now. But it will soon have the effect of driving down the amount of tax paid. What would you do if you were earning £80k and tax rates went up to 45% for earnings above £75k? You would cut back the amount you earned, surely - either by paying into pension, or, more likely, doing less work. Or, longer term you might move to England. Certainly your high paying employer would find they could offer more attractive packages to English based staff than Scottish based. And highly paid work would dribble southwards.
Highly paid people are highly paid because they are motivated by money. I find it hard to imagine this won't have an effect.
Some might choose to do less work; others, seeing their net income fall, might choose to do more to maintain their net income.
Most employees of course, have no options for changing their gross income levels, beyond looking for a new job.
So a footballer who didn’t win the World Cup wins SPOTY. Classic.
It’s about “personality” in sport isn’t it?
Not really - the ‘personality’ is a convenient way of saying sportsman/sportswoman.
Okay. 🙂
Meanwhile, tomorrow’s metro has Prince Andrew sweating over the Christmas holiday 💦
The “I” has MI6 announcing water is wet - to borrow a phrase.
Teaching children they can be born in the wrong body is harmful - Kemi Badenoch owns the Daily Mail tomorrow.
This is just easily ignored guidelines from the government though, so tough talk and headlines like this is cheap sometimes, isn’t it?
Telegraph - Starmer frees dangerous criminals. “What Starmer did has a terrible impact on my family. It shouldn’t have been allowed.”
Sunak has spent a lot Tory money on election guru’s, to hollow out Starmer with this stuff slipped into friendly media. Why does it feel like it won’t work?
Because Labour are such heavy odds on favourites, it doesn’t make sense to think that they won’t win. I can’t see how they won’t win myself.
But NOM was 1/10 in 2015, and people on here were talking of it as free money for months before the GE
Remain was big odds on and tipped as value at 2/9 on here in 2016. It was 1/12 at the close of polling and it lost
Then Theresa May’s Tories were 1/6 to get a majority in 2017 and that didn’t happen either
The only successful fav has been Boris’s GE, and this site was getting bombarded with Corbynites saying it was going to be a lot closer than the betting made it
So, I’m with you, I think it’s all over. But three of the last four big favs in elections have been turned over when they seemed certain to win
It’s also a case how long polls have been set on something, that makes the turn around a shock. Neither leave or remain had a long history of being 15% or more ahead in 2016.
My point though wasn’t so much the attempt to hollow out Starmer by spinning titbits of his record from 5 year stint as DPP actually flipping the polls around, but will this strategy even hurt Starmer? It feels like a political campaign going through the motions, like a sports team in the middle of a slump.
All the usual donors have come to the pub to watch Rishi strip and drop up and down on a poll. A jugs gone round that’s fill to the brim. The usual strategists hired. The usual outlets publishing what’s been given them. But it just looks so bland and half hearted on the page, considering how much it all costs.
Trump on the other hand would make all this actually work. Saville, Saville, Saville.
Obviously Boris would have been better at that kind of attack . It doesn’t seem to suit Sunak to go down that road. Personally I think he/they should be highlighting the way Sir Keir has gone back on almost everything he has said in his eight years as a politician; it’s all out there. He plays the ‘Mr Integrity’ card but it’s all nonsense. He does look and sound like someone honest that you’d trust though, so it might be difficult to shift the image.
Better that than shouting that he’s a nonse defender etc, I think. That just gives him the chance to say they’re acting like internet conspiracy theorists, and look more statesmanlike as a result
Interesting development out of Colorado. The state Supreme Court has barred Trump from the ballot.
Donald Trump is barred from Colorado’s 2024 primary ballot, the state Supreme Court rules in a landmark decision. The ruling was made under an 1868 provision of the Constitution that prevents insurrectionists from holding office.
Mr Sunak will use the LE as a test run for a June election. When the results are, ahem, not quite what he needs then he will panic and delay until November.
It doesn't matter. Neither immigration nor oysters will save him
My assumption all along had been that he would go late. Why wouldn't he? But then came the autumn statement, and we have plenty of evidence that Plan A is 2nd May.
Sunak needs momentum - not just to try and recover the polls, but also to bowl out the lunatics in the five families / ReFUK. A push towards an election is the best momentum he will get.
By March they will know that the Rwanda bill has bogged down. That's its purpose. Blame the Blob / Labour / Woke, run an immigration election, "the people's priorities vs Labour" etc and hope that Starmer trips himself up.
Or, don't. Wait it out. Rwanda bogs down with no end in sight. 5 Families out for blood, Farage out for more. Polls not closing. And no cards left to play.
And his choice is either to put down his one remaining chip in May, when it almost certainly loses, or bide his time until October when he even more almost certainly loses. The effect of people remortgaging trumps any tax cuts he can pretend to offer.
Even if May leads to a smaller defeat for the party, October leads to a better, longer stay in No 10 for Sunak and a longer time in Parliament for many of his MPs.
And that's his dilemma.
Interesting polling today on homeowners.
I expected that the owners without mortgages would be either wealthy or retired or both. Nonetheless Labour running a pretty close second in a core Tory demographic.
Can Starmer get out the grey vote?
By definition, anyone who has a house with no mortgage significantly before retirement in today's housing market must be fairly wealthy.*
A much bigger problem is they may not feel as if they are.
*As of today, this could include me although having fixed for 5 years at 1.6% two years ago I'm in no hurry to actually do so.
Or it just means that you're married, don't live in the SE and live within your means. I'm 36, mortgage free* having bought 11 years ago. Wife did the same, when we got married, we sold her house and paid off the mortgage on mine. Neither of us ever earnt more than £30k pa. If I hadn't got married I was still on track to clear my mortgage in my early 40s on just my income, although the current bust of high interest rates would have hurt a bit.
*Technically, I've still got a mortgage of £20k, but only because it's fixed at a stupidly low rate and it's cheaper to pay the interest on it and claim the interest on £20k in a savings account than to pay the ERC to clear it.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
If hmrc ever tried taking two pound out of every 3 I earned I would say fuck it and make money illegaly and wouldn't pay them a penny. If they can act like a bandit then they can fuck right off and so will I
In which case you'd go to prison.
You are aware that many people in the benefits trap (limited hours a week or lose benefits) do additional hours for their employers off the books, if they can?
If they can’t get that, they find someone else to employ them “on the black”.
The lack of enforcement suggests that either HMRC can’t be bothered or don’t have the resources to fight it.
The 'benefits trap' doesn't work like that.
No legit employer is going to allow an employee to do additional hours for their employers off the books - the risks are too great.
If people or companies choose to take the risk of working in the black economy why would they wait for a tax hike to make them do that?
That said I had some jolly nice oysters at the Red Lion and Sun, a gastropub in Highgate, yesterday
You can find oyster quality in odd places, but the more peripheral tend to be more variable (and you do NOT want variablity in oysters)
Your right I do not want variability in my oysters. I want no oysters.
Can't trust a man who doesn't love oysters. Sorry. It is the ultimate test of masculine soundness
It means you have overcome your natural but childish aversion to something that looks like donkey phlegm in an ashtray, and you have thought: I can do this. And you've girded your loins and you've tipped back your half shell and you've slurped it all up and then you've realised OMFG they're fantastic!!! And a lifelong love is born: because you were brave
THAT, my friends, THAT is a man
I have eaten oysters on several occasions they are fucking disgusting. However I am enough of a man to say they are fucking disgusting rather than to go with the flow because they are seen as haute cuisine by people like you who I suspect mostly go along with this shit because to not like oysters or champagne or caviar somehow marks you down as one of the hoi polloi....Oysters really are disgusting, fizzy wine is foul as for caviar it tastes salty is about the only thing you can say about it. You want to pay huge prices for overrated trash be my guest
Matter of taste, I think. I love almost all seafood, oysters included; my wife dislikes almost all, ditto. Posh is irrelevant in this case.
It is a matter of taste and there is certainly a food snobbery around many things like champagne, caviar, oysters . That was the whole gist of leons post in essence....you are not man enough to eat them else you would love them.... now imagine saying that to someone about for example liver which many people detest. Personally I enjoy it but I don't claim people are deficient for not sharing my taste.
