From the BBC:
The European Commission wants EU member states to consider allowing it to levy direct taxes - a move that could ease the burden on national budgets.(1)
The EU's Budget Commissioner, Janusz Lewandowski, said he would present some options next month for direct EU taxes. Taxes on aviation (2), financial transactions (3) and CO2 emission permits (4) are all possibilities, he told the daily Financial Times Deutschland.
1) Does not compute. Whether a government collects extra tax in its own right and hands it over, or collects extra tax on behalf of the EU is neither here nor.
2) A tax on the value of landing slots would hit the spot. Apart from that, before the EU even thinks about taxing 'aviation', it could stop subsidising Airbus, airports and airlines generally.
3) That's a piss poor idea for the same reason that the EU-imposed VAT is a piss poor idea.
4) These permits are the worst idea of all as they are handed out for free in the first instance but have value in future, so they are a massive corporate subsidy and led directly to the closure of steel plants in the UK.
Monday, 9 August 2010
That's a shit idea, obviously.
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9 comments:
"The European Commission wants EU member states to consider allowing it to levy direct taxes - a move that could ease the burden on national budgets.(1)"
Ahh yes, but then the national governments can say "look! We've reduced your taxes by x%. We're lovely and you want to vote for us again," while not mentioning the 2x% increase thanks to the EU taxes.
The only good way of dealing with the Eurine Union is to kill all of them. For preference, in a horrible and painful way, but in any case, today.
I was in Wales on a holiday with Mrs L last week. Went and looked at various castles, and how they'd been used to subjugate the population. And then I read a piece about the American Revolution and the truly radical ideas the colonists had about the nature of the state and its relationship with the people. The principal idea seemed to be the citizen as sovereign.
Every time you read something about the EU the clearer it becomes that in the EU the citzen is not in any way Sovereign. But the problem is how, when our representative democracy allows the same democtatic weight to non wealth creating people as it does to wealth creators, are we ever goig to get it changed - other than by blood?
RA, and those of us who spot the 2x % increase will be told that they are 'green taxes to help prevent CCC".
BFOD, as I've said before, we can auction off tickets to the hangings and the revolution will be self-financing.
L, I am painfully aware of the true function of castles*, which makes the Home-Owner-Ist expression "An Englishman's home is his castle" seem all the more cynical.
* The most extreme is the one on Mount St Michael, where all the cannons face shorewards and not out to sea.
MW/BFOD - I am not at all a violent man but, truthfully, I don't just want tickets. I will volunteer to help. I can drive a tumbrill as well as any man - well I have a nice two tonne trailer that'll take 20 bureaucrats easy, and my old LR will tow it - nice and slowly - so that there is plenty of time for the rude populace to throw rotten tomatoes.
Isn't the 1st thing to be asked before adopting a tax to ask what are 1) its ends.. and then 2) its means once that has been agreed on?
The ends here seem to be to raise revenue. But for what exactly and why and then what makes them think it will work?
I suspect large concentrations of capital are seeking protection here.
L, will they be allowed to throw tomatoes in tins?
RS, 1) its ends are to give the EU more money and more power and make it more like 'a state'. 2) The means are not so important.
The taxes they suggest could be used to raise barriers to entry or reduce barriers to entry, that all depends (I'd assume the former, because that is typical for the EU).
Our politicians will deny there is any such plan.
Then, next year, they will say there is such a plan, but they'll veto it.
Then, the year after, they'll say they can't veto it, but they have secured an opt-out from the worst aspects, in return for a promise from the French to reform the CAP.
Then, the year after that, the taxes will be imposed. The CAP will not be reformed, and Dave Cameron will point out that this does not involve any transfer of power to the EU - since it will turn out that it was all covered in the Lisbon treaty anyway - so no referendum is needed.
And we will fall for it.
WY, that's an excellent bit of future history you have written there (but you missed the bit where the politicos say that other taxes will be reduced to compensate and then they back track on that). We'll have to check progress over the next couple of years.
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