Comments on: Mutual obligation + high EMTRs = suxxor

By: Club Troppo » Not so persuasive after all …

Club Troppo » Not so persuasive after all … — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:28:25 +0000

[...] a marginal note to Missing Link the other day, I expressed the view that Jason Soon and Helen Dale’s advocacy for the LDP’s Negative Income Tax + abolition of minimum wage policy was [...]

By: Club Troppo » Missing Link Daily

Club Troppo » Missing Link Daily — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:23:18 +0000

[...] Helen “skepticlawyer” Dale agrees that mutual obligation is nonsense and adds a call for a negative income tax to Jason’s case for labour market deregulation/abolition of minimum wage.44. KP: And very [...]

By: DeusExMacintosh

DeusExMacintosh — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:44:21 +0000

You know what they say, Terje… vote early, vote often!

By: TerjeP

TerjeP — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:16:04 +0000

I am a long term (~20 years) supporter of the BI/FT approach.

Best vote for it in the short term then.

By: derrida derider

derrida derider — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:34:43 +0000

Sinclair, I am including Prescott. His case (which I've critiqued at some length on Andrew Leigh's blog here) is predicated on the level, not the progressivity or otherwise, of European taxes. So my comment stands. And I repeat that we are trying to compare like with like here - if you have massive spending cuts to make the 30/30 idea stack up then you have to then compare it with what the current tax/benefit system would look like if it also benefited from those cuts. All that said, I'd like to repeat that I am a long term (~20 years) supporter of the BI/FT approach. But I don't think I'll ever see it put into practice.

By: DeusExMacintosh

DeusExMacintosh — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 01:44:54 +0000

I keep expecting it to come up as a back-door way to facilitate the introduction of ID cards. You could try just forcing them on claimants as an anti-fraud measure, but you’d have better luck ’sweetening’ the deal.

By: skepticlawyer

skepticlawyer — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:22:09 +0000

Good grief, so it’s even worse than I thought, DEM. That’s what comes of trying to combine John’s Australian calculations with British EMTRs. One thing that has emerged in the discussion over at Club Troppo on this is how much worse the UK is than Australia on EMTRs (and Australia is nothing to write home about).

I like the waiving VAT/GST idea – that has potential, although I’d be curious to see what the compliance costs would be.

By: DeusExMacintosh

DeusExMacintosh — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 19:38:50 +0000

Slight correction to your benefits rules & figures SL. All people receiving means-tested benefits are kept to the £20 a week earnings limit after which they are docked pound for pound for any additional earnings (so those who receive income support AND housing benefit AND council tax benefit would actually lose £3 per pound earned). Incapacity Benefit, which most people associate with those with disabilities, is not in fact means tested. People with disabilities who are not in full time work usually qualify for premiums on top of the basic rate of Income Support that means their Incapacity Benefit gets topped-up with Income Support (despite all this rubbish about IB rates being too high). IB claimants also have the possibility of earning a bit more through what they call "Therapeutic Work" which is limited in scope and duration but are still caught by the means-test rules if they receive anything else. Dr Tom Shakespeare came up with an interesting proposal recently that the additional costs of being disabled could be defrayed by waiving VAT. If the LDP's 30/30 style income tax proposals for low earners seem too radical for the UK the same exemption might be usefully applied to those who qualify for Income Support (which includes the working poor) and would make an administratively cheaper alternative to Gordon Brown's labyrinthine and error-prone tax credits.

By: John Humphreys & the 30/30 « Thoughts on Freedom

John Humphreys & the 30/30 « Thoughts on Freedom — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:18:58 +0000

[...] There’s been a bit of to and fro over the LDP’s 30/30 policy at Catallaxy, Skepticlawyer and Club Troppo. Ken Parish has now written the mother of all critiques over at Troppo. I think [...]

By: Sinclair Davidson

Sinclair Davidson — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:21:40 +0000

“is not usually believed to have a large effect on this margin outside of a few US supplysiders.”

are you including Edward Prescott in that?