Champagne is the worst of it....get offered a glass and go no thanks and its all "but this is champagne" I have tried many from high to low end frankly I would rather put my own urine in a soda stream than drink the muck....hell I would rather have a pint of watneys red barrel than a glass of champagne and that really is foul
Could someone please explain why I am supposed to enjoy champagne more than wine, real ale, malt whisky, or even piss?
Champagne differs from its own uppityness. It’s delicious, though English or Welsh sparkling wine is of course equally delicious, but because it’s seen as an occasion wine most people don’t actually drink it for the taste. Or have too high expectations. Which is a shame. It’s simply a good drink, better than crémants or cava, but not holy water.
No, there is an actual reason. And I have cited it below
Champagne makes me fart.
Oysters are ... ok. I like a seafoody taste, but I find a food you're supposed to drink challenging. I prefer mussels, tbh. Or cockles. Or prawns. And I prefer cava to champagne. Though if I were offered a glass of champagne right now I would cheerfully accept.
Champagne (and Cava) do of course cover a vast array of flavour profiles, varietal mixes, ages etc. But generic Cava plus a tiny dab of fino sherry is a lovely combination.
Interesting development out of Colorado. The state Supreme Court has barred Trump from the ballot.
Donald Trump is barred from Colorado’s 2024 primary ballot, the state Supreme Court rules in a landmark decision. The ruling was made under an 1868 provision of the Constitution that prevents insurrectionists from holding office.
Much as I despise Trump he has not been convicted of insurrection, so does this mean the Colorado Supreme Court has in effect found him guilty of it?
Most of my team are scottish, the ones affected by the new tax rate are already looking at paying more into penisons/salary sacrifice schemes. One also remarked when I mentioned it that most of what it collected was going to be spent on collecting it
1. I thought you were always moaning about how your wages had stagnated and were piss-poor because of globalisation. Yet your team are all earning over £75k?
2. The cost of collection is trivial surely? Plug the figures in, run the calculation and either the employer deducts and pays the tax or the self-employed pay it direct to HMRC.
I don't think it's trivial. I wouldn't like to be the IT team in charge of assessing whether everyone's tax was subject to Scottish tax rates or English ones. But it's small compared to the amount raised by taxation. But my expectation is that this will be a net loss to the Scottish exchequer - they will lose more in discouraging people to earn than they will raise in people paying more tax, even if the cost of collection is ignored. But it will be an interesting experiment.
It’s really simple, if your address has a Scottish postcode your tax code has an S in front of it and you are subject to Scottish tax rates.
Payments need to be reported to HMRC via RTI and the money is paid directly to HMRC alongside payments for other employees
Supposedly the amount raised is £80m or so which is accurate if IR35 remains as it is because (as was pointed out elsewhere) it’s hard to switch to dividends if you are an employee being paid via PAYE
Fair enough. It IS trivial then. I stand corrected.
But, well, yes, it might nominally raise £80m based on tax paid right now. But it will soon have the effect of driving down the amount of tax paid. What would you do if you were earning £80k and tax rates went up to 45% for earnings above £75k? You would cut back the amount you earned, surely - either by paying into pension, or, more likely, doing less work. Or, longer term you might move to England. Certainly your high paying employer would find they could offer more attractive packages to English based staff than Scottish based. And highly paid work would dribble southwards.
Highly paid people are highly paid because they are motivated by money. I find it hard to imagine this won't have an effect.
Some might choose to do less work; others, seeing their net income fall, might choose to do more to maintain their net income.
Most employees of course, have no options for changing their gross income levels, beyond looking for a new job.
I'm not sure that last paragraph is true any more. Certainly in white collar jobs, every workplace I've ever been in has had people who have worked less than a 5 day week, either for childcare reasons, or because they were working down towards retirement, or just because they fancied it. And everyone has been able to buy or sell leave. Personally, I went down to 80% hours when my wife went back to work after maternity leave after my second child was born. Initially it was needed for childcare reasons - that is less pressing now the kids are older, but the main reason I'm not getting back up to full hours is that it would tip me into the higher rate tax band. I'd be doing 20% more work for rather less than 20% more money.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
If hmrc ever tried taking two pound out of every 3 I earned I would say fuck it and make money illegaly and wouldn't pay them a penny. If they can act like a bandit then they can fuck right off and so will I
In which case you'd go to prison.
You are aware that many people in the benefits trap (limited hours a week or lose benefits) do additional hours for their employers off the books, if they can?
If they can’t get that, they find someone else to employ them “on the black”.
The lack of enforcement suggests that either HMRC can’t be bothered or don’t have the resources to fight it.
Most of my team are scottish, the ones affected by the new tax rate are already looking at paying more into penisons/salary sacrifice schemes. One also remarked when I mentioned it that most of what it collected was going to be spent on collecting it
1. I thought you were always moaning about how your wages had stagnated and were piss-poor because of globalisation. Yet your team are all earning over £75k?
2. The cost of collection is trivial surely? Plug the figures in, run the calculation and either the employer deducts and pays the tax or the self-employed pay it direct to HMRC.
I don't think it's trivial. I wouldn't like to be the IT team in charge of assessing whether everyone's tax was subject to Scottish tax rates or English ones. But it's small compared to the amount raised by taxation. But my expectation is that this will be a net loss to the Scottish exchequer - they will lose more in discouraging people to earn than they will raise in people paying more tax, even if the cost of collection is ignored. But it will be an interesting experiment.
It’s really simple, if your address has a Scottish postcode your tax code has an S in front of it and you are subject to Scottish tax rates.
Payments need to be reported to HMRC via RTI and the money is paid directly to HMRC alongside payments for other employees
Supposedly the amount raised is £80m or so which is accurate if IR35 remains as it is because (as was pointed out elsewhere) it’s hard to switch to dividends if you are an employee being paid via PAYE
Fair enough. It IS trivial then. I stand corrected.
But, well, yes, it might nominally raise £80m based on tax paid right now. But it will soon have the effect of driving down the amount of tax paid. What would you do if you were earning £80k and tax rates went up to 45% for earnings above £75k? You would cut back the amount you earned, surely - either by paying into pension, or, more likely, doing less work. Or, longer term you might move to England. Certainly your high paying employer would find they could offer more attractive packages to English based staff than Scottish based. And highly paid work would dribble southwards.
Highly paid people are highly paid because they are motivated by money. I find it hard to imagine this won't have an effect.
Some might choose to do less work; others, seeing their net income fall, might choose to do more to maintain their net income.
Most employees of course, have no options for changing their gross income levels, beyond looking for a new job.
Quite a significant proportion of people have options for changing their gross income levels, such as taking on extra shifts, longer shifts, overtime, or other responsibilities.
And many choose to do so cash-in-hand in order to evade taxes, despite the criminal risk they engage in, in doing so.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
If hmrc ever tried taking two pound out of every 3 I earned I would say fuck it and make money illegaly and wouldn't pay them a penny. If they can act like a bandit then they can fuck right off and so will I
In which case you'd go to prison.
You are aware that many people in the benefits trap (limited hours a week or lose benefits) do additional hours for their employers off the books, if they can?
If they can’t get that, they find someone else to employ them “on the black”.
The lack of enforcement suggests that either HMRC can’t be bothered or don’t have the resources to fight it.
The 'benefits trap' doesn't work like that.
No legit employer is going to allow an employee to do additional hours for their employers off the books - the risks are too great.
If people or companies choose to take the risk of working in the black economy why would they wait for a tax hike to make them do that?
Firstly, you don't understand the bottom of the employment market. Many employers have their legit employees, and pay cash in hand for extra stuff. Blending the two does happen.
Secondly, my point was that people do alter their behaviour - rather than just accept massive tax rates, they will do some hard core stuff to avoid them.
Middle class people have other ways to get out of paying tax. Hence the interesting things that people do with agricultural land, despite not being farmers. And that is not limited to the ultra rich.
Most of my team are scottish, the ones affected by the new tax rate are already looking at paying more into penisons/salary sacrifice schemes. One also remarked when I mentioned it that most of what it collected was going to be spent on collecting it
1. I thought you were always moaning about how your wages had stagnated and were piss-poor because of globalisation. Yet your team are all earning over £75k?
