Quotulatiousness

October 2, 2019

In a crowded field, Election 2019 may be the worst we’ve seen so far

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley makes the case that this year’s federal election is the worst of all:

It has been widely suggested that this might be Canada’s Worst Election. Certainly it is dreary as all get-out. We began with interminable back-and-forth about abortion, which all party leaders pledge to do absolutely nothing about. If one or more of them are lying, it seems very unlikely they would admit to it at a press conference. The next mania was over Justin Trudeau’s blackface revues, which were radioactively damaging to whatever was left of his Most Enlightened Gentleman brand, but which mostly served as an opportunity for exhibitionist partisan insanity and cringeworthy journalism.

[…]

By rights the Conservatives should be mopping the floor. But they can hardly attack Trudeau’s social-engineer budgeting when they’re relaunching their flotilla of boutique tax credits for kids’ sports and arts programs and public transit. Why not just make their tax cut even bigger and let people spend their money how they please?

Similarly, the Conservatives would be on much firmer ground criticizing Trudeau’s housing-market interventions if they weren’t promising to review the mortgage stress test and bring back 30-year mortgages — something Stephen Harper’s government eliminated in 2012. Having decided carbon pricing was evil almost entirely because Justin Trudeau supports it, the Tories still struggle to defend any effective or efficient policy against climate change.

Any hope that Maxime Bernier might hold Scheer’s feet to the fire on free minds and free markets went up in flames ages ago as his People’s Party attracted far more authoritarian/nativist refugees from the Conservative Party of Canada than libertarian ones. Jagmeet Singh is bargaining hard to sell the NDP’s credibility down the river to appease all-but-totally uninterested Quebec nationalists — shamefully promising not to intervene against Bill 21, as if he would ever get the chance. Elizabeth May and her Green Party constantly remind us that they’re really quite odd: May insisting Longueuil candidate Pierre Nantel isn’t a separatist while Nantel shouts “I’m a separatist!” through a bullhorn is the weirdest thing she has done since the last weird thing.

The debates have worked out as badly as conceivably possible: The Leaders’ Debate Commission, created by the Liberals to solve a problem that didn’t exist — aieeee! Too many debates! — has reinvented the wheel, crushing both Maclean’s debate (which Trudeau declined to attend) and the Munk debate on foreign affairs (which has been cancelled due to Trudeau’s lack of interest) beneath it.

September 23, 2019

The “Global Climate Strike”

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The big “let’s all play hooky from school” event’s Toronto organizers have been getting positive coverage from some of the local media, because of course they have. Here’s Tanya Mok for BlogTO, listing the totally reasonable and not in any way unrealistic “demands” of the movement:

FridaysForFuture Demonstration, 25 January 2018 in Berlin.
Photo by C. Suthorn via Wikimedia Commons.

The coalition has made a list of seven demands, which “reflect the rallying cries of the intersectional movements” they belong to. Some of those demands include:

  • Indigenous rights and sovereignty.
  • The protection of forests, land, and water sources.
  • A shift to publicly-owned renewable energy, and reducing national carbon emission by 65% by 203, reaching zero emissions by 2040.
  • A $15 minimum wage for all, and higher taxation on the rich.
  • Universal public services like health care and dental care, free university and college, housing as a human right, and free public transit.
  • Justice for migrants and refugees, allowing status for all. That includes putting an end to deportations and allowing for the full access to public services.

There will be a concert at Queen’s Park after the rally, as well as a follow-up benefit concert at the Tranzac Club in the evening. A giant street mural project run by Greenpeace will also be taking place prior to the rally, around 10 a.m., at the southern point of Queen’s Park.

September 20, 2019

The reason we don’t have – and will never have – an Economists Party

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne points out that the study of economics probably disqualifies you from being an effective politician, because achieving success in the sausage factory of politics requires you to ignore or even work against economic facts:

A Mises Institute graphic of some of the key economists in the Austrian tradition (Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Mises Institute via Wikimedia Commons.

I believe I was the first to propose the creation of an Economists Party, a political movement that would advocate for the sorts of policies favoured by people who study economics for a living, based on the principles at its core.

It could not happen, of course, any more than the existing parties are likely to suddenly embrace the teachings of economists they have so cheerfully ignored until now, and for the same reason: because politics is, at its core, the opposite of economics.

