Taunting With Taxes

Coping with Brown has taken up most of the Labour party's energy in the first week of the election campaign.  Despite Sarah the Carer constantly at, and often grabbing him by, his elbow, Brown has again been off-message, obsessed with his own  self-delusions about his years wrecking the UK economy.

It has been impossible to stop him from going on and on about National Insurance tax rises.  The matter is very simple and well understood by the economically literate, and the working people who don't like the level of stoppages on their wages.  Raising payroll taxes at a time of very high un- and under- employment, and reducing take-home pay when the economy needs consumer stimulus, is a no-no. 

Brown's personal difficulties with courage and character prevent him from admitting this most obvious of errors and have led him into insulting every major employer in the country at every appearance he has made other than in Labour loyalists' front rooms.  He has blundered on into fresh fields of delusionary self justification by imputing economic policies to the Conservatives that are wholly of his own limited imagination. 

In his meanly-furnished, poorly-grasped, and narrowly conceived  economic world the only alternative to raising National Insurance Tax is to raise the rate of Value Added Tax. 

Not at all, as any fule no.

Angels have been asked before 'not to give them ideas', so it will do to say that VAT is a tax that should be reconsidered in its effects on the economy as a whole (it is, of course, a tax on tax) on its levels, on its extension, on its encouragement  throughout the tax base of tax evasion, and on its partial subjugation of the country's tax-raising to European Union regulation.

A small but perfectly-formed public reconsideration of VAT and its use and applications would drive Brown over the edge into bogs and thickets of half-understood tax practice and effect.  His need to believe he really grasps this stuff  is such that he will fall apart, the Carer's constant supervision or no.

Tax policy does more than raise funds for widely agreed state purposes;  it shapes the entire society and delivers ideological goals, sectional agendas that are anathema to many mulcted of part of their earnings.  Brown knows this last but is without the knowledge or imagination to grasp an alternative tax agenda, a Conservative agenda.  And the Labour strait jacket on even discussion of tax forms and policies has been worn too long by the country, just like the demonisation of any discussion of immigration levels, or cultural norms.

People hate some kinds of taxes much more than others: inheritance tax, National Insurance, VAT, petrol duty, and duties on tobacco and alcohol.  They are understanding of the need for a progressive income tax (preferably flattish and always adjusted for fiscal drag) and there is positively demand for  taxes on assets various,  provided they start high enough up the scale.

Brown needs to be herded further into the wastelands of his conceits and we need to reconsider how we are taxed and what for.