2. The cost of collection is trivial surely? Plug the figures in, run the calculation and either the employer deducts and pays the tax or the self-employed pay it direct to HMRC.
I don't think it's trivial. I wouldn't like to be the IT team in charge of assessing whether everyone's tax was subject to Scottish tax rates or English ones. But it's small compared to the amount raised by taxation. But my expectation is that this will be a net loss to the Scottish exchequer - they will lose more in discouraging people to earn than they will raise in people paying more tax, even if the cost of collection is ignored. But it will be an interesting experiment.
It’s really simple, if your address has a Scottish postcode your tax code has an S in front of it and you are subject to Scottish tax rates.
Payments need to be reported to HMRC via RTI and the money is paid directly to HMRC alongside payments for other employees
Supposedly the amount raised is £80m or so which is accurate if IR35 remains as it is because (as was pointed out elsewhere) it’s hard to switch to dividends if you are an employee being paid via PAYE
Fair enough. It IS trivial then. I stand corrected.
But, well, yes, it might nominally raise £80m based on tax paid right now. But it will soon have the effect of driving down the amount of tax paid. What would you do if you were earning £80k and tax rates went up to 45% for earnings above £75k? You would cut back the amount you earned, surely - either by paying into pension, or, more likely, doing less work. Or, longer term you might move to England. Certainly your high paying employer would find they could offer more attractive packages to English based staff than Scottish based. And highly paid work would dribble southwards.
Highly paid people are highly paid because they are motivated by money. I find it hard to imagine this won't have an effect.
Some might choose to do less work; others, seeing their net income fall, might choose to do more to maintain their net income.
Most employees of course, have no options for changing their gross income levels, beyond looking for a new job.
Quite a significant proportion of people have options for changing their gross income levels, such as taking on extra shifts, longer shifts, overtime, or other responsibilities.
And many choose to do so cash-in-hand in order to evade taxes, despite the criminal risk they engage in, in doing so.
My brother's a plumber. Neither he nor any of his trade mates will touch cash in hand. Too much to lose.
State of Minnesota today authorized new state flag:
"The commission finalized the design on Tuesday, December 19, 2023 by removing the stripes and altering the shape of the star, making the finalized design an all light-blue banner with a simplified shape of Minnesota on the hoist in dark-blue and a simplified eight-pointed star in the center of the shape. Unless the legislature decides to take further action, the new flag is set to begin flying on May 11, 2024."
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
If hmrc ever tried taking two pound out of every 3 I earned I would say fuck it and make money illegaly and wouldn't pay them a penny. If they can act like a bandit then they can fuck right off and so will I
In which case you'd go to prison.
You are aware that many people in the benefits trap (limited hours a week or lose benefits) do additional hours for their employers off the books, if they can?
If they can’t get that, they find someone else to employ them “on the black”.
The lack of enforcement suggests that either HMRC can’t be bothered or don’t have the resources to fight it.
The 'benefits trap' doesn't work like that.
No legit employer is going to allow an employee to do additional hours for their employers off the books - the risks are too great.
If people or companies choose to take the risk of working in the black economy why would they wait for a tax hike to make them do that?
Wow, sweet summer's child.
A great many employers are not legit though.
And given that the employer sees one a tiny percentage of what they pay their employee goes to the employee rather than HMRC, and the employer is getting taxed too for the privilege (eg Employers NIC), then for not entirely legit employers there is a humungous incentive to cook the books and pay the employee partially on and partially off the books.
Especially in cash-related businesses. Getting a paycheck that says one amount, then an envelope with an extra amount, is far from unheard of.
And its not that a tax hike makes them do that, its that the cost-benefit ratio of being dodgy changes as tax rates change. If there's minimal incentive to do that, but a great risk if caught, then people won't be dodgy. If there's a risk if caught, but a huge incentive to do it, then many more people will be dodgy.
That said I had some jolly nice oysters at the Red Lion and Sun, a gastropub in Highgate, yesterday
You can find oyster quality in odd places, but the more peripheral tend to be more variable (and you do NOT want variablity in oysters)
Your right I do not want variability in my oysters. I want no oysters.
Can't trust a man who doesn't love oysters. Sorry. It is the ultimate test of masculine soundness
It means you have overcome your natural but childish aversion to something that looks like donkey phlegm in an ashtray, and you have thought: I can do this. And you've girded your loins and you've tipped back your half shell and you've slurped it all up and then you've realised OMFG they're fantastic!!! And a lifelong love is born: because you were brave
THAT, my friends, THAT is a man
I have eaten oysters on several occasions they are fucking disgusting. However I am enough of a man to say they are fucking disgusting rather than to go with the flow because they are seen as haute cuisine by people like you who I suspect mostly go along with this shit because to not like oysters or champagne or caviar somehow marks you down as one of the hoi polloi....Oysters really are disgusting, fizzy wine is foul as for caviar it tastes salty is about the only thing you can say about it. You want to pay huge prices for overrated trash be my guest
Matter of taste, I think. I love almost all seafood, oysters included; my wife dislikes almost all, ditto. Posh is irrelevant in this case.
It is a matter of taste and there is certainly a food snobbery around many things like champagne, caviar, oysters . That was the whole gist of leons post in essence....you are not man enough to eat them else you would love them.... now imagine saying that to someone about for example liver which many people detest. Personally I enjoy it but I don't claim people are deficient for not sharing my taste.
Champagne is the worst of it....get offered a glass and go no thanks and its all "but this is champagne" I have tried many from high to low end frankly I would rather put my own urine in a soda stream than drink the muck....hell I would rather have a pint of watneys red barrel than a glass of champagne and that really is foul
Could someone please explain why I am supposed to enjoy champagne more than wine, real ale, malt whisky, or even piss?
Champagne differs from its own uppityness. It’s delicious, though English or Welsh sparkling wine is of course equally delicious, but because it’s seen as an occasion wine most people don’t actually drink it for the taste. Or have too high expectations. Which is a shame. It’s simply a good drink, better than crémants or cava, but not holy water.
No, there is an actual reason. And I have cited it below
Champagne makes me fart.
Oysters are ... ok. I like a seafoody taste, but I find a food you're supposed to drink challenging. I prefer mussels, tbh. Or cockles. Or prawns. And I prefer cava to champagne. Though if I were offered a glass of champagne right now I would cheerfully accept.
Champagne (and Cava) do of course cover a vast array of flavour profiles, varietal mixes, ages etc. But generic Cava plus a tiny dab of fino sherry is a lovely combination.
THINGS I WISH I KNEW WHEN I WAS 17, PART 999
If you don't want to get drunk: diet coke
If you do want to get drunk: diet coke and vodka
Diet coke is the devil's work. Go full fat or don't bother, in my view. I once saw a study which I leapt on because it aligned to my personal prejudices: Diet Coke makes you fat. Aspartane stops your body burning off fat, so while you are absorbing fewer calories, you aren't converting fat to energy at the same level.
There are very few manly things you can do with fizzy drinks. But Lemmy was known for drinking Jack Daniels and coke (when he didn't want to get drunk - just Jack Daniels when he did).
Personally, I consume coke about once every 6 months, generally when I am absolutely physically exhausted and my body craves an immediate sugar hit.
Interesting development out of Colorado. The state Supreme Court has barred Trump from the ballot.
Donald Trump is barred from Colorado’s 2024 primary ballot, the state Supreme Court rules in a landmark decision. The ruling was made under an 1868 provision of the Constitution that prevents insurrectionists from holding office.
A significant development but will other states follow suit? If they do and the SC upholds their rulings Trump's presidential campaign could be effectively torpedoed if he cannot get on the ballot in half the states
Interesting development out of Colorado. The state Supreme Court has barred Trump from the ballot.
Donald Trump is barred from Colorado’s 2024 primary ballot, the state Supreme Court rules in a landmark decision. The ruling was made under an 1868 provision of the Constitution that prevents insurrectionists from holding office.
Much as I despise Trump he has not been convicted of insurrection, so does this mean the Colorado Supreme Court has in effect found him guilty of it?
Yes. The judge at first instance had found him guilty of meeting the threshhold for this - but still didn't think the Constitution barred him. The Supreme Court thinks he had passed the test for the being disbarred on both tests.