The basic principle of economics is that everything is scarce. The basic principle of politics is that nothing is scarce. Economics teaches that more of one thing can only be had at the expense of less of another. Politics teaches that we can have more of both things, and of everything else besides.

Since more of one thing means less of another, economics tells us there is no point in favouring one part of the economy over another: the resources diverted to one firm, industry or region are simply resources denied to all the rest. Whereas politics is all about such transfers: a perpetual merry-go-round of redistribution, not from rich to poor, which is appropriate, but from everybody to everybody, which is impossible.

And if, for some reason, a politician were to resist this impulse, he would shortly find himself out of work. For whereas the benefits of a given intervention are typically concentrated on this or that group, the costs are spread widely; its beneficiaries, accordingly, have every incentive to organize and agitate on its behalf, while those footing the bill — consumers, taxpayers, or both — have comparatively little at stake as individuals. They may not even know who they are.

Thus it is that politics inclines, more or less inevitably, to prefer the narrow interest over the broad; producers over consumers; the present over the future. The only difference between the parties is whether this bias to the expedient is dressed up as a philosophy and celebrated as a positive good, or merely yielded to.

September 13, 2019

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh gets his tax plans vetted by the Parliamentary Budget Office

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A recent innovation for political campaigns is that they can ask the Parliamentary Budget Office to provide an estimate for the impact of any taxation proposals, and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was the first out of the gate to have his “super-wealth tax” evaluated. The PBO estimates that the levy would net out some $6 billion in the first full year of implementation. Sounds like a lot of money! Colby Cosh explains why it’s not quite what it might seem:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia.

Alas, the bean-counters always swoop in to spoil things. Singh’s wealth-tax scheme is instructive not only because he availed himself of PBO costing, but because it usefully reveals the limits of what the PBO or any other economic modeller can do. Look, in other words, at the fine print.

The PBO’s job was to estimate what you can extract from “an annual net wealth tax on Canadian resident economic families equal to one per cent of net wealth above $20 million.” In the PBO model this is a simple multiplication, but the roughly $6 billion take is arrived at only by reducing the revenue by 35 per cent to correct for “behavioural response” — that is, lawful (and unlawful) tricks employed to avoid the new tax by the rich targets. The net revenue is what’s left after you deduct another two per cent to cover administrative costs.

And, as the PBO immediately insists, “the estimate has high uncertainty” on both counts. This means they’re educated guesses. Jennifer Robson, a social policy prof at Carleton University’s Arthur Kroeger College, pointed out on Twitter that right now we don’t tax economic families per se and we don’t report assets and debts routinely to Revenue Canada. Ideas for pure wealth taxation (which is rare in practice) are predicated on the creation of, essentially, a new tax system — one which would have to detect and perpetually update how much, for example, the furniture in your house costs. The 35 per cent loss from behavioural response is at the high end of historic estimates from real-world examples. Even within our current tax system, Robson observes, we only get two extra dollars for every one we spend on expanding collections and compliance against the existing tax base.

As a practical matter, a wealth tax would mostly be, or would act most efficiently as, a tax on bank balances and investment accounts. Of course, there is always real estate. The super-rich seem to have a lot of that, and it is relatively easy to tax, and the resentment of Torontonians and Vancouverites who don’t own some is, for better or worse, a major reason the NDP is trying to weaponize envy.

But this reminds us that property taxes and taxes on property transfers perform a similar function, although they are not used primarily for income redistribution as such here — and in Canada ours are relatively high. The OECD does a little league table of tax structures, and compared with other industrialized countries Canada’s take from property taxes is about double the average. In a 36-country list we are near the bottom (33rd) in our dependence on taxing goods and services, and about average (12th) in dependence on corporate taxation, but fifth highest in dependence on personal taxation — and third in dependence on property taxes.

September 2, 2019

The economics of climate change policies

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall explains the economic implications for the various demands that we consume less in order to fight climate change:

A major contention from economists is that if we decide to fight global heating in the wrong manner then we’ll make ourselves poorer than we need be. A major contention from the same economists is that if we don’t fight global heating at all then we’ll make ourselves poorer than we need be. That being the economic point about all of this, we must fight global heating in the correct manner.

