With this invoice I thee wed

Gay people charged 4 times more by the state to 'marry' their partner than religious couples

... says Éoin Clark. And he is right... 


Should you wish to mark your commitment and have it sanctioned by Belfast City Council, these are the options (Saturday prices)..

1. A civil wedding in the registrars office = £289
2. A civil wedding in an 'approved' venue = £273
3. A civil wedding in a venue of your choice = £273 + £400 'to apply for a temporary marriage license'
4. A Religious wedding = £40

In his bid to paint a picture of gayism, Éoin does needlessly focuses on that angle.. when the problem he identifies equally impacts any couple who don't want a religious wedding. The Gays do, it must be said, lose even the option of the cheap £40 wedding deal because all of those loving deities aren't, actually, all that loving at all.

I am bored.. so I did my own research. What do those options really mean??

Option 1 gives us a registrar and a room which is licensed to hold ceremonies. So it's the full-service package.. nothing more to pay.

Option 2 gives us a registrar who will come to a room that we've arrange ourselves from the list of approved venues. With this option, we have to pay whatever our chosen rooms costs.

Option 3 is the same as option 2, except you can be a maverick and choose any place you want to get married/partnered. That means, obviously, that you need to drop £400 on a license so that said venue can be temporarily approved. I expect that if you don't get married in a place that the council has approved then your first night of bliss will be a messy disappointment and any children you create/adopt will be struck down with a n odorous pox. Oh, and the council needs to do a comprehensive Health and Safety assessment of the venue. I'm serious about the last one. Anyway, here, again, you obviously have to pay for your venue yourself.

Option 4 is the cheapo Jesus-friendly option, and it's only £40 because God/Allah/Icke is all powerful and will be really angry if the fee is any higher than a mid-price seat at Stamford Bridge. Also, with the £40 option you don't get a venue or a registrar.. you have to make all of your own arrangements. That, one suspects, means paying the church/etc whatever it has decided to charge for weddings these days (which probably depends on how demanding the last lot of abused kids were at out-of-court-settlement-o'clock).

But the point is that the £40 option is very very different from all the others. It seems to be nothing more than a small admin fee for, one presumes, entering the details of the wedding into a poorly-secured database so that someone can hack in and steal all your DVD's whilst you're on honeymoon.

All that said, Éoin is still right. How come people who don't want / can't have a religious ceremony are stuck with a council ceremony which is (possibly) expensive? Is it really the case that the only people who can perform these ceremonies are people blessed by an imaginary man in the sky or a real man at the council? And if the council must stick it's oar into these things, it might at least like to avoid profiteering and this indirect, yet inevitable, discrimination against those who don't want religion involved in their proceedings.

I say well done to Éoin, who is generally a fan of the state getting involved in as much as possible, for spotting something where it should be involved far less. And this is an easy fix. Make the £40 fee available to anyone who can turn up with a signed contract of partnership. The state can make a standard contract available if it so wishes, and can charge more for anyone who wants to write their own. If being married/partnered is to have implications for things like tax, benefits, children etc then I'm OK with there being some degree of regulation of the contract.. but why the fuck does it need any say in where two people chose to make that contract, or who (if anyone) is standing in front of them at the time?

I didn't ask to be born

http://thethoughtgang.wordpress.com/2012/04/21/i-didnt-ask-to-be-born/

Progressives, Obsessives and VAT

Christie Malry's blog doesn't seems to allow long comments, so this post (and replies thereon), made me write a blogthing....

He talks about the cult of the progressives.. those who shout down any tax/benefit changes they consider aren't wholly designed to bear down disproportionally upon the rich. I (like Christie) believe that a tax system should be progressive, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who doesn't. Deciding what is and isn't progressive because, as Christie alludes, whilst it might seem like science, it's not.

Alas, a complex problem and a complex system is increasingly becoming victim to gross over-simplification for political ends, and the obsession with progressiveness (or, to be more accurate, progressiveness as deemed by the noisier inhabitants of the moderate not-quite-left) is not helping to formulate better and fairer tax policy.  Along with this comes the eternal mantra that the tax burden should fall on those with a 'better ability to pay', and by 'better ability to pay' people invariably seem to mean 'with a higher individual gross income'.