It - and other State's decisions - will go to the Supreme Court. Interestingly, they have recently agreed to an expedited timetable for hearing submissions on whether they should hear the case for Trump claiming he has absolute immunity for all acts undertaken as President. Basically, was Trump imbued by the Constitution with the powers of George III?
Most of my team are scottish, the ones affected by the new tax rate are already looking at paying more into penisons/salary sacrifice schemes. One also remarked when I mentioned it that most of what it collected was going to be spent on collecting it
1. I thought you were always moaning about how your wages had stagnated and were piss-poor because of globalisation. Yet your team are all earning over £75k?
2. The cost of collection is trivial surely? Plug the figures in, run the calculation and either the employer deducts and pays the tax or the self-employed pay it direct to HMRC.
I don't think it's trivial. I wouldn't like to be the IT team in charge of assessing whether everyone's tax was subject to Scottish tax rates or English ones. But it's small compared to the amount raised by taxation. But my expectation is that this will be a net loss to the Scottish exchequer - they will lose more in discouraging people to earn than they will raise in people paying more tax, even if the cost of collection is ignored. But it will be an interesting experiment.
It’s really simple, if your address has a Scottish postcode your tax code has an S in front of it and you are subject to Scottish tax rates.
Payments need to be reported to HMRC via RTI and the money is paid directly to HMRC alongside payments for other employees
Supposedly the amount raised is £80m or so which is accurate if IR35 remains as it is because (as was pointed out elsewhere) it’s hard to switch to dividends if you are an employee being paid via PAYE
Fair enough. It IS trivial then. I stand corrected.
But, well, yes, it might nominally raise £80m based on tax paid right now. But it will soon have the effect of driving down the amount of tax paid. What would you do if you were earning £80k and tax rates went up to 45% for earnings above £75k? You would cut back the amount you earned, surely - either by paying into pension, or, more likely, doing less work. Or, longer term you might move to England. Certainly your high paying employer would find they could offer more attractive packages to English based staff than Scottish based. And highly paid work would dribble southwards.
Highly paid people are highly paid because they are motivated by money. I find it hard to imagine this won't have an effect.
Some might choose to do less work; others, seeing their net income fall, might choose to do more to maintain their net income.
Most employees of course, have no options for changing their gross income levels, beyond looking for a new job.
Quite a significant proportion of people have options for changing their gross income levels, such as taking on extra shifts, longer shifts, overtime, or other responsibilities.
And many choose to do so cash-in-hand in order to evade taxes, despite the criminal risk they engage in, in doing so.
My brother's a plumber. Neither he nor any of his trade mates will touch cash in hand. Too much to lose.
Good for them.
Many people do and our tax system encourages it, especially with obscene 70%+ tax rates. Too much to gain.
A positive profile of Sunak. Yes it’s The Times, but Tom Peck hates the Tories, so quite unusual, albeit damning with faint praise ‘Tetchy’ Rishi Sunak has a new persona: the arrogant nerd
That said I had some jolly nice oysters at the Red Lion and Sun, a gastropub in Highgate, yesterday
You can find oyster quality in odd places, but the more peripheral tend to be more variable (and you do NOT want variablity in oysters)
Your right I do not want variability in my oysters. I want no oysters.
Can't trust a man who doesn't love oysters. Sorry. It is the ultimate test of masculine soundness
It means you have overcome your natural but childish aversion to something that looks like donkey phlegm in an ashtray, and you have thought: I can do this. And you've girded your loins and you've tipped back your half shell and you've slurped it all up and then you've realised OMFG they're fantastic!!! And a lifelong love is born: because you were brave
THAT, my friends, THAT is a man
I have eaten oysters on several occasions they are fucking disgusting. However I am enough of a man to say they are fucking disgusting rather than to go with the flow because they are seen as haute cuisine by people like you who I suspect mostly go along with this shit because to not like oysters or champagne or caviar somehow marks you down as one of the hoi polloi....Oysters really are disgusting, fizzy wine is foul as for caviar it tastes salty is about the only thing you can say about it. You want to pay huge prices for overrated trash be my guest
Matter of taste, I think. I love almost all seafood, oysters included; my wife dislikes almost all, ditto. Posh is irrelevant in this case.
It is a matter of taste and there is certainly a food snobbery around many things like champagne, caviar, oysters . That was the whole gist of leons post in essence....you are not man enough to eat them else you would love them.... now imagine saying that to someone about for example liver which many people detest. Personally I enjoy it but I don't claim people are deficient for not sharing my taste.
Champagne is the worst of it....get offered a glass and go no thanks and its all "but this is champagne" I have tried many from high to low end frankly I would rather put my own urine in a soda stream than drink the muck....hell I would rather have a pint of watneys red barrel than a glass of champagne and that really is foul
Could someone please explain why I am supposed to enjoy champagne more than wine, real ale, malt whisky, or even piss?
Champagne differs from its own uppityness. It’s delicious, though English or Welsh sparkling wine is of course equally delicious, but because it’s seen as an occasion wine most people don’t actually drink it for the taste. Or have too high expectations. Which is a shame. It’s simply a good drink, better than crémants or cava, but not holy water.
No, there is an actual reason. And I have cited it below
Champagne makes me fart.
Oysters are ... ok. I like a seafoody taste, but I find a food you're supposed to drink challenging. I prefer mussels, tbh. Or cockles. Or prawns. And I prefer cava to champagne. Though if I were offered a glass of champagne right now I would cheerfully accept.
Champagne (and Cava) do of course cover a vast array of flavour profiles, varietal mixes, ages etc. But generic Cava plus a tiny dab of fino sherry is a lovely combination.
THINGS I WISH I KNEW WHEN I WAS 17, PART 999
If you don't want to get drunk: diet coke
If you do want to get drunk: diet coke and vodka
Diet coke is the devil's work. Go full fat or don't bother, in my view. I once saw a study which I leapt on because it aligned to my personal prejudices: Diet Coke makes you fat. Aspartane stops your body burning off fat, so while you are absorbing fewer calories, you aren't converting fat to energy at the same level.
There are very few manly things you can do with fizzy drinks. But Lemmy was known for drinking Jack Daniels and coke (when he didn't want to get drunk - just Jack Daniels when he did).
Personally, I consume coke about once every 6 months, generally when I am absolutely physically exhausted and my body craves an immediate sugar hit.
Absolutely mental, the bastards will not get a penny from me, I will just stick more in pension and get tax relief and they will miss out on the VAT, spending etc. Morons could not run a bath
Is that the sound of the Laffer Curve… laffing?
Thing is, most of the time the laffer curve is (proven) rubbish. But when you have a devolved administration that’s in the same country as and right next door to - and defines itself by its difference to - another regime where the rate is very visibly lower, it does rather focus the mind.
We see the same in the US with state taxes. But this is good. We need experimentation. If higher taxes mean better services then there’s a trade off for people to consider.
You won't have any issue presenting that proof in simple and assimilable terms I take it.
Laffer curve aside there’s definitely an iron rule - let’s call it the Lucky Guy curve - that states that when TimS posts something at a time of day LuckyGuy is online, it will be met within seconds by a withering riposte. Even when the original post is actually sympathetic to his world view.
The original claim was made based on zero actual data. Subsequent analysis shows what is common sense: that higher tax rates raise more tax, unless they go completely bonkers and lead to behavioural change (usually emigration).
Tax policy is complicated and there are no simple rules that can explain taxpayer behaviour. If there were we’d long ago have solved our fiscal problems.
There are one or two things about the Laffer curve which have to be true. At 0% tax rate you raise nothing, and at 100% rate you will in the medium run raise nothing, while making people with any assets at all cross.
As the same basically will apply to a 0.001% rate (there are exceptions) and a 99.8% rate then it follows that there must be a figure somewhere between the two which is the sweet spot. This could be called the Colbert point, after the man who pointed out that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".
It will likely very considerably between societies, in the real world - but I've seen a few academic papers which put it somewhere between 60 and 70%.
Which would probably have given poor old Laffer conniptions. The great bluffer.
Accords with my sense of it. I've always thought 65%. One for one, two for the pot. No modelling, just pure instinct.
HMRC did some work a decade ago which suggested there is a big drop off after 50%
One for me, one for the pot seems reasonable. More than that begins to feel unfair.