The correct manner not being vast plans by bureaucracies. Instead, change market prices with the one intervention – a crowbar into the system just the once with a carbon tax – and then let the economy itself chew through the implications of that.

Do note that the argument is not “poorer than we are now”, it’s poorer in the future than we need to be in that future.

And then we’ve got the varied Green, New Deal, unsoaped hippies and socialist idiots whose demand is rather different. They are insisting that we must be poorer, now, than we are, now. These people really do have to be told to bugger off:

    A sustainable environment means consuming less, not differently.

The only useful measure of how rich you are is “What are you able to consume?” Insisting that you consume less is therefore insisting upon being poorer.

It’s also entirely wrong that consuming differently won’t make a difference. Because again those economists. The thing we consume is value. That’s also the thing that we produce. That Gross Domestic Product, GDP, that is so bewailed as a societal target is nothing but the value added in the economy. GNP is the value which accrues to the people in the economy. NNI is the net value that goes as income to those in the economy. And so on through the different possible combinations of net and gross, national and domestic, production and income.

They’re all measures of value added. Not of resources consumed at all. So, if we face resource constraints all we need to do is change the value we’re producing by using fewer of those scarce resources to do so. Then we can carry on consuming ever greater quantities of value that we’ve gone and created. This must obviously be so – we do quite obviously face resource constraints currently. All economic resources are scarce, that’s what makes them economic resources in the first place, their scarcity. We don’t actually have an economics of atmospheric nitrogen because it’s not scarce. We do have an economics of soil nitrogen because it is scarce. The conversion of one to the other comes at a price – many prices in fact. The conversion itself, the algal blooms from having done so and so on. But the doing also adds value – which is then what humans consume, the value added.

So, the idea that consuming differently won’t make a difference is dribble. Plus, the idea that we must all be poorer in order to sustain that environment is drivel. Simple observation tells us that places with poor people have worse environments than places with rich.

August 24, 2019

Remy: All My Loving (Beatles Parody)

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

ReasonTV
Published on 23 Aug 2019

Remy discovers the hysterical, shrieking crowds are here for the entitlements.

Written and Performed by Remy
Produced and Edited by Austin Bragg
Music tracks and mastering by Ben Karlstrom
——————

Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.

—————-

LYRICS:

Does adulthood dismay you?
Vote me and I’ll pay you
You won’t have to grow up it’s true
All your bills will be paid
Your adulthood delayed
And I’ll give all this money to you

Bob commuted to college
For discounted knowledge
So large debts he would not accrue
Lived at home, did some chores
Now he’ll also pay yours
Cuz I’ll give all his money to you

All this money
You will get from Bob
All this money
If I get this job

All your work wages risen
Your debts all forgiven
Your childcare will be paid for too
Want free parental leave
Just takes one vote for me
And I’ll give all this money to you

All Bob’s money
I will give to you
All Bob’s money
If I win it’s true
All Bob’s money
All Bob’s money
All Bob’s money
I will give to you

August 19, 2019

UBI: threat or menace?

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Samizdata, Samizdata Illuminatus outlines the arguments for some form of Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Negative Income Tax (NIT) and argues that it’s a terrible idea that should not be implemented anywhere:

Cartoon that appeared with Michael K. Spencer’s article “Is Universal Basic Income really a solution?” at https://medium.com/@Michael_Spencer/is-universal-basic-income-really-a-solution-c0d6d95f100e

For those that are not familiar with the term, UBI (Universal Basic Income) means, roughly, “the government should guarantee everyone some minimum level of income whether they work or not”.

The notion began simply enough. Some economists observed that there are a myriad of intersecting government programs for the poor (in many countries, dozens) which distort behaviour in horrible ways and which cost a fortune in overhead to administer. This is where the problem of UBI begins, in the hubris of the armchair philosopher. “What if”, these economists asked, “we can’t get rid of the dole entirely (even though that would be better) but we could at least make it efficient by replacing the entire morass with a single program, say a negative income tax?”

Trained to explore ideas (no matter how bad) for a living, said academic economists then vigorously explored this impossible hypothetical world in which they could not get rid of the dole but could somehow get politicians to perfectly implement their hypothetical improved alternative, and proceeded to write lots of papers about it.

