English taxpayers will see their Council Tax bills rise by 3.5% this year. The official line was predictable:
LGA chairman Margaret Eaton said that despite the difficulties, local authorities were doing their best to limit the rises in council tax. “Money is tight for everyone and nobody likes paying more council tax, but town halls are making enormous efforts to keep bills down,” she said. “Councils understand that people are suffering and they’re working flat out to keep council tax down, to keep local businesses afloat and help people deal with the impact of the recession. “More people are turning to councils to help them through the recession. Councils are responding by making services more efficient and they recognise that tax increases need to be kept to the absolute minimum.
The ‘money quote’ is of course: “More people are turning to councils to help them through the recession”… the idea that civil society revolves around the state is so deeply ingrained that the concept of less state and more civil society simply does not fit within their world view. Let me suggest that if a massive number of council employees in England were fired, very few of whom are net contributors of wealth to the ailing economy, that would do more to alleviate the recession than anything the state could do at the local level to ‘help people through the recession’. Less taxes, that would help.
The sheer arrogance is breathtaking. Expecting any increase in tax, when they should be shrinking themselves at the very least in step with the contracting economy, shows how rotten the system is. And of course the dependably useless Tory party, at their very best only a ‘lesser evil’, only want to ‘freeze’ local taxes for two years. They are not even contemplating actually rolling back the state even in line with the shrinking economy. Message to the vile Dave Cameron: if the economy is contracting, anything other than a reduction is an increase.
The very idea of “rolling back the state even in line with the shrinking economy” must seem alien to them. I keep hearing the argument (from important sounding people on the telly) that “cutting government spending in a recession is madness”. It’s perverse.
Amen. A vote for either main party is a delusion of choice as there is bugger all difference. UKIP, because there simply is no alternative.
Is that you Bruno?
UKIP has little chance of winning anything at the moment but as voting Tory and WINNING changes nothing, how is that not a wasted vote? If you are going to waste a vote, at least vote for the right people.
And who know? If enough people come to that conclusion… no political party lasts forever and the Tory party is probably beyond salvage, the return of Ken Clarke just confirms my view of them as a worthless shower, not that I really needed any proof beyond the intellectual and political void that is Dave Cameron.
Blimey! It’s a fair cop, guv 😛
In what way does a council keep local businesses afloat?
The whole concept of there not being a tax increase seems lost on them….
I agree that if you are going to ‘waste’ your vote you should ‘waste’ it on UKIP, you never know…
I agree that councils could sack half their staff and nobody would notice.
But as a tenant, I’m really not fussed about council tax. If it goes up, then that means my landlady is less likely to increase the rent. And if the Tooth Fairy offered to pay everybody’s council tax in my area, my landlady would just put up the rent by £2,400.
There are far worse taxes than Council Tax.
I prefer taxes which raise money in the least disruptive way possible to property and liberty. Sales taxes tend to tick that box more than taxes based on property values. And no Mark, we are not debating LVT with you again. You’ve been pumelled enough.
sigh.
Rather like saying there are far worse diseases than typhoid… true, but so what? If you are struggling in the current economy does it matter which tax is going to screw you for 3.5% more this year?
Mark, Mark, Mark…you aren’t following. You are not one with The Program.
Topics that quickly degenerate into pointless arguing have to follow a strict rotation. We cannot have LVT come up again until we’ve discussed Iraq, free trade with unfree regimes, and someone needs to post a badly-edited video of a cop apparently misbehaving on camera and ask me to explain it before we can come back to LVT.
Thanks to declining tax revenues, our training budget is basically gone for 2009. Whether or not we’ll even have the barest minimum first aid, firearms re-qualification and arrest control/taser recertification is up in the air but I’m pessimistic. Forget EVOC refreshers.
Them’s the breaks. Speaking as a local-government employee it would be damn irresponsible to NOT make cuts in the present climate, although I’d rather leave most of our open vacancies open than cut training. Or charge more for special-events permits that require added police coverage. Or something. But leaving retail sales and property taxes (the primary funding sources for US local governments including public safety/schools/etc) at present levels is painful for the taxpayers as is. An increase would be, IMHO, unacceptable.
