The graph above shows the percentage of Corporation Tax raised as a proportion of GDP by Ken Clarke in 1996-7 & George Osborne in 2012-3.
![\"\"](\"https://www.timworstall.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Ken-Clarke-v-George-Osborne.png\" "\\"Ken")
The figures are here.
You appear to be using corporation tax as a percentage of total tax take, not corporation tax as a percentage of GDP.
Twat.
Dear Tim,
Thanks for spotting this. Will amend in the morning. The gov. receipts data was compiled from my own research and of course you are correct to point out my miss type. Put it down to early morning absent-mindedness. Or if you are feeling less charitable, persist with that t**t word you use above.
Warmest regards,
Éoin
The mot juste, Tim.
Let’s just take a look at Eoin’s preferred measure VAT vs. Corporation tax. (although for fairly obvious reasons it’s dumb).
It turns out that this measure is highly volatile (as you’d expect – corporation tax is taxing the residual claims of the corporation, so in good times they roll, in bad times they don’t). If we take the ratio of corporation tax relative to VAT tax:
Average for the 1980s:
54.8%
Average for the 1990s:
52.7%
Average for the 2000s:
51.9%
2010/2011 = 50.4%
It’s worth pointing out that the peaks are very high in good years = 72.6% in 1989/90 60.8% in 1999/00 and very low in bad years 40.5% in 1983/84, 38% in 1993/94
Comparing corporation tax in 96/97 to today is kind of silly – the economy was mid-expansion then which is why the corporation tax take relative to VAT was 59%. But just two years before it was just 46.5%.
On Eoin’s definition, Nigel Lawson raised the tax take from the rich because between 1983/84 and 1989/90, Corporation tax relative to VAT rose from 40.5% to 72.6%.
Or alternatively if we shifted the start of Eoin’s analysis back to 1993/94, we would discover that the rich are forced to pay so much more during the whole of the Clarke period and Gordon’s period and under Osborne.
http://www.ifs.org.uk/ff/revenue_composition.xls.
You need to go here for the latest figures:
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/stats/tax_receipts/tax-nic-receipts-info-analysis.pdf
If you plot the data over the entire period from 1978 onwards there is a slight downward trend say 1-2% a decade?
Verdict: Twat
No – mendacious, horribly partisan, statistically and economically ignorant socialist (although the last adverb is almost tautological). With a weird fetish for horridly misleading excel graphs.
It is shorter to say “twat”, though.
SE: not to mention horridly horrid. Is it a law of nature that socialists have to have poor taste in graphic design, or just an immense coincidence?
No – I think it might be blindness induced by political fetishism rather than where he sits in some virtual Assemblée Nationale.
I know some quite significantly lefty (competent) graphic artists so there doesn’t appear to be a significant correlation. And both communist and fascist art tended to be dull.
In fairness, the existence of right-wing tastelessness doesn’t disprove an association between being left-wing and tasteless. But the graphic artist friends, I’ll go with that.
Just keep them out of the way of the Labour party manifesto: on balance, I reckon the front cover of the last one probably lost more centrists than it gained diehard communists.
This Éoin Clarke seems to be a charming chap. Which is more than one can say for many of the commentators here. The meme that says that all left-wingers are stupid/innumerate/illiterate/tasteless is particularly unattractive.