What fresh Hell is this?
There is also an ongoing question across industries over where tax should be paid. “The problem is there is a difference between where the customer is and where the production is,” says Richard Murphy, co-founder of the Tax Justice Network. “They’re paying the tax where production is. We, the customer, are paying the price but we’re not seeing the benefit of the tax paid.”
This is a problem? When Spud has spent the past couple of decades insisting that tax should be paid in those poor countries where the production is?
It was good to see some commonsense (well, to my mind at least) reporting on Al Beeb yesterday regarding Shells record profits. Beeboid economics bloke said something like: ‘Shell made 95% of their profits overseas and will have paid the taxes due there. The 5% made in the UK will be taxed at 40% plus the windfall tax(75%?)’. Made a change from the ‘evil capitalist bastards aren’t paying their fair share’ we normally get from the MSM.
Shell used to be heavily invested in the North Sea. Indeed, Brent crude is still a benchmark price for oil, despite the long abandonment of the Brent field.
I wonder why Shell has withdrawn the area. Nothing to do with the political uncertainty of windfall taxes and green freakery, I’m sure.
I’m pretty sure that the British government collects all of the import duty plus all of the Very Attractive to politicians Tax, isn’t that enough for the colonialists?
So country by country reporting isn’t a thing anymore? We should tax companies where they sell things?
An old trope about “where the customer is” which can easily be dismantled – although no one ever seems to do it – by pointing out that this would mean that UK exporting companies who currently pay UK tax would then be paying tax instead in the countries they exported to.
Those who put this argument forward always seem to think it would only apply to foreign companies who export to the UK.
Never mind the complexities of a UK company then having to employ accountants in each and every country they export to.
The man’s a malignant populist and, ironically, a fascist.
He seems to be arguing for double taxation, without double taxation relief.
On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday it’s where the customer resides, on Thursday and Friday its where the production arises and at the weekend it’s a coin toss or something completely different.
Who can ever really tell with His Great Entuberance?
@John Galt
It’s consistently where he (hopes to) be able to get his fat controller hands on it.
BF
Matt has it – it needs to be where he can deploy it and that means taxing it here in the UK if the amount of income in an overseas jurisdiction exceeds that the bulk of the tax has to be paid in the UK.
As the peerless Andrew C points out – this a common fallacy for advocates of this type of taxation – even those more articulate than Murphy (so that’s anything from a monkey to a parrot) – they presume it will only be levied on foreign businesses operating here. Not forgetting the reverse would also be true.
In terms of his basic point, although he can’t keep an argument consistent or coherent often within the same post, his underlying philosophy is that the state is all in all. He argues for total confiscation of all assets from all private sector employees and a level of
state control exceeding North Korea. This is all in his published works – ‘The Joy of Tax’, ‘Money for nothing and Tweets for Free’ and ‘The Courageous State’ – in earlier times he’d have been called a brigand…
Your description of him as a ‘malignant populist’ is spot on…
“They’re paying the tax where production is. We, the customer, are paying the price but we’re not seeing the benefit of the tax paid.”
1) I thought we bought stuff because we needed/wanted the stuff, not for taxes to be paid
2) the benefit of paying taxes is 0. It is, at best, a necessary evil in exchange for the services provided. To a large extent it is just a money transfer from the productive to the unproductive
also, I thought taxes didn’t fund government services in the MMT world
Herr Kartoffel exhibits a severe case of what would be labelled cognitive dissonance, if he was capable of thought.
@Emil re taxes, it does appear to be the position of MMT that tax is not necessarily. Which then begs the question, why do we need the Inland Revenue, surely we can just scrap it and save billions to spend on whatever nonesense takes the current government’s fancy.
My sockpuppet commiserated with him over the Mrs Sunak case because “it’s destroyed years of campaigning for profits to be taxed where they are made, and now they’ve given in the the braying mob to tax them where the owner lives instead”. He, naturally, banned me.
jgh
I thought I had been banned and then actually did get blocked recently.
https://www.timworstall.com/2022/09/oooooh/
My ‘alter ego’ remains active albeit has been quiet recently…
I’ve always regarded Spud as an Ellsworth Toohey for our times:
From the wikipedia summary of the Fountainhead:
Toohey is a socialist, and represents the spirit of collectivism more generally. He styles himself as representative of the will of the masses, but his actual desire is for power over others.
They’re paying the tax where production is. We, the customer, are paying the price but we’re not seeing the benefit of the tax paid
But this is bollocks. They are paying taxes where they make profits. Presumably the Graun just quotes him because a) he is on their side and b) the writer is even thicker than Spud so won’t attempt to query his nonsense.
What they crave is a tax system where the authorities can just charge in and demand what they want without all this stuff about deductions, transfer pricing, jurisdiction, or whatever. They’d prefer the Viking Raider theory of taxation, also used extensively by the Mongols.
arguably the most disturbing post yet was one Tim missed- ‘New Tech for the blog’
So, having done my research I set off for the Apple Store in Cambridge today and spent some of the donations made to this blog on an iPad Pro and an iPhone 14 Pro, both chosen because they provide more opportunity to produce better quality material for this blog and for videos than any of the other options available.
I also added a Logitech keyboard for the iPad, and was amused that the Apple Store staff did not, themselves, recommend the Apple alternative. That keypad is amazing – perhaps the best typing experience that I have ever had.
The quality of dictation processing is also very high. I guess using the latest chips helps this, but it also reduces the stress in my arms given the number of words I write a day.
So, my thanks to those who helped fund these purchases. The blog will be the better for them
So expect more unwatched videos outlining his matchless economic knowledge and more blog posts. Could he even revisit either:
– The Fair Tax Mark
– Sustainable Cost Accounting?
The future’s bright…..
It’s not a fresh hell – it’s the same old one we all know: that those who advocate paying ever more in tax are merely expressing greed and don’t really have any further principles on which to base taxation. Hence the place where tax should be paid wildly fluctuates to match wherever the money it. If it’s rich people in the UK owning assets abroad, then they should be taxed here; if it’s rich people abroad owning assets here, then they should be taxed here; if it’s UK companies making profits abroad, then they should be taxed here; if it’s foreign companies making profits in the UK, then they should be taxed here. In fact, looking at some of the claims, we sometime even see foreign companies making profits abroad which supposedly should be taxed here.
To improve the British economy, I’d tax all foreigners living abroad.
M.Python.
Being foreign AND living abroad is so clearly a tax dodge that you’d have to insist on penalties and interest being charged as well.
@Van_Patten, did I read that correctly? He can’t afford an ipad or a mobile phone without donations?
I don’t think we’ll be hearing more about the Fair Tax Mark as he fell out with them:
https://www.t*xresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/11/25/the-fair-tax-mark-a-statement/
Sustainable Cost Accounting was his pitch to get back with Labour after the Corbyn fallout, but fortunately they don’t seem interested in talking to him. He is still getting a £17k a year grant off the back of it though.
http://www.c*rporateaccountabilitynet.work/funding/
Buying an ipad AND an iphone from the donations his more poorly-paid suckers have given him, despite his three professorships and various spurious grants, AND boasting to them about it?
He really is a grade A thundercunt.
“the benefit of paying taxes is 0.”
From Murphy’s point of view, the benefit of tax is that he gets paid from it. So tax paid elsewhere is irrelevant.
He’s making videos again. Maybe he’ll buy a second shirt?