Again, this academic musing was already a utopian impossibility, for in the real world, there are interests that would act to block the elimination of existing welfare schemes and insist that the new scheme be added to the current ones rather than replacing them. This sort of thing is routine, of course; originally, VAT schemes were thought of by academic economists as a less distorting replacement for income taxes but ended up added in addition.

The interest groups arrayed against replacement of existing welfare schemes range from the bureaucrats whose job it is to administer said schemes (and who for whom “efficiency” means unemployment), to the vast range of contractors employed in providing benefits of one sort or another, to the politicians who get votes and power in exchange for largesse paid for with other people’s money, to the current recipients of existing benefit schemes who will correctly reason that the notion behind “efficiency” is not to increase their benefits. There’s no advantage in replacement for any member of the existing system, and thus, it was a non-starter to begin with.

This did not, however, prevent many people from falling in love with the idea, as wouldn’t-it-be-ever-so-elegant-if-it-could-happen so often trumps this-is-reality in the minds of those saying “what if” over a pint or seven late in the evening at the pub next to the economics department offices.

Oh, and of course, a form of the negative income tax was created in the United States under the name of the “earned income tax credit”; as might have been predicted in advance, it was added to existing welfare programs rather than in any way replacing them.

From this simple yet benighted beginning as a completely unrealistic thought experiment, the idea of UBI gained traction and then, as most cancers do, developed a mutant and even more virulent cell line, one that allowed it to spread and grow in the minds not only of leftists (who are already inclined towards redistribution of all sorts) but those on the right who are inclined to view ordinary people as useless.

We are now informed that UBI is a solution to a different problem as well. We are informed, in not-so-hushed tones, that the rise of new technologies like Artificial Intelligence will soon automate away most jobs, resulting in a vast class of people who will be unemployable in any trade whatsoever, which will consequently lead to mass unemployment, and that said permanently unemployable people will starve to death if we don’t find ways to provide them with income.

We are told we thus must guarantee a minimum income for all, without regard to whether they are capable of earning a living on their own, or we’ll have riots on our hands once AI based systems become ubiquitous. They claim that we should, nay, must, promise everyone some minimal subsistence income, whether they work or not. This will provide the masses with the ability to survive, and thus society will be preserved.

August 16, 2019

Rule Britannia, Britannia Rules the Salt | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1930 Part 1 of 1

Filed under: Britain, History, India — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 15 Aug 2019

After the Great War, the British empire is at its peak in terms of population and size. However, resistance against colonialism is starting to brew in the British colonies and dominions.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Francis van Berkel
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Sound design: Iryna Dulka

Portrait Colorizations by Daniel Weiss.

Sources: National Portrait Gallery, Library and Archives Canada, Jenny Scott

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

August 1, 2019

QotD: Small government provides little scope for special interest lobbying

Filed under: Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When a government is small, it can provide very limited benefits to special interest groups, so there is a small incentive for special interest groups to lobby the government. The successes of those that do lobby the government will cause the government to grow. This occurs because the great majority of voters and taxpayers are rationally ignorant about most government activity, making it easy to increase everybody’s taxes a small amount to provide a sizable benefit to a few. Most people do not have an incentive to investigate in detail the allocation of their tax dollars, but the special interest groups with the sizable benefit will repay the representatives with political support. Thus, special interest groups cause government growth.

The growth of government, in turn, raises the payoff available to special interest groups. With a higher payoff to special interest groups, this encourages the formation of new special interest groups to share in the payoff. A larger government can support a larger number of special interest groups. Thus, as government grows, more special interest groups form. The formation of special interest groups in turn increases the demand for special interest legislation, cause a further growth in government spending.

Randy Holcombe, An Economic Analysis of Democracy, 1985.

July 31, 2019

The quickest way to raise the real income of minimum wage earners

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall explains how to quickly raise the living standards of everyone in Britain earning the minimum wage, without costing employers any more:

I – Tim Worstall that is – then started pointing out that the difference between this living wage and the minimum wage was the amount of tax that we – shamefully – charge to the low paid. Tax being both income tax and national insurance contributions. In fact, I rather shouted about it around the place, at the ASI, and here in The Times in 2012.