If hmrc ever tried taking two pound out of every 3 I earned I would say fuck it and make money illegaly and wouldn't pay them a penny. If they can act like a bandit then they can fuck right off and so will I
In which case you'd go to prison.
You are aware that many people in the benefits trap (limited hours a week or lose benefits) do additional hours for their employers off the books, if they can?
If they can’t get that, they find someone else to employ them “on the black”.
The lack of enforcement suggests that either HMRC can’t be bothered or don’t have the resources to fight it.
The 'benefits trap' doesn't work like that.
No legit employer is going to allow an employee to do additional hours for their employers off the books - the risks are too great.
If people or companies choose to take the risk of working in the black economy why would they wait for a tax hike to make them do that?
Wow, sweet summer's child.
A great many employers are not legit though.
And given that the employer sees one a tiny percentage of what they pay their employee goes to the employee rather than HMRC, and the employer is getting taxed too for the privilege (eg Employers NIC), then for not entirely legit employers there is a humungous incentive to cook the books and pay the employee partially on and partially off the books.
Especially in cash-related businesses. Getting a paycheck that says one amount, then an envelope with an extra amount, is far from unheard of.
And its not that a tax hike makes them do that, its that the cost-benefit ratio of being dodgy changes as tax rates change. If there's minimal incentive to do that, but a great risk if caught, then people won't be dodgy. If there's a risk if caught, but a huge incentive to do it, then many more people will be dodgy.
Many of these people seem to be hairdressers to PBers.
Interesting development out of Colorado. The state Supreme Court has barred Trump from the ballot.
Donald Trump is barred from Colorado’s 2024 primary ballot, the state Supreme Court rules in a landmark decision. The ruling was made under an 1868 provision of the Constitution that prevents insurrectionists from holding office.
Much as I despise Trump he has not been convicted of insurrection, so does this mean the Colorado Supreme Court has in effect found him guilty of it?
Yes. The judge at first instance had found him guilty of meeting the threshhold for this - but still didn't think the Constitution barred him. The Supreme Court thinks he had passed the test for the being disbarred on both tests.
It - and other State's decisions - will go to the Supreme Court. Interestingly, they have recently agreed to an expedited timetable for hearing submissions on whether they should hear the case for Trump claiming he has absolute immunity for all acts undertaken as President. Basically, was Trump imbued by the Constitution with the powers of George III?
Be an interesting judgment....
If the absolute immunity judgment is not 9-0 against him, then there's something wrong.
Interesting development out of Colorado. The state Supreme Court has barred Trump from the ballot.
Donald Trump is barred from Colorado’s 2024 primary ballot, the state Supreme Court rules in a landmark decision. The ruling was made under an 1868 provision of the Constitution that prevents insurrectionists from holding office.
Much as I despise Trump he has not been convicted of insurrection, so does this mean the Colorado Supreme Court has in effect found him guilty of it?
On Trump: if the worst comes to the worst, and Trump goes fully fascist, seeing his occasional pre-politics forays into showbiz (like his bried cameo in Home Alone 2) will be increasingly jarring. It would be like seeing Hitler playing a small walk-on part in The General*.
*1926 Buster Keaton film. I was struggling for a suitable similie. Turns out comedy films from the 1920s aren't actually as well known as I'd hoped when I started down this train of thought.
Eldest child has diarrhea - mildly before bed, all on toilet, then we heard him get up and go to the toilet. Wife went to check he was ok and called for me. We discovered a trail of excrement beginning on his duvet, down the ladder (on each step), through the ladder with some splatters on to child no. 2's bedding (luckily her head is at other end) trail on to landing where he, in his wisdom removed his pyjama bottoms, trail on into bathroom.
My wife helped him into shower while I followed trail with various surface appropriate cleaning products. After a bit of a cuddle downstairs he was put back into new bedding and we hope there's no more.
Still, I did - after fetching my wife and I well earned drink - get to comment: "well... that was a proper shit show, wasn't it?"
ETA: I also have a new answer for the 'describe a difficult sitatuation and how you dealt with it' job interview question. Hire parents of small children, they can handle anything
That said I had some jolly nice oysters at the Red Lion and Sun, a gastropub in Highgate, yesterday
You can find oyster quality in odd places, but the more peripheral tend to be more variable (and you do NOT want variablity in oysters)
Your right I do not want variability in my oysters. I want no oysters.
Can't trust a man who doesn't love oysters. Sorry. It is the ultimate test of masculine soundness
It means you have overcome your natural but childish aversion to something that looks like donkey phlegm in an ashtray, and you have thought: I can do this. And you've girded your loins and you've tipped back your half shell and you've slurped it all up and then you've realised OMFG they're fantastic!!! And a lifelong love is born: because you were brave
THAT, my friends, THAT is a man
I have eaten oysters on several occasions they are fucking disgusting. However I am enough of a man to say they are fucking disgusting rather than to go with the flow because they are seen as haute cuisine by people like you who I suspect mostly go along with this shit because to not like oysters or champagne or caviar somehow marks you down as one of the hoi polloi....Oysters really are disgusting, fizzy wine is foul as for caviar it tastes salty is about the only thing you can say about it. You want to pay huge prices for overrated trash be my guest
Matter of taste, I think. I love almost all seafood, oysters included; my wife dislikes almost all, ditto. Posh is irrelevant in this case.
It is a matter of taste and there is certainly a food snobbery around many things like champagne, caviar, oysters . That was the whole gist of leons post in essence....you are not man enough to eat them else you would love them.... now imagine saying that to someone about for example liver which many people detest. Personally I enjoy it but I don't claim people are deficient for not sharing my taste.
Champagne is the worst of it....get offered a glass and go no thanks and its all "but this is champagne" I have tried many from high to low end frankly I would rather put my own urine in a soda stream than drink the muck....hell I would rather have a pint of watneys red barrel than a glass of champagne and that really is foul
Could someone please explain why I am supposed to enjoy champagne more than wine, real ale, malt whisky, or even piss?
Champagne differs from its own uppityness. It’s delicious, though English or Welsh sparkling wine is of course equally delicious, but because it’s seen as an occasion wine most people don’t actually drink it for the taste. Or have too high expectations. Which is a shame. It’s simply a good drink, better than crémants or cava, but not holy water.
No, there is an actual reason. And I have cited it below
Champagne makes me fart.
Oysters are ... ok. I like a seafoody taste, but I find a food you're supposed to drink challenging. I prefer mussels, tbh. Or cockles. Or prawns. And I prefer cava to champagne. Though if I were offered a glass of champagne right now I would cheerfully accept.
Champagne (and Cava) do of course cover a vast array of flavour profiles, varietal mixes, ages etc. But generic Cava plus a tiny dab of fino sherry is a lovely combination.
THINGS I WISH I KNEW WHEN I WAS 17, PART 999
If you don't want to get drunk: diet coke
If you do want to get drunk: diet coke and vodka
Diet coke is the devil's work. Go full fat or don't bother, in my view. I once saw a study which I leapt on because it aligned to my personal prejudices: Diet Coke makes you fat. Aspartane stops your body burning off fat, so while you are absorbing fewer calories, you aren't converting fat to energy at the same level.
There are very few manly things you can do with fizzy drinks. But Lemmy was known for drinking Jack Daniels and coke (when he didn't want to get drunk - just Jack Daniels when he did).
Personally, I consume coke about once every 6 months, generally when I am absolutely physically exhausted and my body craves an immediate sugar hit.
I couldn't disagree more.
Sugar/carbs are the problem with weight and the reason why we have an obesity problem and Coke is packed full of the stuff.
For too long people have been fed the fallacy that fat causes people to be fat, and that "fat-free" food is good for you. Sugary fat-free food is not good for you.
Drinking a diet coke with fries and other stuff may see you be obese, but its because of the fries and other stuff, not because of the diet coke.
The best way I can manage my weight is by being on a ketogenic/carnivore diet. Eat more protein (especially meat) and fats, eat less carbs, that's the key to losing weight sustainably.
Whether you drink a diet soft drink or water on the side - they're largely nutritionally the same.
Interesting development out of Colorado. The state Supreme Court has barred Trump from the ballot.
