Capital gains tax rates in the UK should be the same as income tax rates, and the vast majority of people agree, and that could raise many billions of pounds a year for the UK exchequer.

Inflation. If rates are equalised then you need to have indexation added back into the system. Otherwise you’re just taxing the decline in the value of money. And there’s no guarantee – at all, rather the other way in fact – that adding indexation back into the system will lead to higher tax revenues.

The private sector is fundamentally unproductive in the UK, compared to the rest of the world; that’s the truth that we have to face.

We face  massive underemployment in this country as a consequence, and that’s the truth that we have to face.

Low productivity requires more labour to perform the same set of tasks. That’s what it actually means. Higher productivity means using less labour to perform that same set of tasks.

And there are whole communities starved of investment in the UK as a consequence of the private sector withdrawing from them, in effect, and that’s the truth that we have to face.

More investment means higher productivity and the employment of less labour to achieve the same tasks.

you can put your head in the sand and you can say, I’m talking nonsense,

Yes, yes, you are.

Financial services do not generate wealth; they merely reallocate it at most, with a (usually significant) margin having been extracted along the way by those making the financial services arrangements.

Places without financial services are richer, are they?

One of the arugments against a wealth tax is how damn difficult it is to define, measure and caclulate wealth:

Given the attention now being given to that group in society, this is significant because it reveals that, despite all the political talk about cracking down on tax avoidance, the UK’s tax authority still does not know how much wealth billionaires actually hold or how much tax they really pay.

Quite. No one really knows how much wealth people have. Which is why a wealth tax etc etc….

One of his wilder contentions is that government doesn;t have to issue bonds at all. But it does so because it provides a safe form of saving for the financial markets. Goodness of the heart style stuff.

UK government debt currently stands at around £2.7 trillion, with the Government’s interest bill this year expected to be around £100bn. David Miles, a member of the OBR’s budget responsibility committee, warned that the decline in full-salary pensions schemes, which were traditionally big buyers of UK government debt, could push up long-term borrowing costs by as much as £20bn.

Those financial markets desire less safe form of savings. So, Govt will have to pay higher coupons or issue less debt. Hey Ho, we get to the same answer whichever logical structure we use, eh?

This data is fascinating because it directly contradicts a great deal of data in HM Revenue & Customs’ own tax gap information on the corporation tax gap.

Bumbledy bumbledy

But if the Hacker Young data is right, and they have a long history of extracting data from HMRC via Freedom of Information requests, then all this corporation tax gap data is nonsense.

Bumbledy bumbeldy

This last point is, perhaps, the most important. I have, for many years, pointed out that the definitions of tax loss included in HMRC’s tax gap data have been open to question. In particular, HMRC has used a spectacularly inappropriate definition of tax avoidance to limit the scale of recognised losses attributed to this cause. Basically, they claim that unless an activity is considered to be tax avoidance under the Disclosure of Tax Avoidance Schemes (DOTAS) rules of 2004, they can ignore it for the purposes of calculating the tax gap. This will be their excuse for ignoring this transfer pricing abuse, because transfer pricing is not required to be disclosed under the DOTAS rules, and so, rather conveniently, falls out of the disclosure requirement for tax gap reporting purposes.

Sigh.

Spud uses a different definition – one pulled from etc – than HMRC. Which is why Spud’s numbers are different from those of HMRC. Of course, it’s Spud – pulled from etc – who is right. Sigh.

So I’ve restated this data, which the ONS has provided on a per-person basis, and there are right now near enough, 68 million people in the UK, although I’m sure not everybody has been counted for certain, and out of those, apparently 14 million are under the age of 18, and let’s be honest, most people under the age of 18 don’t own very much. So, there are, on that basis, near enough 1.9 adult people in every household in the UK.

So, if we restate that information on data per decile and simply make it now data per person rather than wealth per household, we get a different chart,  which is like this. And what that suggests is that, of course, each individual person in each individual decile has less than households do because we’ve divided every number by 1.9. It’s as straightforward as that. And so now we have people in the top 10% having wealth of around £2.3 million each, that’s each, and people in the bottom 10% still have near enough nothing.

ONS also splits it out by age of head of household. Top 10% tend to be 55 to 65. Mortgage paid off, pension topped up ready to be drawn down. Spud doesn’t bother with that.

Analysing wealth without looking at lifecycle effects is utter moronity. But then Spud….