Comments on: How do you pay for tax cuts?

By: joe bonanno

joe bonanno — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 22:00:44 +0000

Let’s be honest, green taxes are just a load of old pony, truly a sop to the gullible, as is ’sharing the proceeds of growth’. The State mops up quite enough of our money already, thank you.

Labour have so cheapened the debate by trying to equate tax cuts with SLASHING PUBLIC SERVICES!!!!!!!!

However I am noticing a seachange. ‘We should all pay more taxes’, seems to have melded into, ‘Everyone else should pay more taxes’. So we’re getting there, we just need the final leap into, ‘We should all pay less taxes’.

Well done, John, and heartening at least to note that the Tories can suggest cutting taxes and be given a decent hearing.

And I did chuckle with the reference in The Sunday T. to the BBC not showing Gordon Brown picking his nose.

Reply: Sharing the proceeerds of growth is not nonsense. As I keep saying, if only the newspapers would pick it up, after 3 years growing at 2.5% a year the UK state is raking in an additional

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 13:42:28 +0000

Though I understand, and wholly admire, Messrs Redwood and Osbourne’s cautiousness in phasing in tax cuts only when the economy allows it (method #5, above), doesn’t all this talk of new Green Taxes confuse the issue somewhat and even suggest a Conservative government would rely on ’stealth taxes’?

Reply: I am not proposing green taxes or relying on them. The “proceeds of growth” are big and can do the job. If the economy grows at 2.5 % (its long run average) you have

By: Hilarity

Hilarity — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 13:30:38 +0000

“5 years of New Labour in their death-throes was too much to bear.”

I’m with you there. I keep looking at the Labour poll results and Brown’s Bounce with a mixture of horror and near-despair. Can Britain survive another five years?

By: Hilarity

Hilarity — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 13:27:42 +0000

I think that asking serious questions about the party’s priorities isn’t “picking hairs.” If the only question being asked is “how do we pay for tax cuts,” in other words, how to we keep up the present level of funding for the enormously bloated government we have inherited after ten years of Blair’s New Labour, then we are asking the wrong questions.

By: Cllr Gavin Ayling

Cllr Gavin Ayling — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 20:33:13 +0000

Of course your ways of financing tax cuts are true, but there’s another one more difficult for lazy liberals to understand: If you cut taxes people do more business and pay more tax by making the extra money work harder for them.

By: Steven_L

Steven_L — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 18:56:16 +0000

“Are the Cameron Tories really so far gone that they have forgotten the whole point of the exercise?” (Hilarity)

From what I remember, the Tories elected Cameron on a promise to modernise the conservative party and face the challenges of the 21st century with an open mind.

I think picking hairs over the order of a list of things that governments can do to finance tax cuts is a tad silly. Cameron has been saying from the start that he wants to share the proceeds of economic growth between public services and tax cuts. The Conservative Party is trying to get swing voters like me to vote for them and I think they are doing a good job of it.

Cameron has also said a lot of things about encouraging more individual responsibility, freedom and social enterprise as opposed to having an all-encompassing state. I did decide to vote Tory in 2005 (but my postal vote never turned up) but I thought that their manifesto was rubbish. I thought we had a pretty poor choice at the last election but decided that we needed a change and that another 5 years of New Labour in their death-throes was too much to bear.

A lot of people who would never have considered voting Tory are now becoming interested in Tory policy. What puts them off are when people start bleating on from the sidelines about a return to the ‘good old days’ of Thatcher. It’s not 1979, it is 2007.

By: Hilarity

Hilarity — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 16:35:07 +0000

Um, John, we, the conservative electorate looking for someone genuinely conservative to vote for, might take these proposals with more enthusiasm if they were ordered differently:

why not put

3. You can cut spending by removing things from the budget that government does not need to do a future Conservative government could scrap ID cards, abolish much unelected regional government, cut out many quangoes, reduce the size of the civil service by natural wastage.

first?

I thought the Tories were not supposed to be the “tax-cut” party, but the small government party.

Do you guys remember that a tax cut is not a tax cut if all it means is that the money is being lifted out of the other pocket? You say, ‘well it has to come from somewhere, let’s have more green taxes.” But as far as I can tell, the problem is the assumption that the ‘money has to come.’

The total tax revenue going out of the hands of the public and into government coffers has never been so high. Ever. The tax burden in Britain would make a Roman emperor blush.

The idea that we have to have enormous government running every minute aspect of our lives is supposed to be the policy of the other guys isn’t it?

Can’t we have a Tory party who thinks the key is to reduce government? Reduce control over business?

Can we please get back to principles? Can we think about the possibility that the priority is not “finding other ways” to pay for the enormous government we already have, but finding ways to reduce the size, and intrusiveness, of government, encourage British people to look after themselves and each other?

Are the Cameron Tories really so far gone that they have forgotten the whole point of the exercise?

No wonder the BNP get better and better returns in by-elections.

Reply: I have proposed lower taxes, paid for out of economic growth, which means the portion of income taken by the state falls.

By: jorgen

jorgen — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 05:31:42 +0000

Never mind what Labour say about your ideas. What worries me is that Cameron is not supporting them!
Reply: David Cameron was on holiday. George Osborne attended the launch, and has given support to the two main tax proposals - subject to economic prudence. He also praised the Report generally.

By: Steven_L

Steven_L — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 19:49:16 +0000

Reducing crime and being tougher on the black economy might be another way to pay for tax cuts.

By: J

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 18:23:22 +0000

“Labour seem quite incapable of understanding compound arithmetic.”

I’m not so sure. They like the extra 5bn - it’s gets them out of a big hole.

By: Tony Makara

Tony Makara — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 12:23:55 +0000

Closing down failed Labour programmes like the New Deal would free up money. The future Conservative government must kill the tax credits sytem too. Under tax credits system we have a bizarre system of half work/half benefits in which people can actually receive more money from the state when in work than they would receive if they were unemployed. This of course is a deliberate strategy to create a dependency culture among people who are working, the Labour philosophy being that people won’t bite the hand that feeds them at election time.