Sunday 19 October 2008

"Tories urge VAT holiday for firms"

This appears to be another silly gimmick from Camerosborne, but with a couple of little tweaks it would be brilliant, namely:

1. Don't charge interest on the late paid VAT.

2. Make the holiday indefinite/permanent.

To cut a long story short, scrap VAT*, the worst tax of all**.

And if the EU get in a strop and chuck us out, that's icing on the cake!

* Where appropriate, replace it with a small per cent tax on the sale of new goods to cover any external costs, in particular refuse collection/disposal costs, but that's a user charge rather than a tax.

** Employer's National Insurance contributions are just as evil in principle, but this tax raises slightly less than half as much as VAT, so let's deal with VAT first.

UPDATE: Obo looks at this in more depth.

6 comments:

Trixy said...

As you allude to there, it's up to the EU. And they're socialist and think that taxing people is a good thing.

Did the Tories mention that, or did they just go straight for the headline?

Mark Wadsworth said...

The latter, as usual.

Anonymous said...

They could zero rate the entire UK?

For VAT that is.

TheFatBigot said...

I have always understood that VAT is usually payable on invoices issued rather than money received.

If this is correct, it seems to follow that they would be helped by only being obliged to pay VAT when they get the dosh.

Mark Wadsworth said...

TFB, up a turnover of £1.35 million you can in fact go for the cash accounting scheme. But it's still the worst tax.

TheFatBigot said...

Ta.