Freelance job intraexchange crypto arbitrage bottled water
My weekly column in the Freelance job intraexchange crypto arbitrage bottled water Times on Saturdays, explaining the economic ideas around us every day. This column was inspired by my book and began in If a politician was a surgeon, faced with the task of amputating your leg, we can well imagine how it would go. Finally, he would blame the mess handed to him by the previous surgeon and would begin to rub away at your toes with a cheese grater.
So it is with taxes. Yet our politicians seem determined to make the process as clumsy, painful and disingenuous as possible. This may be because politicians see taxes purely in political terms. They believe that the deep problem with taxes is that people do not like paying them, which is why they say, instead, that the taxes will be levied only on multinational corporations, investment bankers and tax dodgers of all stripes.
Politicians placate angry voters with tax exemptions and deductions. All this is politically understandable but has the effect of making the taxes much more damaging than they need to be. The true problem with taxes is quite different. It is that in an effort to pay less tax, people do some extraordinary things.
Others are quite simple. All of them are unfair, and all of them generate paperwork. A second problem, less fussed-about but probably more serious, is that people will change their behaviour rather than just the legal description of that behaviour.
For example, some new mothers who want to work will stay at home rather than hire childcare out of heavily taxed income. One, by Gabriel Zucman, emphasises that the complexity and inconsistency of different tax systems allow wealthy individuals and multinational companies to exploit cross-border loopholes and avoid tax. But one way to look at the problem of levying high taxes is to ask who has solved it.
Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Somehow the Scandinavians have managed to raise large sums from their citizens without destroying their economies. It is also partly about the comprehensive tax reporting in Scandinavia, which makes outright evasion very difficult. Norwegian tax returns are published for all to examine. No wonder Gabriel Zucman dreams — perhaps implausibly — of a global financial registry to help track down tax dodgers. Not everyone will feel delighted about an all-seeing government determined to invade privacy in the name of higher taxes.
But there are other elements of Scandinavian taxation that any government might want to emulate: Scandinavian countries minimise the distortions of their tax system by avoiding the bad habits of politicians in other countries.
Chief among these habits is targeting a narrow tax base. The US tax system is full of ad hoc deductions and exemptions. The UK system needlessly excludes swaths of the economy from tax. Rather than charge a 10 per cent rate of VAT on everything, the UK government charges a 20 per cent rate of VAT on roughly half of what consumers spend. The Danes have a much broader VAT base, and a higher rate too. The simplest way to broaden the tax base is to dismantle barriers to getting a job.
Scandinavian governments subsidise education, transport and care for children and the elderly, all of which help people to work who might otherwise find themselves stuck at home. As a result, even high taxes do not keep them out of the labour market. If the surgeon really is going to amputate your leg, having a prosthetic replacement would be wise. Written for and first published at ft.
In anticipation of this event, Professor Thaler is setting FT readers a challenge, revisiting a puzzle he set them once before, in The task is simple: The winner is the person whose number is closest to two-thirds of the average of all the entries.
For example, three entries are submitted: The average is then 30 and the winning entry is 20, being exactly two-thirds of the average. In the event of a tie, the prize will freelance job intraexchange crypto arbitrage bottled water to the person who submits the best justification. The prize for the winning entry is a luxurious weekend bag designed for the FT by Dom Reilly — lightweight, elegant and exquisitely handcrafted in brown full-grain leather with subtle FT branding.
Please send your guess and your justification to: Competition ends May Men think about sex every seven seconds. Eighty-four per cent of women are emotionally unsatisfied with their relationships.
Single people in the United States have more sex than married people do. Sixty-nine per cent of people over the age of 35 have had extramarital affairs. People have 40 per cent less sex now than they did 20 years ago. A new book by statistician David Spiegelhalter, Freelance job intraexchange crypto arbitrage bottled water by Numbers, runs a statistical comb through our collective sex lives.
His book is largely designed to teach us about sexual behaviour — who is doing what with whom and how often — but along the way he manages to impart some important statistical lessons too. Lesson one is that statistics tell us nothing until we understand what is being counted in the first place.