Imagine two taxpayers.. Mr £50k and Ms £30k. 'Progressive wisdom' dictates that Mr £50k should pay a higher rate of tax than Ms £30k. If we needed to raise more tax then it would favour increasing income tax, as that would affect Mr £50k more than Ms £30k. 'Progressive wisdom' would not favour an increase in VAT because, it says, that would impact Ms £30k more than Mr £50k, because the increase would account for a greater percentage of her income.

Now let's imagine that Mr £50k is 45 years old, and is a single parent of three, and he has a mortgage on his modest but criminally overpriced 4-bed house. He gets by just fine (£50k is still a good wage) but he's not exactly flash. He spends most of his remaining money on food and clothing for the children, perhaps having some left over to put aside for a rainy day.

Ms £30k is 25, single, living in a flat that her parents paid for. She spend some money on food (lots of meals out and takeaways, mind), drink, entertainment and gadgets.

Now... who's got the better ability to pay a bit more tax? And is an income tax rise or a VAT increase the best option?

This is a deliberately manufactured example, of course... but it's not a stretch to suggest that a lot of people have disposable incomes, which they can spend on the sorts of consumption that VAT taxes, that are much higher than people who have higher earnings.

Income does not always equate to wealth. Income does not always flow through to disposable income. The tax system needs to take account of this. To be 'progressive' it needs to measure 'ability to pay' by reference to more than just earnings. With VAT it does this.. which is why it irks me greatly when VAT is dismissed as 'regressive' all the time, when even in isolation it is not.. and when taken as part of a comprehensive tax system it definitely isn't.

The point of VAT is that it should only apply to non-essential spending. Of course, it doesn't get it right all the time.. but it's not too bad. It's not on most food, books, children's clothes, public transport and other such things. Whether VAT is applied to the right things is a matter for another day, but it's irrelevant to the question of whether it is a fair tax.

Caroline Flint is an idiot

Caroline Flint thinks that instead of mucking about with tax for the rich, we should cut VAT by 2.5% in order to put £450 in the pockets of ordinary people.

She's an idiot.

A 2.5% VAT cut translates to a 2.1% reduction in the cost of something to which VAT is applied. So something which would have cost £120 (aka £100 plus 20% VAT) would now cost £117.50.nTherefore, to save £450 then someone would need to spend £21,600 (inclusive of 20% VAT).. with lower VAT they would pay £21,150. That's £1,800 per month.

To have £1,800 per month to spend, a household(1) needs a gross income in excess of £25k a year, or £480 per week. According to the IFS (see fig 2.1), median household income in the UK in 2009-10 was £413, and mean was £517. 

So someone with an average income can, should they be so minded, save £450 in VAT. Just.

But, not really.... because this requires a household to spend every penny of that income on stuff to which VAT is added. So, well, that means they can't spend any money on, er, housing.. food.. children's clothes.. insurance.. utilities and whatever else various governments have decided should not attract VAT (or, in the case of utilities, standard rate VAT)

So let us be a little more realistic.. let us assume that our household spends £550 on housing (that'll get you a £100k mortgage), and £75 a week on food (according to the Guardian, £50 a week for a family of four is possible, but bloody tough). Now we need £2,650 a month if we're to save £450 from our VAT cut.. so we need a gross income of more like £40,000(2) a year... or £770 a week.  Back to that IFS graph... we're now sitting pretty in the top 20%.

AND.. we're still expecting these people to live in modest homes (remember, we're only paying a £100k mortgage), have modest food bills, pay nothing in insurances, pay no utilities, pay no loans or finance costs, buy no children's clothes, put nothing into their pensions, and save nothing for a rainy day.

So, Caroline Flint, tell me again how cutting VAT by 2.5% will put £450 in the hands of ordinary families? Because I'm fortunate enough to sit pretty close to the sexy end of that graph, and I know damn well that I wouldn't save that much.

Curiously, do you know what WOULD put that sort of money into the hands of a lot of ordinary working people? Why, how about raising the personal allowance for income tax up to £10,000? Or even further.. up to the value of the minimum wage, where it should be anyway? Why doesn't Caroline Flint propose that instead? Perhaps because part of it is already coalition policy (and driven by those nasty LibDems, at that) and her party had many years in government during which they ratcheted up taxes on 'ordinary working people' whenever possible largely, a cynic might suggest, in order to fund a bureaucracy to find convoluted way to give some of it back.


