It is easy being green

I stopped going to the pre-budget briefings of organisations like the CBI and many others, after I spotted a trend.

They all wanted tax payers money spent on training, infrastructure, tax breaks for them and what ever was on their members wish list and they never wanted to pay higher taxes, in fact they wanted lower taxes too.

Now you might think I was naive to expect anything else but really is the best way to lobby for your members to always demand everything from the government and offer nothing? Why would any chancellor of any hue bother listening to any presentations and pleading of lobby groups if they are so boringly repetitive and self serving?

The answer is they don’t, but lots of either very green or desperate journalists cover this stuff religiously and that sets the mood music for the debate. Sometimes they have no choice, their editors want to speculate ahead of the Budget for days and there is very little to say, it is all speculation.

But really they might do some homework, there has been no increase in the closure rate of private schools since Labour announced they would now pay VAT, the tax system is unbalanced and very favourable to those who earn money from capital gains, and very, very few of them are working people with jobs, this is an easy fact to check. The UK’s tax rate is still low compared to similar countries with similar sized governments and social systems. Someone has to pay more to fix the NHS and increase defence spending. The OBR obviously thinks that the previous government misled it about the state of its finances etc etc.

All of this is easy to check, to use in discussions and to put to experts. But what we always get is every man and his lobbyists claiming that THEY cannot afford to pay a penny more, that it will destroy growth or cost jobs or be passed onto customers. We even get millionaires given air time to claim that their tax contributions is wasted on the feckless, as if the money from such people is specifically allocated to benefit cheats and not the Royal Marines. I suppose they need to believe that to justify avoiding taxes.

But it is well worth asking such people, if not you who? If not your sector whose? You have had 14 years of being told you could have tax cuts and a state that works, which ended with a collapsing state and higher taxes.

Are you really so green that you still believe that lie? Or is it just an easy line to push onto a compliant media?

Jonty’s Jottings

Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.