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As we have been saying here for years… Christopher Booker writes in The Telegraph:
What on earth was in David Cameron’s head when, amid raucous Commons exchanges on our soaring energy bills, he shouted at Ed Miliband, “we need to roll back the green charges” that the Labour leader “put in place when he was energy secretary”? Mr Cameron must have known that he and his party cheered every single one of the green charges introduced by Mr Miliband when he was energy and climate change secretary. Along with George Osborne, William Hague and most of his present Cabinet, Cameron happily voted for Mr Miliband’s Climate Change Act, committing us all to paying up to £18billion every year until 2050; in fact, the Tories wanted to go even further
So are the likes of David Davis plotting to remove the catastrophic Cameron? And if Nigel Farage is not intending to make hay out of this I would be very surprised. But then regular readers of Samizdata has long known we regard Cameron’s Tories, the LibDems and Labour as pretty much interchangeable.
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From the U.S.
Help me out here….
Green charges?
Those windmills don’t just build themselves you know.
I always find it irritating when on business shows like CNBC or Bloomberg they refer to an increase in the price of gas as a tax hike. As they spend hours and hours talking about the US fiscal deficit and whether the time is right to close it by increasing taxes or cutting spending (it’s not), they always bang on about “tax hikes” as chilling of demand and so recession inducing. Money is sucked from the consumer and as good little Keynesians that must be resisted. And so by analogy, anything that sucks money from the consumer – like an increase in the price of gas – is a sort of tax hike. To non Keynesians this is irritating, for while tax hikes are bad, it is not because of the alleged Keynesian demand chilling, it’s because it’s a compulsory transfer from the productive part of the economy to the unproductive. Whereas an increase in the price of gas is just the market doing its signaling.
But these green charges never get called taxes, when in reality that’s exactly what they are. They are hypothecated taxes levied on power bills, and spent on projects of the government’s choosing. I’d love someone to tot up all these stealth taxes (there’s lots more of them) – I’d bet they add up to at another 10% of GDP, maybe more.
David Davies MP is a quite different person from David Davis MP, whom I suppose you mean.
True true Guy.