(1) This assumes two earners who both pay basic rate tax. If income is biased towards one person then the gross amount needed increases because the tax paid will be higher. If there is only one earner then the figure is around £28,000 per year, or £540 per week.
(2) With a single earner the figures increases to £44,000 a year, or £846 a week. Now we're tickling the top 10% of households.

Just Shut Up

It's always nice to find out whether people who talk rubbish are doing it deliberately. Or whether people who spin and twist things to their own agendas are genuinely seeking to mislead and misrepresent.

I was critical of a hopelessly misleading chart presnted by Eoin Clarke. Whilst he still deleted my comment about it on his blog, he commented here and asked for a bit of help with Excel so he could set the scale on his charts sensibly. Fair play, I say.

So today I am directed by FCA Blog to this post by Grande Dame - which is spreading (warning: bad swearing ahead) horseshit:


"98 of the top 100 grossing businesses in the UK DO NOT PAY ANY CORPORATE TAX"


Yes. She said that. She thinks it's true. It's so patently untrue I will not provide the links that prove it. Life is too short.

So, has Grande Dame just got the wrong end of the stick? There is, of course, a lot of misleading stuff about tax being put out there. Mr FCA, indeed, highlights a shoddy headline from Sky News. Is Grande Dame a victim of misinformation, or is she a cause of it?

Well when challenged by FCA, she responded with (I paraphrase) "blah blah blah read this piece in the Guardian". I read the piece in the Guardian. It did not back up her claim. So I thought I'd leave a comment:

It does not say anywhere in that Guardian piece that these companies pay no tax. It says that they have a presence in tax havens, some of which have 0% tax rates. That is not the same.

If you look at the accounts of any of those companies (and they will all publish them on their websites, look for 'Investor Relations') then you will see that they do pay tax. Lots and lots of tax.

Most of these companies do, indeed, use various fancy structures and wheezes to *reduce* their tax bill. That is not in dispute. Not all of the subsidiaries in tax havens are set up with that in mind (it's hardly beyond belief to imagine that a huge UK company might want to have a genuine presence in Ireland) but many are. Great... let's talk about whether these companies are pushing the law too far and decide what should be done about it.

However, let's NOT say they pay no tax. It's not true. It's absolutely objectively and proveably nonsense. It is not supported by your sources, and even the most rudimentary fact-check would tell you that. You're spreading complete misinformation.. how, precisely, do you think that helps further your objective?

I thought that was polite and constructive enough. Grande Dame deleted it. Grande Dame doesn't care about the truth. She's written something that is wrong. She's had it clearly explained to her that she is wrong. She's been told why she's wrong and how she can confirm that she is wrong. She knows that she's not an expert in the field (at least, I hope she does) yet she will not listen to anyone suggesting she reconsiders what she's said. Whatever she thought when she wrote the piece, she now knows that it's wrong and she has no interest in correcting it. At this point, the youth would say EPIC FAIL.

Now... I'm not going to stick up for companies who set up tax-dodge schemes. I think that they should pay tax wherever they do business, under the rules set out by whoever is in charge. I'd like the law to limit some of the tax avoidance opportunities that are out there. (Of course, I don't much like lots of our tax rules, nor what the money raised is then spent on... but, that's a side issue, theoretically this is a democracy and companies that trade here should subject to whatever rubbish setup the rest of us are stuck with.)

HOW AND EVER... the case for corporate tax reform (if one believes there is one) is NOT helped by people talking rubbish. No debate can be effectively won when one side is armed only with spin and lies. If you don't think that the truth can stand up for itself, then you're part of the problem.


EDIT: Whilst she's still being wilfully ignorant of the basic and irrefutable facts, it does appear that Grande Dame didn't delete any comments. My bad, n'all that.

Doing it right

http://thethoughtgang.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/doing-it-right/

If Alanis Morissette were a tax blogger....

...she, too, would plug her forthcoming book in a blog post about how nasty advertising is.