We should not take for granted that we all mean the same thing when we talk about sex. While Clinton exploited ambiguity, modern scientific surveys of sexual behaviour try to eliminate it.
A second lesson is that we should pay attention to whether statistical work has been done carefully or casually. This is twice as much as more credible surveys have found. Some of the most famous sex researchers are also limited freelance job intraexchange crypto arbitrage bottled water a lack of representative sampling.
The underlying research here was politically groundbreaking but we cannot have too much confidence that these numbers are correct. Kinsey was on the lookout for interesting sexual case histories and so sent his researchers to prisons and to bars famous for being gay meeting places. He may well have captured a broader range of sexual behaviour as a result but at the cost of a representative sample.
To revisit the factoids in the first paragraph: But the final discovery — that we are having 40 per cent less sex — is true. According to the rigorously collected Natsal freelance job intraexchange crypto arbitrage bottled water, heterosexually active people aged typically had sex five times in the past month back in Bythe number had fallen steadily to three times. Perhaps the next Natsal survey will be able to figure out why. It is the agenda one would expect of a courageous Labour party, which of course places it a long way from the agenda that the actual Labour party is proposing.
It seems only fair, then, to offer the same service to the Conservatives: Step one is to replace the benefit system with a freelance job intraexchange crypto arbitrage bottled water libertarian form of redistribution.
Scrap the income tax allowance too. The basic income can be phased in on a residency basis over 10 years, ensuring that recent immigrants pay a larger net contribution to the exchequer. This policy targets poverty rather than inequality. It abolishes much of the bureaucracy that surrounds benefit eligibility, promotes individual responsibility and reduces the stigma of collecting money from the state.
It gives everyone, rich and poor, a clear incentive to work. Compared to the current system, it redistributes to the working poor and to the highest earners — both groups of people who are likely to produce more taxable income in response. It is simple, discouraging tax avoidance. And, despite the flat headline rate, the average income tax contribution is progressive: People with unusual needs — the severely disabled, for instance — would be helped by a multibillion-pound fund with considerable discretion to make direct cash payments or commission assistance from charities.
A second policy is to privatise the freelance job intraexchange crypto arbitrage bottled water school system. Compulsory schooling would end at the age of 14 and educational institutions would be competing to attract these pots of tax-free cash with engaging and practical training courses. Any unspent money would be taxed and handed over to the child at freelance job intraexchange crypto arbitrage bottled water age of Third, scrap the personal pension system.
Both the logic for and the reputation of the existing system is in tatters. With the new flat tax and universal basic income it would also be superfluous. People can save for their retirement in more flexible Isa-style savings accounts and could be nudged into doing so by a default payroll deduction.
Freelance job intraexchange crypto arbitrage bottled water fourth policy must involve the housing market. This is a multifunctional policy indeed. Given that housing benefit is to be abolished by this radical government, there is an urgent need to build freelance job intraexchange crypto arbitrage bottled water numbers of houses.
This would freelance job intraexchange crypto arbitrage bottled water the economy and reduce the price of new homes.
In these zones, substantial increases in housing could be achieved by a coalition of local authorities, community groups and developers.
However the trick is pulled off, the government must create the conditions for a housing boom —new homes a year for five years would do to begin with. Abolishing all VAT exemptions would be a good start, freelance job intraexchange crypto arbitrage bottled water would provide substantial revenue.
A carbon tax would also be well worth introducing, as would more proportionate taxation of housing wealth. The proceeds of these taxes would be needed at first to pay for the universal basic income but the aim would be to reduce universal income tax rate too.
A future leftwing government could redistribute freelance job intraexchange crypto arbitrage bottled water the same framework by increasing the basic income. That should do the trick for the first term but a Conservative government should also commit to staying in the European Union, which stands in favour of trade, business and hard money; and to leaving the National Health Service alone for a few years just to see how it performs when not being incessantly prodded by politicians.
There you have it: In Europe we are thankfully nowhere near the wealth inequality of the past. The richest 1 per cent had