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Today, Tax Freedom day

The Telegraph reports Today is ‘tax freedom’ day: Employees start to see their earnings go into their own pockets rather than to the Government from Thursday, low-tax campaigners said. The Adam Smith Institute declared May 30 “Tax Freedom Day” – a day later than last year and the latest it has fallen in the calendar since 2006. Tory MP Steve Baker said it showed the “shocking truth about taxes and overspending”. “This doomsday machine of deficit spending, debt and currency [...]

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Budget 2013: The Headlines

The following was provided by the Conservative Party in summary of the Budget 2013. In a tough economic situation, the British people know there are no easy answers or short cuts. But we are succeeding, slowly but surely, in fixing those problems. We’ve now cut Labour’s record deficit by not just by a quarter – but by a third. We’ve helped create 1.25 million new private sector jobs. Interest rates remain at record lows. Income tax The amount people can [...]

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Taxes, currency debasement and the OFT report on pump prices

Via the Office of Fair Trading, Rises in pump prices for petrol and diesel over the last 10 years have been caused largely by higher crude oil prices and increases in tax and duty and not a lack of competition, an OFT report has found. and, emphasis mine, The OFT found that, pre-tax, the UK has some of the cheapest road fuel prices in Europe. In the 10 years between 2003 and 2012 pump prices increased from 76 pence per [...]

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Bucks County Council extends council tax freeze

This week Buckinghamshire County Council (BCC) announced its budget plans for 2013/4. Keeping money in people’s pockets during these tough economic times is an essential part of ensuring the continued prosperity of Buckinghamshire. It is also welcome to see that the Conservative 2010 General Election pledge to freeze council tax for two years has been achieved and extended by the Council. I reproduce an extract below from the BCC press release: Despite £14.4m less funding from central government, freezing Council Tax [...]

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A new debate is emerging on the scope of the state

Few people would tolerate a country in which the poor starved or went homeless and yet in Wycombe food is provided by the One Can Trust and emergency winter shelter by Wycombe Homeless Connection. Last time I divided the social security budget (£207bn) by the number of people in poverty (13m), the figure of almost £16,000 was higher than the income of over half the population. Despite spending so much money, the welfare state fails to keep people to a decent [...]

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Greg Clark on Labour’s tax policy

Via House of Commons Hansard Debates for 28 Nov 2012 (pt 0003), Labour is, to its core, the party of tax and spend, and, to be fair, it takes a very consistent view of both sides of the equation. With regard to spending, it is always a matter of “How much?” and not “To what end?”—of inputs, not outcomes; of the number in the headline on the press release, not what is achieved with the money. On taxation, too, for Labour [...]

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Via City A.M. – Boris on Starbucks and DC on judicial review

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On the cover of City A.M. this morning, Boris Johnson argues that Starbucks must do more for the UK. Apparently, the Mayor said of Starbucks, “It needs to reflect very fast and very seriously on its position…Either it makes a change in its tax arrangements or does a lot more to visibly serve society.” Now, I was critical of Starbucks in the press myself, but the Mayor is mixing up two issues: paying tax and serving society. As I said [...]

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I won’t support Labour on fuel duty – or duck the issue of spending

Today, we’ll be debating an Opposition Day motion on fuel duty, which I want cut. It’s shocking that 60% of the pump price of petrol is tax. Nevertheless I won’t be supporting Labour. It’s one thing to be supported by Labour on a important constitutional point — Parliament’s control over our EU budget contribution, for example — but it is another to support them on an Opposition Day designed to injure the Government. In any case, fuel is 10p a [...]

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Two speeches on sound money, the morality of taxation and the cruel fiction of state power

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I spoke yesterday to the European Young Conservatives on the origins of the crisis in excess state power, deficit spending, debt and debasement. Here are the slides: And this morning, I spoke on the morality of taxation alongside Syed Kamall MEP, Cllr J P Floru and Matthew Elliott of the TaxPayers’ Alliance. My remarks are here: PDF. My central message was the same on both occasions: if we really care about human welfare, especially the welfare of the poor, we need to [...]

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Speech on tax avoidance and evasion

From my speech yesterday on tax avoidance and evasion: The heart of this debate is the question of altruism. My feeling is that Members of all parties often feel that people constructing sophisticated avoidance schemes are insufficiently altruistic. There are a wide range of perspectives on that. Rarely in this country do we hear the cry, “All tax is theft”, but at one extreme there is the rather childish hysteria of objectivism, which totally rejects all altruism, and at the [...]

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Steve Baker is MP for Wycombe. He was previously an RAF officer then a business software consultant. Find out more...

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