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Well, that’s told the winner of the John Bates Clark medal then

Zucman is part of the new generation of tax justice campaigners for whom gestures (like supporting the UN rather than the OECD to deliver tax reform) matter much more than actually effecting change. The world could discuss Zucman’s idea for twenty years and get nowhere. Or it could get on with the suggestions I have made and without fuss deliver real additional revenues, fairer tax systems and much reduced inequality.

I have always been on the side of pragmatic tax justice. The fantasists who now dominate civil society debate on this issue do the cause no favours, whilst impeding practical progress considerably. None of them paper to gave ever worked in tax. They really are not helping a cause to which I dedicated many years of work.

Not that I favour Zucman’s work either – it’s technically wrong to my mind – but I do try not to be quite so arrogant about it

21 thoughts on “Well, that’s told the winner of the John Bates Clark medal then”

  1. From his Wikipedia article:

    “In interviews, Zucman describes the “traumatic political event of my youth”, as being when Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the final rounds of the 2002 French presidential election, when Zucman was 15.
    “In 2018, Zucman said of that event: ‘A lot of my political thinking since then has been focused on how we can avoid this disaster from happening again. So far, we’ve failed’”

    Still failing this year, I expect. It’d take a heart of stone…

  2. Polling the readers:
    None of them paper to gave ever worked in tax.
    Anyone know what that meant?

  3. One of Zucman and Murphy think that council tax and business rates are incident on the occupiers. And it isn’t Zucman. It looks like working in tax doesn’t mean you always know much about it.

  4. In the Taxing Wealth Report I explain how the UK could raise considerably more proportionately just by modifying existing taxes with little political capital expended. So what is all this about?

    I think it’s already been proven without doubt that the ‘Taxing Wealth Report’ is laughable and barely any of its assumptions stand up to even cursory scrutiny. If it raises 5% of his expected take on even a one-off basis I’d be amazed and anyone adopting its recommendations would need some kind of North Korean political system to effectively implement it (specifically including their control around subjects leaving the country)

    I guess he’s doomed to irrelevance in the UK, let alone at the global level.

  5. BiS

    Even as a veteran of reading him and the vagaries of predictive text I have to admit I’m not entirely sure what he’s saying.

    It’s an interesting definition of ‘working’ – if spouting ill-informed, prejudiced bullshit about a topic was the same as ‘working’ in a field many people would have CVs running to hundreds of pages

  6. At school, John was known as Master Bates Clark, whereas Richard Murphy has long been known as ‘That Wanker’.

    Frankly, who gives a toss about either of them?

  7. @BIS:
    “None of them paper to gave ever worked in tax.”

    “None of them appear to have ever worked in tax.”

  8. Dennis, He Who Has A Degree In Economics

    Zucman is an economist working in academia. For him, tax justice campaigning is nothing more than masturbation… Pleasurable, to be sure, but amounting to nothing of consequence.

  9. How warped do you have to be to boast “They really are not helping a cause to which I dedicated many years of work.”
    The cause of course. is to think of ways of making people miserable by stealing more of their money. If he was in Government that might be expected, but him as a private citizen to devote his life to it, is just plain warped.

  10. Dennis, Pointing Out The Obvious

    How warped do you have to be to boast “They really are not helping a cause to which I dedicated many years of work.”

    How warped do you have to be to be oblivious to the fact that your “many years of work” have accomplished absolutely nothing and that you are ignored by all political parties and politicians on any subject you choose to champion.

  11. Murphy thinks that looking at published schemes claiming to show Labour Luvvies how to avoid/?evade tax is working in tax. I know/have known (my brother-in-law’s father, now deceased was the first) several tax inspectors *who actually did* work in tax; they changed (favourably) my view of tax inspectors that had previously been derived from the media.
    Incidentally, HMRC has made more mistakes on my tax than I have, significantly more, so “working in tax” is NO guarantee of getting it right.
    [DWP is worse than HMRC]

  12. Richard "Dick" Turpin

    According to HMRC the UK tax gap for 2022/23 has reduced as a % of tax liabilities – from 5% to 4.8%. In terms of the size of the whole UK economy the % is much lower.

    I believe that according to Richard Murphy’s risible “burglar’s wish list” of new taxes and rises, the tax gap is much higher. I’d imagine up to c. 60%, being the size of the economy which is not currently stolen in taxes.

  13. How warped do you have to be to be oblivious to the fact that your “many years of work” have accomplished absolutely nothing and that you are ignored by all political parties and politicians on any subject you choose to champion.