    The gross annual salary of a full-time worker on the minimum wage is £12,070.50. We could come close to lifting every low-paid worker out of poverty if we simply increased the personal tax allowance from £8,105 to that sum. Not a penny of income tax or NICs should leave their pay packet. A full-time worker, however, on the living wage would be taking home £12,410.74, after the taxman has taken a cut — that’s only £340 more. And before the Foundation uprated the living wage yesterday, the annual difference was just £8.74.

    There are problems. Raising the personal allowance gives everyone a tax cut — which I’ll admit doesn’t break my heart. But we could lower the amount at which the higher rates of tax kick in to make up for that lost revenue. And won’t these workers lose their right to unemployment benefit and a pension, if they don’t pay NICs? No, they qualify already, as the system treats the very low paid as if they had made NI contributions. We should go farther. The link between the full-year minimum wage and the personal allowance for tax and NI should be made explicit. Change one and the government of the day must change the other. If the minimum wage is the minimum moral amount that someone’s labour is worth, then that is what they should get, not the amount after Denis MacShane’s European wanderings have been paid for.

    Which leaves us with two competing visions of how everyone can be free of poverty pay. The Living Wage Campaign’s vision is to shout at every employer in the country until they give in. The Worstall Way is to increase the incomes of the working poor by stopping taxing them.

June 27, 2019

“Raise our taxes!” cried the hypocritical virtue signallers

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

We’ve been over this ground before. Some very rich people are getting fawning media coverage for their “selfless”, “virtuous” demand that the government raise their taxes. Except they’re far from selfless: they’re demanding that other people be forced to pay more tax, but they’re very much not putting their own money where their bleating mouths are. Most governments are happy to accept more money from you than your formal tax liabilities:

… are all very eager to accept your contributions. But most people don’t take advantage of this mechanism, especially the ones garnering headlines for their “altruism”. Because they’re virtue signalling, and almost certainly don’t actually want to be taxed more. Don’t believe what people merely say they want, watch what they actually do (economists call this “revealed preference“). Hypocrites, the lot of them.

June 26, 2019

What is the problem that a wealth tax is designed to solve?

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne asks the obvious question about the sudden keen interest in imposing wealth taxes:

It is noteworthy how the debate on inequality has shifted in recent years: from the problem of poverty, whose evils are obvious, to the “problem” of great wealth; from the gap between the poor and the rest of us, to the gap between the rest of us and the rich, or indeed between the rich and the very rich.

But it is not obvious why it is wrong, in itself, that a small number of people should get stinking rich. It is clearly objectionable if they did so by illicit or unethical means — but then it is the means itself, not the wealth, to which we object. And it would be in poor taste, at the least, if they spent it all on themselves. But that is not how the great fortunes are typically disposed of — it’s physically impossible to spend more than a small fraction of it.

Perhaps the argument is less that the rich are too rich than it is that the government is too poor. You can make a case that government should spend more on certain things, especially in America. It doesn’t follow that you need to raise taxes to do so. A lot of good new spending could be funded by cutting bad old spending.

Suppose there were a case for raising taxes. Are wealth taxes the way to go? Wealth is, after all, merely the accumulation of past income — and we already tax income. If rich people are exploiting loopholes to avoid paying tax on their incomes, by all means close the loopholes. But the case for taxing income twice seems obscure.

Yes, we already have a kind of wealth tax, in the form of municipal property taxes — and they’re a notorious mess. They conform to none of the usual principles of good taxation, being neither simple, nor efficient, nor fair.

Why unfair? The bedrock criteria of tax fairness is supposed to be ability to pay. That’s only uncertainly related to wealth. Suppose the value of your house shoots up. Congrats: suddenly you’re wealthy. But your income is unchanged. And it’s income you need, or more accurately cash, to pay your taxes. It’s not clear why you should pay more in tax than someone with the same income, but a cheaper house.

June 14, 2019

“[P]eople aren’t really arguing about the existence or logic of the Laffer Curve they just hate the empirical answer”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Laffer Curve is one of those ideas that drives some people mad, because if it’s true (and empirically it appears to hold most of the time), it militates against raising taxes on the wealthy:

That working out where the peak of the Laffer Curve is is difficult is entirely true. That it’s going to be different for each tax in each different legal and societal set up is also true. But that doesn’t excuse drivel like this:

    The ends of the curve are basic enough – at a tax rate of 0, the government will raise $0 in revenue, and at a tax rate of 100, the government will still raise $0 in revenue because people won’t work without take-home pay. At the extremes, the Laffer curve is correct, but that doesn’t tell us anything about the points in the middle. Laffer’s idea, however, was that a “tipping point” existed on the continuum in between, where people’s incentives to work and invest decreased because tax rates were too onerous.