Thankfully, due to TABOR, tax hikes ain’t gonna happen soon here.[1]
As I write this, Denver’s Fox affiliate ran an article about the county sheriff in Fort Collins. He’s looking at having to release 10% of his county jail inmates because he can’t afford to house them. And this in a state where nonviolent drug offenders basically don’t go to jail to begin with.
[1] Although the governor is trying. He wants to increase car registration fees as a general revenue source, because fees are not taxes that require voter permission to raise. The whole thing about fees needing to have some rational relationship to the service they supposedly pay for, well, that’s just a detail.
Milton Friedman also said the second least bad tax is a flat tax on incomes or profits, with which I wholeheartedly concur.
Politicians LOVE VAT and sales taxes as they can trick people into thinking that somebody else pays it. Commonsense says that sales taxes have a far worse effect on the economy than a flat income or profit tax.
Politicians are totally schizophrenic in this regard. The first step to banning something is to call for higher taxes on it (fatty food, petrol, whatever) as they know that higher taxes reduces amount consumed to some extent, ergo it must also reduce amount produced.
A sales tax on everything (above and beyond external costs) of necessity depresses production i.e. reduces people’s incomes, as well as increasing the price to the consumer.
I can argue this one all day as well (click link below)
I am sure you can argue it all day, Mark. And you will be wrong all day, 395 days a year.
“A sales tax… of necessity depresses production.”
It depresses me too.
What also depresses me is that you apparently cannot see through to the principled objection to taxes. Tax is theft – get it through your head.
OK, even if you strip the state down to the teeniest tiniest minimum (police, defence etc) you’d still need about £50 billion to £100 billion per annum.
I’m perfectly happy with this idea. But you’d still need to raise £50 billion or £100 billion to pay for it.
So unless the Tooth Fairy pays it …
Sunfish, I know little about Denver local politics, but whilst your brave local pols are cutting back on the non-essential items like police training and state and county jails, are they also cutting back on the kind of essential items that local and county councils over here spend so much of our tax money on?
Have they cut the budget for the Lesbian Outreach department? Have they reduced the amount of tax payers money paid to local ‘artists’? Has the minority youth aromatherapy program been slashed?
When vital services such as these are affected then you will know that the recession has well and truly bitten.
The UK defence budget is on the order of 2.5% of GDP. Might even be able to fund that by lottery, donation or other voluntary means – assuming people were not being robbed blind.
Given twenty (or fifty) years economic growth without a regulatory or parasitic state who knows what tiny percentage of wealth would be needed to deter the savages in the collectivised economies.
The big problem is, Mark, that you just run around advocating different novelty or intriguing taxes instead of attacking the one we do have. Clever taxes or even negative ones or bloody vouchers are not part of the solution. You’re in danger of becoming part of the problem space.
David NCl, OK, let’s agree that those bits of the state that we really need only cost £50 billion, which I have never disputed. How are you going to raise the money? If I ever point out which taxes are really bad (VAT, for example) everybody suddenly abandons economic logic for political expedience and starts sticking up for VAT.
Kevin-
Times are truly desperate. The only lesbian outreaching going on this week is in the w4w section of craigslist. Our Five-a-Day Coordinator has been cut back to three a day.
Things are bad all over. I went to rent “Up in Smoke” last week and found out that it would have been an extra two bucks for the version with Chong in it.
I see libertarian infighting here…
Look folks. Before we start arguing the toss about which taxes are “good” and which are “bad” I suggest we all stick together (I know – “kill the blasphemer!”) and agree that they are all to high as a start point.
Then we can debate. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how we fund limited government – I’m talking here to the Classical Liberals / Minarchist here because my wifi doesn’t reach to Tau Ceti where the Anarcho-Capitilists are located. And I mean debate. The method by which maybe (I’m just making this up) 5-20% of GDP goes to government is a detail. The real issue is getting it down from nearly 50%.