    It was a close run thing though, wasn’t he an advisor to the Corbyn Labour lot and the only thing that stopped his idiocy being implemented was that John McDonnell couldn’t stand the potato king, presumably not for his policies, but for his holier-than-though attitude and all round personality.

    No vermine for you, Potato King!

  14. London (Black) Cabbie

    I had that Richard Murphy in the back of my cab once.

    Spent the whole time asking me questions about my tax and VAT payment history and lecturing me about the importance of tax compliance.

    Didn’t give me a tip on the grounds that he thought I would not declare it.

    CVNT.

  15. John Galt

    I have a relative who is a collaborator of Murphy’s – the issue was that Mcdonnell wouldn’t put him in charge of the department (as a kind of Corbynite Alan Walters) – that combined with his ability to start an argument in a phone booth meant that he stormed off in a huff after one meeting and was ‘frozen out’ – much to his chagrin. I found the whole thing quite amusing. Even amongst people of similar intellectual heft he still couldn’t actually control his ego enough to achieve his goals.

    Dennis – as so often – nails it completely. If he wasn’t the personification of evil one could almost feel sorry for him.

  16. Thanks for the clarification, @Van_Patten.

    Maybe that “ability to start an argument in a phone booth” has saved us from having to actually deal with his nonsense from a practical level, not just a theoretical one.

    The residents of the Isle of Man (including myself at the time), still blame that cvnt for throwing a spanner in the works as far as the Common Purse Agreement (mostly related to VAT sharing) was concerned, which cost the island about £200 million a year or 1/3 of it’s income in 2009/2010.

    The island only began to recover from this fiscal shock in 2016, with the implementation of FERSA.

    https://www.gov.im/about-the-government/departments/the-treasury/final-expenditure-revenue-sharing-arrangements-fersa/

  17. Van_patten is spot on re Labour. Murphy was offered a junior role with a peerage in lieu of salary. He demanded the chief advisor role plus a fat salary on top of the peerage. This was about the same time he got the professor title from City University and my guess is this was an attempt to give him some academic credibility for the role with Labour.

    His fallout with the Tax Justice Network was about money. He was trying to steer their grants into his bank account. At the time their total income was about £200k. Since they dumped him their income has risen to about £1 million and Murphy is furious he lost out!

  18. @Richard “Dick” Turpin – “According to HMRC the UK tax gap for 2022/23 has reduced as a % of tax liabilities”

    The tax gap is a completely meaningless figure so can go up, down, or in any other direction you like whenever you like. It is the difference between tax paid and tax you think ought to be paid, including amounts where there is no legal requirement to pay. See https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/measuring-tax-gaps/7-tax-gaps-illustrative-tax-gap-by-behaviour where “avoidance” is part of the gap. People who think avoidance is wrong do not believe in the rule of law (i.e. where people do what Parliament has specified rather than what Parliament should have specified or what someone thinks Parliament should have specified, or what Parliament wanted to specify but it was irrational and incoherent so it couldn’t be validly expressed).

  19. John Galt

    He certainly has a lot to answer for – hopefully a crowdfunded legal action for libel or slander along the lines of the Mcalpine case can drive the bastard over the edge.

    As Sam Jones says- ultimately it’s all about money – he has very little and appalling pension Provision – certainly in comparison to what he feels his intellect does merit

    I will say in my volunteer activities in various prisons across London I have encountered a number of convicted murderers – none have come across as obnoxiously as him. Pure evil.

  20. @Richard (Dick) Turpin
    HMRC explain that the tax gap hasn’t really reduced, it’s just that the % has gone down. The reason:
    The long-term decrease in the percentage tax gap has resulted from the tax gap value in absolute terms (£ billion) growing at a slower rate than theoretical tax liabilities over the time-series.
    So the tax take went up, but the tax gap stayed the same.
    What’s interesting is that if we run this backwards and shrink the state to say a mathematically satisfying 1/π of GDP with a heavier focus on justice and security, then the tax gap % would rise one heck of a lot. Some island nation on the edge of Europe should try this, to test the hypothesis of course, to see if it holds up, for the benefit of others.
    After all we’re supposed to immiserate ourselves by achieving net zero carbon for the benefit of the planet in this place that constitutes 0.3% of it, so why not run a whole lot of other experiments alongside for the lols, to check if the claims hold up or are disproved, so that poorer countries can learn from what occurred.

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