Put more money in ordinary people’s pockets to boost household spending while taxing banks and axing military and other wasteful spending: sounds like a political coup and it was one Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi pulled off consummately on Friday. Renzi’s cabinet passed a decree to reduce taxes for those earning between 8,000 and 26,000 euros […]
Posts under ‘Taxation’
Benneconomics – a tribute
Mar 24th, 2014 by Andrew Fisher.I got to know Tony Benn well when I worked as a researcher to the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs in the mid-2000s. I’d first met him when he was about to stand down from Parliament “to devote more time to politics“, a promise which he fulfilled. He filled venues around the country with […]
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A budget to counter the Osborne wasteland
Mar 19th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Yesterday I focused on Osborne’s overblown and hollow claims about recovery which will pervade his budget tomorrow, but today I propose to answer the obvious retort: so what would you do? First, the haemorrhaging of public service jobs should be ended. Already 642,000 jobs have been cut from the public sector since 2010, and Osborne […]
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One rule for benefit claimants, another for the tax avoiders.
Mar 5th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.The latest figures collected by Oxfam indicate nearly a million persons have been ‘sanctioned’ (i.e. deprived of all benefits for a month for the first infringement, often trivial, for 3 months for the second, and 3 years for the third) in the last 15 months and that the numbers using foodbanks are now well over half a million. […]
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Young Labour demands wealth super-tax and scrapping of ‘right to buy’
Feb 24th, 2014 by Newsdesk.Young Labour’s first conference with written policy motions has seen delegates vote for radical measures to address the cost of living crisis and kick-start the economy. The two-day event in Bradford, which concluded yesterday (Sunday) voted to call on the Labour manifesto to include a one off “super-tax” which would seize ten per cent of […]
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How do you run the country five years after the old business model died?
Feb 6th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Big Business remains in a state of denial. After the biggest crash for a century, their line is unaltered: low taxes (or preferably no taxes through avoidance), deregulation, privatisation to remove virtually the entire domain of the State into the private sector, unrestrained inequality. It’s as though the trauma of the last 30 years hadn’t […]
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The ultra-rich hold us to ransom again
Jan 28th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Greed is good, or at least that’s what the bankers and CEOs of the biggest companies think. What is surprising is not their avaricious self-interest and total indifference to everyone else, but the blatancy with which they flaunt it. As their leader so movingly put it, they’re all in it together – the CEOs of […]
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The 50p tax rate – a welcome blow against the entitlement culture
Jan 26th, 2014 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.Did Ed Balls announce the nationalisation of the top 100 monopolies or something at yesterday’s Fabian conference? I was there, and he assuredly did not. To make sure the dangerous radicalism of putting 5p on the top rate of tax was boxed in, he even ruled out renationalising energy companies and the rail. And yet, according […]
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Here’s another plan: how about no cuts for the poor but £25bn cuts for the super-rich?
Jan 13th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.It is totally unnecessary and gratuitously damaging to demand wholesale elimination of the structural deficit within a very short fixed period (Osborne’s 2018), and patently wrong if it badly weakens the economy. The deficit is currently just over 7% of GDP, and before the crash when the economy was growing strongly at nearly 3% the […]
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Rather than chase internet tax-cheats, the Tories opt to abolish Social Fund for poor
Jan 5th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.On the same day that it’s announced that the Government is scrapping the £180m a year last resort for the down-and-out and destitute after sudden financial crisis, a new survey shows that the big US internet companies operating in Britain have increased their UK sales last year in the UK by 18%, but paid even […]
