This is just incredibly fabulous from the GallMeister himself:
One of the underlying important themes that the Tax Justice Network and I have emphasised over the last decade has been the continual shift of the burden of taxation from capital onto labour. As if evidence were needed that this trend is continuing, this was the headline from an email that I received this morning from the OECD:
Of course, the situation varies from country to country. It is the trend that is important, and that is a continuing explanation for the crisis that our economy, and that of the world at large, faces. Growth without a rising share of labour income is not possible: inequality prevents it.
No, no, just let that sink in for a bit.
So, labour is being horribly oppressed as the tax burden upon it rises. This is being done by reducing tax free allowances on labour income, thus subjecting higher portions of total income to labour taxation.
That is what the OECD is stating and that is what the GallMeister is complaining about, yes?
And yet what is the case in the UK? Where the personal allowance has risen considerably (admittedly only to make up for decades of fiscal drag but still) thereby reducing the portion of total income that is subject to labour taxation? One of the implacable opponents of this policy being a retired accountant from Wandsworth currently resident in Norfolk?
Can you imagine what gall you must have to hold both positions at the same time? That the neoliberal lackey running spit dogs like myself are wrong for oppressing labour with ever higher taxation and also the spitlackey dog running neoliberals like myself are wrong for reducing the taxes paid by labour? The former by reducing tax free allowances and the second by increasing them?
Still, I understand such gall will be rarer in future as they’re going to surgically remove it.
Even more gall than that Tim. He takes a report that considers exclusively the rising proportion of payment for labour that is taken by the State, in tsxes, and he declares it to be proof of a coordinated worldwide attack on labour by…CAPITAL.
And he seems to miss (I’m being generous here) the fact that the sitiation varying from country to country means in practice the burden reducing the UK (even though the top rate inccreased to 50%). So he doesn’t get to lead a round of “three cheers for Chancellor Osborne”.
All in all; not eh analysis one would expect from someone who believes he should be on the Board of HMRC.
I love the gall link. Remiinds me of the sadly long-since defunct Portadown News, a spoof newsletter that took the piss out of both sides in Northern Ireland. Once said that Ian Paisley was going in to hospital for a routine bile transplant.
Meanwhile the Gallmeister, Chairman of HMRC-In-Waiting and now Legal Expert Richard Murphy has taken the government to task for it’s legally ignorant view that you need to prove intent to take a person’s liberty.
To prove his point he gives us an extract from the 2006 Fraud Act, the extract that includes words like “knowingly’ and “intends”.
All hail!!!!
Ironman
I was sorely tempted to write in response to the last point n the Fraud Act post where he posits
‘do you really take us for idiots?’
With a Yes. The analogy with Roderick Spode has often been made, but truly I think Murphy Richards will have to give up the ghost as the reality is simply beyond satire…..
Well, if you look up my home, New Zealand here;
http://www.compareyourcountry.org/chart?project=taxing-wages
You find us at the lowest or among the lowest in the OECD. That’s the result of one of the most neo-liberal economies in the OECD.