Donald Trump is barred from Colorado’s 2024 primary ballot, the state Supreme Court rules in a landmark decision. The ruling was made under an 1868 provision of the Constitution that prevents insurrectionists from holding office.
A significant development but will other states follow suit? If they do and the SC upholds their rulings Trump's presidential campaign could be effectively torpedoed if he cannot get on the ballot in half the states
Even if they didn't, this is signifcant - should he be the nominee, he's lost Colorade before he starts. Granted Colorado leans blue anyway, but a significant setback nonetheless, no?
So a footballer who didn’t win the World Cup wins SPOTY. Classic.
It’s about “personality” in sport isn’t it?
Not really - the ‘personality’ is a convenient way of saying sportsman/sportswoman.
Okay. 🙂
Meanwhile, tomorrow’s metro has Prince Andrew sweating over the Christmas holiday 💦
The “I” has MI6 announcing water is wet - to borrow a phrase.
Teaching children they can be born in the wrong body is harmful - Kemi Badenoch owns the Daily Mail tomorrow.
This is just easily ignored guidelines from the government though, so tough talk and headlines like this is cheap sometimes, isn’t it?
Telegraph - Starmer frees dangerous criminals. “What Starmer did has a terrible impact on my family. It shouldn’t have been allowed.”
Sunak has spent a lot Tory money on election guru’s, to hollow out Starmer with this stuff slipped into friendly media. Why does it feel like it won’t work?
Because Labour are such heavy odds on favourites, it doesn’t make sense to think that they won’t win. I can’t see how they won’t win myself.
But NOM was 1/10 in 2015, and people on here were talking of it as free money for months before the GE
Remain was big odds on and tipped as value at 2/9 on here in 2016. It was 1/12 at the close of polling and it lost
Then Theresa May’s Tories were 1/6 to get a majority in 2017 and that didn’t happen either
The only successful fav has been Boris’s GE, and this site was getting bombarded with Corbynites saying it was going to be a lot closer than the betting made it
So, I’m with you, I think it’s all over. But three of the last four big favs in elections have been turned over when they seemed certain to win
It’s also a case how long polls have been set on something, that makes the turn around a shock. Neither leave or remain had a long history of being 15% or more ahead in 2016.
My point though wasn’t so much the attempt to hollow out Starmer by spinning titbits of his record from 5 year stint as DPP actually flipping the polls around, but will this strategy even hurt Starmer? It feels like a political campaign going through the motions, like a sports team in the middle of a slump.
All the usual donors have come to the pub to watch Rishi strip and drop up and down on a poll. A jugs gone round that’s fill to the brim. The usual strategists hired. The usual outlets publishing what’s been given them. But it just looks so bland and half hearted on the page, considering how much it all costs.
Trump on the other hand would make all this actually work. Saville, Saville, Saville.
Obviously Boris would have been better at that kind of attack . It doesn’t seem to suit Sunak to go down that road. Personally I think he/they should be highlighting the way Sir Keir has gone back on almost everything he has said in his eight years as a politician; it’s all out there. He plays the ‘Mr Integrity’ card but it’s all nonsense. He does look and sound like someone honest that you’d trust though, so it might be difficult to shift the image.
Better that than shouting that he’s a nonse defender etc, I think. That just gives him the chance to say they’re acting like internet conspiracy theorists, and look more statesmanlike as a result
Agreed.
The better cards the Tories have to play are, yes, it’s been tough, but we’ve turned a corner, with us that means tax cuts, with Labour that means Green Taxes.
But just as Sunak is not the Trumpian “Saville, Saville, Saville” effective attack dog, nor does his incessant upbeat messaging work with the sober, yes it’s been tough, we’ve turned the corner, you now have the choice of green shoots nourished into tax cuts under us, or green shoots trampled by Labours ideological commitments under them.
That sober message handled deftly, sober statesmanlike, would narrow the polls.
> Colorado's 2024 electoral vote = 10; not huge but hardly chopped liver.
> However, likelihood of Trump winning these 10 EV next year is slim to none.
> Personally worry that somehow this could lead to Biden LOSING the CO EVs, due to Trump being barred from ballot.
> IF that happens, as I reckon SCOTUS will find a way - perhaps even a good way at least as precedent - to keep him on the ballot, if he otherwise qualifies, in all 50 states.
> Last major party candidate who was kept off the ballot in any state, was Harry Truman in Alabama in 1948, when the official POTUS nominee of Alabama Democratic Party was Strom Thurmond, who in other states was candidate for rebel (in more ways than one) States Rights Democratic Party.
That said I had some jolly nice oysters at the Red Lion and Sun, a gastropub in Highgate, yesterday
You can find oyster quality in odd places, but the more peripheral tend to be more variable (and you do NOT want variablity in oysters)
Your right I do not want variability in my oysters. I want no oysters.
Can't trust a man who doesn't love oysters. Sorry. It is the ultimate test of masculine soundness
It means you have overcome your natural but childish aversion to something that looks like donkey phlegm in an ashtray, and you have thought: I can do this. And you've girded your loins and you've tipped back your half shell and you've slurped it all up and then you've realised OMFG they're fantastic!!! And a lifelong love is born: because you were brave
THAT, my friends, THAT is a man
I have eaten oysters on several occasions they are fucking disgusting. However I am enough of a man to say they are fucking disgusting rather than to go with the flow because they are seen as haute cuisine by people like you who I suspect mostly go along with this shit because to not like oysters or champagne or caviar somehow marks you down as one of the hoi polloi....Oysters really are disgusting, fizzy wine is foul as for caviar it tastes salty is about the only thing you can say about it. You want to pay huge prices for overrated trash be my guest
Matter of taste, I think. I love almost all seafood, oysters included; my wife dislikes almost all, ditto. Posh is irrelevant in this case.
It is a matter of taste and there is certainly a food snobbery around many things like champagne, caviar, oysters . That was the whole gist of leons post in essence....you are not man enough to eat them else you would love them.... now imagine saying that to someone about for example liver which many people detest. Personally I enjoy it but I don't claim people are deficient for not sharing my taste.
Champagne is the worst of it....get offered a glass and go no thanks and its all "but this is champagne" I have tried many from high to low end frankly I would rather put my own urine in a soda stream than drink the muck....hell I would rather have a pint of watneys red barrel than a glass of champagne and that really is foul
Could someone please explain why I am supposed to enjoy champagne more than wine, real ale, malt whisky, or even piss?
Champagne differs from its own uppityness. It’s delicious, though English or Welsh sparkling wine is of course equally delicious, but because it’s seen as an occasion wine most people don’t actually drink it for the taste. Or have too high expectations. Which is a shame. It’s simply a good drink, better than crémants or cava, but not holy water.
No, there is an actual reason. And I have cited it below
Champagne makes me fart.
Oysters are ... ok. I like a seafoody taste, but I find a food you're supposed to drink challenging. I prefer mussels, tbh. Or cockles. Or prawns. And I prefer cava to champagne. Though if I were offered a glass of champagne right now I would cheerfully accept.
Champagne (and Cava) do of course cover a vast array of flavour profiles, varietal mixes, ages etc. But generic Cava plus a tiny dab of fino sherry is a lovely combination.
THINGS I WISH I KNEW WHEN I WAS 17, PART 999
If you don't want to get drunk: diet coke
If you do want to get drunk: diet coke and vodka
Diet coke is the devil's work. Go full fat or don't bother, in my view. I once saw a study which I leapt on because it aligned to my personal prejudices: Diet Coke makes you fat. Aspartane stops your body burning off fat, so while you are absorbing fewer calories, you aren't converting fat to energy at the same level.
There are very few manly things you can do with fizzy drinks. But Lemmy was known for drinking Jack Daniels and coke (when he didn't want to get drunk - just Jack Daniels when he did).
Personally, I consume coke about once every 6 months, generally when I am absolutely physically exhausted and my body craves an immediate sugar hit.
I couldn't disagree more.
Sugar/carbs are the problem with weight and the reason why we have an obesity problem and Coke is packed full of the stuff.
For too long people have been fed the fallacy that fat causes people to be fat, and that "fat-free" food is good for you. Sugary fat-free food is not good for you.
