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It’s a cold day in June Incoming from the Adam Smith Institute:
Tax Freedom Day is four days later this year than last year, and the latest it has been for fifteen years.
For more of the grizzly details, go here.
We Brits now face choosing between a government that is raising taxes really quite fast, and an alternative government that would raise them a hell of a lot faster. Stagnation, or ruination. More about Tax Freedom Day here, and here.
The weather today, here in London where I sit, is really cold and grim and gloomy. Would that Tax Freedom Day, which is today, was now moving backwards towards some time like February, instead of us having to wait until June 3rd, which only feels like February.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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There is a third choice, which is to stop being a Brit.
Today is also National Doughnut Day. Celebrate in any way that seems appropriate.
It’s a sad time when towel day comes before tax day now.
The lesser evil is always preferable, and early June is usually miserable.
My gripe with Tax Freedom Day is that it appears to be calculated as if the fiscal year starts on 1st January, rahth than 6th April for personal taxes.
If it were up to Milton Friedman, tax freedom day wouldn’t happen until the deficit (a claim on future taxes) was covered as well. Come to think of it, why not include the total debt for an even truer picture?
The failure of the Chancellor, Mr Osborne, and the First Lord of the Treasury, Mr Cameron, on government spending is worse than their failure on taxes.
Government spending is vast – the talk of austerity is just that, talk.
The failure on regulations (the tidal wave of regulations from the E.U. – plus the government’s own demented ideas) has also been very bad.
And the monetary system failure is too obvious to need much comment – the Bank of England Credit Bubble.
Contrary to what some people think I get no pleasure from doom-and-gloom.
I wish I did – as there is plenty of doom-and-gloom to go around.
25C and blazing sunshine in Ayrshire.
Just sayin’