The Right do not like it because it taxes wealth, and that in their view is wrong, although there is no evidence to suggest that the levels of tax on wealth do impact real levels of actual investment.
We’ve just refuted the main insight of economics – incentives matter.
We’ve also made it something of a puzzle why Stalin bothered to tax profits at 120% at the end of the New Economic Policy. In fact, to bring the NEP to and end.
Strange, I thought that Jim Callaghan introduced CGT specifically to discourage investment – in the form of people building properties and keeping them empty in order to avoid incurring taxable rental income and to maximise potential untaxed capital gains. How would the mighty Spud intellect understand this?
Strange, I though that Gordon Brown introduced taper relief on capital gains to promote risk taking and then removed it 10 years later because he felt private equity firms had made too much use of it. Surely the mighty Spud, tax expert, knows this
Well, to paraphrase what Sherlock H never said: Elymentally my dear Worstall!
” no evidence to suggest that the levels of tax on wealth do impact real levels of actual investment.”
Since investment* is always deployment of wealth**, it would seem self evident that less wealth = less investment.
*No investment is not government spending taxes nor borrowing off someone else to finance spending. Latter’s a form of speculation.
Investment, wealth & savings are all words for the same thing.
“…there is no evidence to suggest that the levels of tax on wealth do impact real levels of actual investment.”
A few minutes googling found an OECD report on the impact of tax on investment (OECD Economics Department Working Papers No. 656) which concluded that taxes have an adverse effect on investment.
off topic but the BBC continues its ‘Apocalypse India’ story with the shocking news about
“The rising number of deaths – 380 were recorded in Delhi alone on Monday – has left crematoriums in urgent need of space.”
Delhi has a metro area population of 31 million.
Part of the BBC’s horror story of ’round the clock cremations’. Even if not a single person who is dying of/from/with Covid would have died anyway, the current death toll is around 10% of those dying of non-Covid causes.
Presumably cremations in non-Covid times only take place 22 hours a day.
Andrew C,
Its all those arts graduates who now make up the backbone of journalism as we know it now. They’ll all be in New Dehli because no country exists outside its capital and be completely mesmerised by the scale of the numbers.
A quick look at the map of India on the Speccie website shows that Dehli and Goa have it really bad, but the rest of the country not so much.
Bottom right chart: https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/lockdown
I saw a comment elsewhere that it was now spreading to smaller towns, what people don’t appreciate is that those towns can be a couple of million people.
@BiND
They’ll go into meltdown if it gets as bad in India as it (allegedly) did here.
125,000 deaths here = 2,500,000 deaths in India. Even then, that’s 0.18% of India’s population and around 10,000,000 people die every year in India.
Interesting data from the link you provided. Sweden (no lockdown) had excess mortality in 2020 of 1.5% compared to the average 2015-2019. Given that there will have been variance during 2015-2019 I wonder if 2020 is even the worse of the 6 years.
Thank you AndrewC for some perspective – I wonder about the Capital city effect some times. It’s where the media usually are, but also Delhi has smog and attracted workers from agricultural areas big time and the combined effect of pollution and indoor working may have hammered their immune systems (John Campbell has some data on Vit-D deficiency in India). He’s checking the data weekly on more rural Kerala, India’s biggest fish consumers, to see if it’s majorly different from the Capital.
Time will out.
John Turning,
I did a project in Delhi at this time of year in ‘95 and ended up in hospital. The consultant told me that April is the worst month of the year for bugs, viruses and other nasties as they’re just coming out of winter and it gets hot and humid quickly. Even if that doesn’t help coronavirus it does mean that the population is more likely to be weaker and more susceptible.
Ah… You mean that Delhi that has always been the example of what you really don’t want if there ever was a new Real Nasty in any population/propagation model?
If CoVid was a bad as the Media still makes it out to be, they would have lost half the population there by now.. And the rush of people trying to GTFO would have forced China to react, and…
I doubt even the chinese could manage a hive of disaster-waiting-to-happen like Delhi.
1,200 people a day still die of TB in India, a diseases that’s largely been eliminated in Europe and N.America decades ago.
There has been a rise in TB in the U.K. but that is linked to immigration and increased travel to the Indian sub-continent area
“There has been a rise in TB in the U.K. but that is linked to immigration and increased travel to the Indian sub-continent area”
The advantages to diversity are indescribable!