Drinking a diet coke with fries and other stuff may see you be obese, but its because of the fries and other stuff, not because of the diet coke.
The best way I can manage my weight is by being on a ketogenic/carnivore diet. Eat more protein (especially meat) and fats, eat less carbs, that's the key to losing weight sustainably.
Whether you drink a diet soft drink or water on the side - they're largely nutritionally the same.
I did say I leapt on the study because it suited my prejudices, not because of any science. Which are: - I'm deeply suspicious of aspartane - the diet coke brand rubs me up the wrong way. (The full fat coke brand does too.) Particularly, at the moment, trying to pretend that coke is in any way a Christmas celebratory drink.
Interesting development out of Colorado. The state Supreme Court has barred Trump from the ballot.
Donald Trump is barred from Colorado’s 2024 primary ballot, the state Supreme Court rules in a landmark decision. The ruling was made under an 1868 provision of the Constitution that prevents insurrectionists from holding office.
A significant development but will other states follow suit? If they do and the SC upholds their rulings Trump's presidential campaign could be effectively torpedoed if he cannot get on the ballot in half the states
Even if they didn't, this is signifcant - should he be the nominee, he's lost Colorade before he starts. Granted Colorado leans blue anyway, but a significant setback nonetheless, no?
And Colorado voted for Bush twice and for Bob Dole, it is not a strong blue state but could go for Trump if he won big.
I remain of the view whether Biden is re elected or not will depend on the courts more than anything else next year, if Trump is not GOP nominee and on the ballot in most states half his supporters would stay home or go 3rd party and Biden then wins by default even if his approval rating little better than now. While if he is convicted of a criminal offence and jailed swing voters will hold their nose and vote to re elect Biden too
Comments
I suspect the same would be said of most people such as teachers and doctors, why put yourself through it when you can just get a mundane job where you go on time and is relatively stress free if you get the same anyway
Laffer consistently argued during his career - and advised Republican administrations - that a cut in US tax rates would increase the tax take. There is no good empirical evidence for his assertions.
Sunak has spent a lot Tory money on election guru’s, to hollow out Starmer with this stuff slipped into friendly media. Why does it feel like it won’t work?
he won his big race, that’s the only reason I’ve heard of Mary Earps
For every single £1 I earn the exchequer gets 54p.
But you'd still do your shelf-stacking* or similar, still earn something, still have it taxed at 100% or face a sanction and maybe starve or lose your accommodation, so my point still stands: the state would still get more than zero income from a tax rate of 100%.
(*In fact, in such a system, and after consideration, you may choose to keep your current, more interesting and less physically demanding IT job rather than the utter boredom of shelf-stacking even if you were financially no better off. I know I would.)
Option B: make a comment based on a pre-judged opinion and not at all on any actual evidence
Somewhat ironic that @IanB2 went for Option B
For those interested in Option A:
Perhaps the best evidence we have at present is that produced by HMRC, and signed off by the Office for Budget Responsibility, in 2012. This suggested that cutting the 50p rate to 45p could reduce revenues by about £3.5 billion in 2015–16 if there was no change in behaviour by affected individuals. However, once one allows for behavioural response, their central estimate was a cost of just £100 million – a very small amount of money. The best available estimate of what reversing the cut would raise is therefore about £100 million too.
https://ifs.org.uk/articles/50p-tax-strolling-across-summit-laffer-curve
Original HMRC analysis they reference:
https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20130129110402/http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/budget2012/excheq-income-tax-2042.pdf
But, well, yes, it might nominally raise £80m based on tax paid right now. But it will soon have the effect of driving down the amount of tax paid. What would you do if you were earning £80k and tax rates went up to 45% for earnings above £75k? You would cut back the amount you earned, surely - either by paying into pension, or, more likely, doing less work. Or, longer term you might move to England. Certainly your high paying employer would find they could offer more attractive packages to English based staff than Scottish based. And highly paid work would dribble southwards.
Highly paid people are highly paid because they are motivated by money. I find it hard to imagine this won't have an effect.
they won’t win. I can’t see how they won’t win myself.
But NOM was 1/10 in 2015, and people on here were talking of it as free money for months before the GE
Remain was big odds on and tipped as value at 2/9 on here in 2016. It was 1/12 at the close of
polling and it lost
Then Theresa May’s Tories were 1/6 to get a majority in 2017 and that didn’t happen either
The only successful fav has been Boris’s GE, and this site was getting bombarded with Corbynites saying it was going to be a lot closer than the betting made it
So, I’m with you, I think it’s all over. But three of the last four big favs in elections have been turned over when they seemed certain to win
The key is that there is a middle and yes there's no objective evidence to settle any disputes but that's true of almost all economics anyway.
The key is to understand the principles, then subjectively evaluate the evidence available and use your own evidence, logic and beliefs to come to an opinion.
If you believe that raising taxes always raises revenue, then you're wrong.
If you believe that cutting taxes always raises revenue (because Laffer Curve), then you're wrong.
65% of them I suspect live at the bottom of my garden.
(Technically a wire transfer but saying that doesn’t feel as good)
Seems to be working.
Isabel Oakeshott
@IsabelOakeshott
·
14h
Has anyone taken a train journey recently that did not involve a litany of excuses and apologies? I was commuting as a kid in the late 80s, and it was better than this. Privatisation has not worked.
What there is evidence against is times when people have misused it. That doesn't make it less real.
There's a reason economics is a social science and not a true science.
I’m not in a line of work, or zone of business ethics, where it would be desirable or easy to switch the nature of income, for example into capital gains. Nor would it be easy or desirable for me to move country to reduce tax. So I stump up the tax. But others do have choices, partly because our tax system is riddled with distortions like the gap between capital and income tax. So behavioural responses to tax are not universal or uniform.
I might do an article on this in January actually, but focused on business taxation. Interesting topic.
I bow to your superior superiority
It would be notable, but it wouldn't be a first ball wicket which wasn't a golden duck. So I maintain that it's a tautology, if only a one-way one.
I can't believe we've found a subject on which you a Bart are lining up together against me.
I don't particularly mind a tautology. 4am in the moring, you say, Mike Oldfield? Fine by me. I just enjoy pointing them out.
In the real world, everyone knows that raising tax rates tends to raise revenue, and reducing them tends to reduce it.
Second order effects depend on the circumstances of the economy at the time. And indeed, in some limited circumstances can tend to reverse the above effects.
Anything much beyond that is political rhetoric, not economics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5LWa18w-BE
I have... many, many questions.
If they can’t get that, they find someone else to employ them “on the black”.
The lack of enforcement suggests that either HMRC can’t be bothered or don’t have the resources to fight it.
Fore most people it’s none of the above.
It’s do I work that extra overtime vs go to the park with my kid? Do I contribute extra to my pension?
An extreme example might be the quandary doctors faced with their pensions - since fixed - where extra work had a disproportionate impact on tax
But as someone in the lower-taxes-to-drive-growth-and-increase-wealth-in-the-long-term camp, I do note that quite often the state needs some money now, rather in some golden future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADMiF0dpAV8&ab_channel=MeidasTouch
I suspect that his award to the state of New York for "disgorgement" is now going to be nearer a billion than $500m. There will be no room for Trump to hide from being found guilty of fraud on multiple counts. Sure, his supporters will scream he has been attacked by the state. But that band will be ever dwindling.
It will be the big political story whilst the first primaries are happening.
Nikki Haley will have a major challenge in rowing back from saying Trump was fit to be President. The only candidate coming out of this with any wider credit is Chris Christie, but the chances of the Republican's saying "you know, he was right about Trump all along" are below zero.
Whether it does in the medium term, is very much debatable and no we don't know that, there's whole swathes of economics done to debate this.
Your logic is like suggesting that firms raising prices tends to increase profits. Of course if the firms who raise prices lose market share to competitors with lower prices, then they can lose their profits rather than gain them - and taxes are no different. There is a naivety to the notion that there's no competitors, there absolutely are whether they be legal (don't do the work), legal avoidance (do the work but engage in legal avoidance like putting in pensions), illegal evasion (cash in hand, absolutely widespread especially for people on obscenely high tax rates on benefits), or other countries (emigration or locating jobs elsewhere).