If the end points are true – something admitted – then it’s a matter of simple, pure, and true logic that there are one or more revenue maximising points inbetween. For it’s simple enough for us to observe that there are tax rates which do raise revenue. And if we have tax rates which raise no revenue and tax rates which raise some then there are those one or more rates which raise the most.

So, please, can we stop the drivel?

Sure, Art Laffer himself is incorrect when stating that all tax cuts always pay for themselves through increased economic growth. But that doesn’t invalidate the logic of the curve, only the use to which it is put.

Fifty-four percent. That’s approximately it: the tax maximizing point on the curve when you include all of the taxes on income (including the things they often don’t call taxes — social security, unemployment insurance, and other non-tax taxes — but which are still withheld from paycheques or payable at tax deadline time). Go much above that and the government’s take begins to decrease, defeating the purpose of raising the tax rate in the first place. (Unless the real purpose is just to harm the rich … which might be true in a number of cases.)

June 9, 2019

People who call for higher taxes are almost always hypocrites

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

And the numbers prove it:

There are many people who tell us that taxation in the UK is too low. Just think of all the gorgeously bureaucratic things that could be done if only the government had more money! Then there’s the number of people who actually do pay more tax on the basis that they think the government should have more money. The second being a rather smaller number than the first.

Which does bring us to that basic point that economists do insist upon making. Revealed preferences are a much better guide to what people do in fact believe than are expressed. Or, as folk wisdom has it, talk is cheap. That many shout that taxes should be higher – usually to insist that them over there should be taxed more – is interesting and amusing. But the actual number of people who really believe taxes should be higher is the number of people who voluntarily offer up more of their own hard earned to the government.

Which means that, according to the aggregate views and actions of the population of Britain taxes last year were too low by exactly the amount of £11,069. Everyone else is just virtue signalling:

    Donations to the Treasury have dwindled in recent years, however, even as the country’s debt remains relatively high. There were just 14 donations and bequests to reduce the national debt in the 2018-19 tax year, totalling £11,069, the UK Debt Management Office said.

That is the revealed preference of us all in aggregate.

It’s not just the UK where the number of people demanding higher taxes don’t actually put their own money where their mouths are — it’s true in Norway, the USA, and even the City of Toronto.

For ultra generous Canadians, Her Majesty will happily accept your donations here. To prove that you’re even more devoted to the challenge, you can even forego the tax credit, too!

June 4, 2019

What do you get for your tax money?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Alex Noble conducts a small experiment:

I suggest we stop thinking about taxes as paying for something useful – this type of thinking paralyses us and causes us to refuse to do that which needs doing. Because our taxes are supposed to pay for it.

We are no longer charitable, because our taxes pay for dole money.
We no longer look after the verge outside our homes, because our taxes are supposed to pay for a council worker with a strimmer.
We don’t repair potholes in our roads, because council workmen are supposed to fill them in.

Just to check that last one, I contacted my local council.

    “I was wondering if I could personally pay a local company to make repairs to the potholes that are causing damage to my car out of my money, and if so, would they be granted permission to close the road while my privately-funded repairs were being carried out?”

And they said…………

    “It would not be possible for you undertake these repairs, and no permission would be given to close the road.”

So I proposed I make a payment to them, to be spent on repairing the road:

    “…could I instead make a voluntary tax contribution on the condition the money is to be spent on these road repairs?”

And they said…

    “…the County Council will not accept payment from members of the public for the provision of highway maintenance over and above that already collected via the Council Tax”

I made one last attempt…

    “I have obtained quotes for the work which are acceptable to me and my neighbours – is there really no way we can as private individuals simply pay for the repairs to our road?”

They responded:

    “…it is not possible to accept any from of funding other than that accepted via the Council Tax and Central Government.”

So I just went out and bought a bag of sand and pounded it into the hole one night. A temporary fix, admittedly.

£5 of sand and five minutes of my time.

No doubt the council are scouring CCTV as we speak in an attempt to bring to justice the criminal that repaired the road.

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