If you think that figure of 20% is horrendously too large then… That’s for the transition. It would be utterly wrong to deny, say, a state pension to someone who has had to pay into the system all their lives and is now just about to retire…
The alternative is of course a revolution and apart from the aforementioned issue those are always a case of throwing everything up into the air and seeing how it falls. And, folks, it could fall very badly indeed. Revolutions having a track history of not turning out in not quite the way envisioned…
Im unsure what councils control from place to place.
Here in Oz they are supposed to handle roads, rubbish collection, and a number of mundane activities. What is happening is many councils are being used as political incubators for all the major and minor parties.
So we end up with the greens dominated council refusing to spend on roads, and making declarations in sympathy with Hamas and that sort of crap.
And every year we see increased rates.
The thing about tax is (of whatever stripe, and we can argue about which is the fairest across the board)
Is that I want my Govt (massively small please!) to tell me what they want my money for, what they are going to spend it on, and how much it will cost me in the long run.
Not an unreasonable thing.
An Audit if you will ! Well seeing as the EU books are still out for tipexing after 14 years… No hope there then.
But the point is, that I should have a very large say in how my stolen hard earned gets spent.
But I dont.
Hell I might agree to throwing money at Hamas so they can keep firing rockets at Israel, rather than using it for the general welfare of Gaza citizens, but I dont.
But these are basics as far as I am concerned.
Tell me what you want my money for, how much and I’ll either let you have it, or I wont.
But give me a choice you fuckers!
“But give me a choice you fuckers!”
That’s not government you want then RAB – that’s a business.
“OK, even if you strip the state down to the teeniest tiniest minimum…”
… then you still publicly advocate theft.
“Revolutions having a track history of not turning out in not quite the way envisioned…”
Well they’re quite similar to government reform schemes then aren’t they?
This is why I do not waste all too much time engageing the anarchist wing of the libertarian movement, such as it is. They simply do not have anything useful to add and doom themselves to irrelevance. They do not see the need to move things in the right direction (less government), it is all or nothing.
Mike, we can argue about the need (and indeed if it is even possible) to transition from a minimal state to no state at all when we have a whole lot less state than we have now. But until we shift the culture to the point we can get a viable political movement (with better than a snowflake’s chance in hell of real world success) committed to ANY actually reduction in the size of the state whatsoever, intoning the mantra “tax is theft” at any suggestion for reducing taxes to anything other than zero does not add much to the discussion.
Make fellow travellers of people who want to head in the right direction, towards less government and more several liberty.
If RAB is “publicly advocating theft” then you are “publicly advocating failure and irrelevance”.
Ahem.
“But until we shift the culture to the point we can get a viable political movement… committed to ANY actually reduction in the size of the state whatsoever…
Do we have that yet?
The moral aspect of the objection to tax (and hence the State) is of prime importance to forcing that shift. That and reality.
I am not the one on this comments thread discussing technical details of selective tax cuts and when or if a minarchist or anarchist State would be possible.
I made no gestures toward a discussion of that sort.
Please excuse me.
The “education system” (the schools, the universities, and he establishment media they produce – radio, television, book shops and so on) all teach that government spending should be increased in a recession – to “counter the cycle”.
It is Moonbat stuff – but it is what is taught. And (dirty “secret” alert) it is politically profitable to go along with it, even for people who do not believe it.
This is partly because of the “Public Choice” point of – concentrated costs and diffuse benefits. Take the money away from a group or individual and they will hate you with all their soul, they will do anything to harm you. Whereas the taxpayers (who get some tiny sum off their bill) do not even notice. But also it is ideology – “helping people” (by spending money) is good. Trying to save money (to hold down taxes) is evil and selfish.
Of course your last point is made as well – “we are not spending any more money than we did last year Paul”.
Which ignores the declining economy – which leads to higher tax and big borrowing on top of that.