My point though wasn’t so much the attempt to hollow out Starmer by spinning titbits of his record from 5 year stint as DPP actually flipping the polls around, but will this strategy even hurt Starmer? It feels like a political campaign going through the motions, like a sports team in the middle of a slump.
All the usual donors have come to the pub to watch Rishi strip and drop up and down on a poll. A jugs gone round that’s fill to the brim. The usual strategists hired. The usual outlets publishing what’s been given them. But it just looks so bland and half hearted on the page, considering how much it all costs.
Trump on the other hand would make all this actually work. Saville, Saville, Saville.
Big in France: Macron's party & conservative party reach deal for a dramatic harshening of nation's immigration law.
Includes loosening birthright citizenship, big benefit cuts for immigrants.
Le Pen says this is "ideological victory" for far-right; her party will support bill.
I have never seen any convincing evidence that the 'taxation rates against receipts' line is not more or less a straight line.
I can see reasons why high rates of taxation on income are a bad thing but Laffer is not one of them.
*Technically, I've still got a mortgage of £20k, but only because it's fixed at a stupidly low rate and it's cheaper to pay the interest on it and claim the interest on £20k in a savings account than to pay the ERC to clear it.
As a boxing fan, I would wonder why Leigh Wood wasnt in there in sporting achievement terms given what he has done in the last couple of years. This, though, is just how the cookie crumbles. Profile counts.
Most employees of course, have no options for changing their gross income levels, beyond looking for a new job.
Better that than shouting that he’s a nonse defender etc, I think. That just gives him the chance to say they’re acting like internet conspiracy theorists, and look more statesmanlike as a result
Donald Trump is barred from Colorado’s 2024 primary ballot, the state Supreme Court rules in a landmark decision. The ruling was made under an 1868 provision of the Constitution that prevents insurrectionists from holding office.
Next stop the Supreme Court.
Colorado Supreme Court rules that Trump is "disqualified from holding the office of President" and shouldn't be listed on the ballot.
https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1737250287440564407
No legit employer is going to allow an employee to do additional hours for their employers off the books - the risks are too great.
If people or companies choose to take the risk of working in the black economy why would they wait for a tax hike to make them do that?
Personally, I went down to 80% hours when my wife went back to work after maternity leave after my second child was born. Initially it was needed for childcare reasons - that is less pressing now the kids are older, but the main reason I'm not getting back up to full hours is that it would tip me into the higher rate tax band. I'd be doing 20% more work for rather less than 20% more money.
And many choose to do so cash-in-hand in order to evade taxes, despite the criminal risk they engage in, in doing so.
Ah, my coat. thank you
Secondly, my point was that people do alter their behaviour - rather than just accept massive tax rates, they will do some hard core stuff to avoid them.
Middle class people have other ways to get out of paying tax. Hence the interesting things that people do with agricultural land, despite not being farmers. And that is not limited to the ultra rich.
"The commission finalized the design on Tuesday, December 19, 2023 by removing the stripes and altering the shape of the star, making the finalized design an all light-blue banner with a simplified shape of Minnesota on the hoist in dark-blue and a simplified eight-pointed star in the center of the shape. Unless the legislature decides to take further action, the new flag is set to begin flying on May 11, 2024."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Minnesota
A great many employers are not legit though.
And given that the employer sees one a tiny percentage of what they pay their employee goes to the employee rather than HMRC, and the employer is getting taxed too for the privilege (eg Employers NIC), then for not entirely legit employers there is a humungous incentive to cook the books and pay the employee partially on and partially off the books.
Especially in cash-related businesses. Getting a paycheck that says one amount, then an envelope with an extra amount, is far from unheard of.
And its not that a tax hike makes them do that, its that the cost-benefit ratio of being dodgy changes as tax rates change. If there's minimal incentive to do that, but a great risk if caught, then people won't be dodgy. If there's a risk if caught, but a huge incentive to do it, then many more people will be dodgy.
I once saw a study which I leapt on because it aligned to my personal prejudices: Diet Coke makes you fat. Aspartane stops your body burning off fat, so while you are absorbing fewer calories, you aren't converting fat to energy at the same level.
There are very few manly things you can do with fizzy drinks. But Lemmy was known for drinking Jack Daniels and coke (when he didn't want to get drunk - just Jack Daniels when he did).
Personally, I consume coke about once every 6 months, generally when I am absolutely physically exhausted and my body craves an immediate sugar hit.
It - and other State's decisions - will go to the Supreme Court. Interestingly, they have recently agreed to an expedited timetable for hearing submissions on whether they should hear the case for Trump claiming he has absolute immunity for all acts undertaken as President. Basically, was Trump imbued by the Constitution with the powers of George III?
Be an interesting judgment....
Many people do and our tax system encourages it, especially with obscene 70%+ tax rates. Too much to gain.
‘Tetchy’ Rishi Sunak has a new persona: the arrogant nerd
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/d9cc5945-dd25-4fef-a576-f7dafb5738a3?shareToken=0aaf23c4117d27f34f96aeba052a4edf
*1926 Buster Keaton film. I was struggling for a suitable similie. Turns out comedy films from the 1920s aren't actually as well known as I'd hoped when I started down this train of thought.
Eldest child has diarrhea - mildly before bed, all on toilet, then we heard him get up and go to the toilet. Wife went to check he was ok and called for me. We discovered a trail of excrement beginning on his duvet, down the ladder (on each step), through the ladder with some splatters on to child no. 2's bedding (luckily her head is at other end) trail on to landing where he, in his wisdom removed his pyjama bottoms, trail on into bathroom.
My wife helped him into shower while I followed trail with various surface appropriate cleaning products. After a bit of a cuddle downstairs he was put back into new bedding and we hope there's no more.
Still, I did - after fetching my wife and I well earned drink - get to comment: "well... that was a proper shit show, wasn't it?"
ETA: I also have a new answer for the 'describe a difficult sitatuation and how you dealt with it' job interview question. Hire parents of small children, they can handle anything
Sugar/carbs are the problem with weight and the reason why we have an obesity problem and Coke is packed full of the stuff.
For too long people have been fed the fallacy that fat causes people to be fat, and that "fat-free" food is good for you. Sugary fat-free food is not good for you.
Drinking a diet coke with fries and other stuff may see you be obese, but its because of the fries and other stuff, not because of the diet coke.
The best way I can manage my weight is by being on a ketogenic/carnivore diet. Eat more protein (especially meat) and fats, eat less carbs, that's the key to losing weight sustainably.
Whether you drink a diet soft drink or water on the side - they're largely nutritionally the same.
The better cards the Tories have to play are, yes, it’s been tough, but we’ve turned a corner, with us that means tax cuts, with Labour that means Green Taxes.
But just as Sunak is not the Trumpian “Saville, Saville, Saville” effective attack dog, nor does his incessant upbeat messaging work with the sober, yes it’s been tough, we’ve turned the corner, you now have the choice of green shoots nourished into tax cuts under us, or green shoots trampled by Labours ideological commitments under them.
That sober message handled deftly, sober statesmanlike, would narrow the polls.
> Colorado's 2024 electoral vote = 10; not huge but hardly chopped liver.
> However, likelihood of Trump winning these 10 EV next year is slim to none.
> Personally worry that somehow this could lead to Biden LOSING the CO EVs, due to Trump being barred from ballot.
> IF that happens, as I reckon SCOTUS will find a way - perhaps even a good way at least as precedent - to keep him on the ballot, if he otherwise qualifies, in all 50 states.
> Last major party candidate who was kept off the ballot in any state, was Harry Truman in Alabama in 1948, when the official POTUS nominee of Alabama Democratic Party was Strom Thurmond, who in other states was candidate for rebel (in more ways than one) States Rights Democratic Party.
- I'm deeply suspicious of aspartane
- the diet coke brand rubs me up the wrong way. (The full fat coke brand does too.) Particularly, at the moment, trying to pretend that coke is in any way a Christmas celebratory drink.
I remain of the view whether Biden is re elected or not will depend on the courts more than anything else next year, if Trump is not GOP nominee and on the ballot in most states half his supporters would stay home or go 3rd party and Biden then wins by default even if his approval rating little better than now. While if he is convicted of a criminal offence and jailed swing voters will hold their nose and vote to re elect Biden too