Mr. Darling's stealth sin tax

Those of us with the character flaws that lead us to smoke and drink were left out in the cold yesterday by the Chancellor's reduction in VAT to 15% as he increased alcohol & tobacco duty by the 2.5 percentage points necessary to offset the reduction in VAT. Anyone want to guess whether this increase is reversed when VAT rates go back up in a year's time? To quote the immortal Damon Runyon:

"The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong -- but that's the way to bet it."

Sometime in the next half hour or so...

...the Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling is set to announce a reduction in the standard VAT rate from 17.5% to 15%; an announcement that will send financial controllers up and down the country, often accompanied by their sales and marketing staff, in search of their IT support staff to ask the following two questions:

"Can we deal with this in the next 6 days?"

and

"Can we do it properly?"

The answers in virtually all cases will be "probably" and "probably not".

I await the approach of my local finance folks with bated breath.

Tories accuse Labour of hate crime

Apparently the calls for a windfall profits tax on energy firms by (mostly not-so-New) Labour backbenchers is apparently just a reversion to good old "socialist hatred" of the stinking rich according to Alan Duncan the shadow business secretary and will not lead to "fair taxation". The Rt. Hon. Mr. Duncan doesn't go on to explain what he might mean by "fair taxation" but it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to guess.

Obama - right, Hillary (& McCain) - wrong

On the idea of a gasoline tax moratorium. Irrespective of the state of the American economy the government should be doing nothing, I repeat NOTHING, to encourage America's profligate energy consumption; both because we are approaching (if we have not passed) the point of peak oil and because of the country's extravagantly high greenhouse gas emissions. This is simply pandering to the electorate with no thought for policy or for the consequences. The price of petrol in America is still far below that of the rest of the developed world; in the case of the UK it is less than half! If anything the tax should be put on a schedule of aggressive, stepwise increases with the funds raised ring fenced equally for research into alternative energy sources and into public transportation. Of course being right is no way to win an election, especially in America!

1,000 reasons John McCain shouldn't be President

Number 6.

In a nation with a crumbling infrastructure and possibly terminal addiction to fossil fuels he seems to think that there should be a federal gas tax sale for the summer. Is this just an insane idea or what?

Running the government like a (poorly run) business (incorporating the quote of the day)

As part of its efforts to outsource government functions to a more efficient private sector the Bush administration has been using private debt collectors to chase taxes due. So far it has only cost the US taxpayer at least 37 million USD.

The quote of the day comes from Senatory Byron Dorgan (D - ND):

"This program is the hood ornament for incompetence."

I'm all for government being efficient but...

..given that the US Internal Revenue Service has an annual budget in excess of 9 billion USD one would think that they wouldn't have to rely on Wikepedia for legal definitions that they are going to rely on in court.