Ritchie\’s found a new dupe

This time his same old report goes out under the banner of the Green Party, with Caroline Lucas headlining.

First up is the Green New Deal: they\’ve still not grasped that by making energy more expensive you destroy more jobs than you create in making energy more expensive. 2:1 according to that Spanish report.

Now the Spanish may or may not be right in their counting: but to, as the Green New Deal does in all its myriad appearances, claim that because a someone now has a job that nett jobs have been created is nonsense. We need to look at the effect upon unemployment of the rise in the cost of energy as well.

We also get a nice little chart about how the debt was brought down after WWII. With no mention of the budget surpluses that were run at the time: nor the inflation which ate into the debt. Tsk, tsk.

You\’ve already guessed that there\’s going to be the argument that pre 2007 spending was just fine and dandy, haven\’t you? It\’s revenue that\’s fallen off a cliff?

Entirely ignoring the point that to be properly Keynesian, back in 2007 and the years before, at the tippy toppy of a vast boom (the longest in our modern history) we should have been running huge budget surpluses. If you\’re a Keynesian that is. So that there was room for both fiscal expansion and also to take on the debt to pay for it.

A proper Keynesian would therefore place the blame with Brown….for not taxing enough or for spending too much (either way) in 2001-2007. A non-Keynesian might look at the same figures and simply blame Brown for pissing away all that money.

This is quite gorgeous:

The second step in this programme is to take
action to close down tax avoidance that exploits
loopholes in our tax system. In 2008 the TUC
estimated that there was £25 billion of tax
avoidance per annum in the UK. The figure has
been disputed – most recently by a coalition
government minister who on one hand claimed this
sum represented legitimate use of loopholes and
was not, therefore, avoidance and who then on the
other hand said the government was determined to
stamp out tax avoidance, leading to serious doubt
if he really understood what he was talking
aboutxvi. It has also been challenged by a Big 4
firm of accountants – but only because they said
that there really was no such thing as tax
avoidance at allxvii. We accept the TUC view that
there is serious tax avoidance in the tax system
– and that this is particularly problematic in
big corporate businesses. That is why many of the
legislative proposals to raise more tax noted
below are aimed at these issues.

That \”TUC reports that\” is in fact Ritchie himself making entirely absurd estimations of the amount of avoidance and evasion. He even says so himself in that very report: \”undoubtedly some of this is the result of legitimate uses of tax allowances\” or some such. And then goes on to insist that there\’s still that £25 billion missing.

And as to \”we accept the TUC view\” well of course you do. It\’s the same damn person writing both reports.

And guess what? We also get an echo of the report Ritchie wrote for PCS, the taxman\’s union. Yup, hire more union members!

But really, the very bestest is at the last. Here\’s their list of references:

The following documents are referenced in this report:
A Green New Deal, The Green New Deal group, New
Economics Foundation, London, 2008
http://www.neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/fil
es/A_Green_New_Deal_1.pdf
The Cuts Won’t Work, The Green New Deal group, New
Economics Foundation, London, 2009
http://www.neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/fil
es/The_Cuts_Wont_Work.pdf
A Socially Just Path to Economic Recovery: TUC
Submission to 2009 Pre Budget Report, Trade Union
Congress, London, 2009
http://www.tuc.org.uk/extras/pbrsubmission2009.pdf
A Code of Conduct for Taxation Richard Murphy,
Association for Accountancy and Business Affairs and
Tax Justice Network, London, 2007
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Documents/TaxCodeofCondu
ctFinal.pdf
Country-by-Country Reporting: Holding Multinational
Corporations to Account Wherever They Are, Richard
Murphy, Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic
Development, Washington, 2009
http://www.financialtaskforce.org/wpcontent/
uploads/2009/06/Final_CbyC_Report_Published.pd
f
In Place of Cuts, George Irvin, Dave Byrne, Richard
Murphy, Howard Reed and Sally Ruane, Compass, London,
2009
http://clients.squareeye.com/uploads/compass/documents
/Compass%20in%20place%20of%20cuts%20WEB.pdf

Information Exchange: what would help developing
countries now? Richard Murphy, Tax Research LLP,
London, 2009
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Documents/InfoEx0609.pdf
Small Company Taxation in the UK: A review in the
aftermath of the ‘Arctic Systems’ Ruling, Richard
Murphy, Tax Research LLP, London, 2007
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Documents/TRLLPSmallBusi
nessTax8-08.pdf
Stemming the Flood, Richard Murphy, Trade Union
Congress, London, 2009
http://www.tuc.org.uk/extras/stemmingtheflood.pdf
Taxing Banks: A joint submission to the International
Monetary Fund, Richard Murphy, The Tax Justice
Network and others, London and Washington, 2010
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Documents/IMFTaxingBanks
.pdf
Tax Justice and Jobs: The business case for investing
in staff at HM Revenue & Customs
Richard Murphy , Tax Research LLP for PCS, London,
2010
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Documents/PCSTaxGap.pdf
The direct tax cost of tax havens to the UK Richard
Murphy , Tax Research LLP, London, 2009
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Documents/TaxHavenCostTR
LLP.pdf
The Missing Billions, Richard Murphy, Trade Union
Congress, London, 2008
http://www.tuc.org.uk/touchstone/Missingbillions/1miss
ingbillions.pdf
The Robin Hood Tax, London, 2010
http://robinhoodtax.org.uk/how-it-works/the-big-idea/

As far as I can tell, every single one of those reports was written by Richard Murphy. We\’ve not actually got any outside references at all: everything is built upon the Tower of Babble that the Great Man himself has been pumping out through various front groups over the past few years.

Every time one part of such a report is critiqued, critiqued to the point of being shown to be untrue, (as examples, the £25 billion lost to tax avoidance being an artefact of his refusing to recognise people doing what Parliament expressly wants them to do by using tax allowances, or his tax debts unpaid figure which includes all those people and companies which go bust and thus have no money to pay taxes, his highly entertaining idea that raising tax rates on the highly paid will lead to greater market labour being offered (no, really, he thinks, contrary to what all of the research shows, that raising tax rates on high earners will mean their wives go out to work), his even more entertaining idea that a rise in CGT will produce more revenue….when our historical experience is that revenue fell when Lawson raised it and only rose again when the rate was cut….well, you get the picture, eh?), this same falsity is then laid out as fact in the next report.

A fact which relies upon no one bothering with the errors in the first report for its veracity.

With that list of reports you can see the stilts upon which this nonsense is balanced.

For more detailed rebuttals of each of most of the points he makes in these varied reports (and thus a snatching away of those stilts he supports this latest nonsense upon) just have a search through the archives here for \”Ritchie\”, \”Richard Murphy\”, \”our favourite retired accountant \” and even the \”Ragging on Ritchie\” category.

Have fun.