Articles

The Taxpayers' Alliance has launched a petition on its website (freezebusinessrates.org) to enable taxpayers to appeal to their members of Parliament on business rates.

Corporate taxation in the United Kingdom rose by 4.6 per cent in 2011, by 5.5 per cent in 2012. Yet the coalition government seems set to implement a further 2.6 per cent hike in April 2013.

Our colleagues at the TPA have campaigned successfully against union subsidies. This means that the number of civil servants working for the unions at the taxpayers' expense will now be reduced sharply. Currently, 0.26 per cent of the payroll in the Civil Service is spent on union representation, compared to 0.04 per cent in the private sector.

"Taxpayers shouldn't be funding staff to work for trade unions, providing them with a huge activist base to support strikes and freeing up resources for political campaigns", says Matthew Sinclair, Chief Executive of the TPA.

"However, similar action is also going to be required elsewhere in the public sector. Only then will the days of nurses and council staff working full-time for the union instead of doing the job for which they are paid be consigned to history."  Read more

It just keeps a'comin

As tax revenues are flooding into the Treasury, the German taxpayers' association (BdSt) has asked the federal government to axe the "stealth" tax increases and to cut spending further. Current estimates show that tax revenues will be substantially higher than previously thought: a record 600 billion euros in 2012 and 700 billion euros in 2017.

The BdSt considers that some 27 billion euros could be saved in the federal budget.

The South China Morning Post (15 October 2012) reported on the coming 75 per cent tax on the wealthy, quoting IREF's Deputy Director Jean-Philippe Delsol, saying the tax is populist and plays on a historic Gallic antipathy to the rich. Read more

Socialism is not working

By Nicolas Lecaussin

Can you imagine that unemployment has been “priority number one” for French politicians over the past 35 years! Left, right and center have all claimed that their first objective was to reduce unemployment, in particular among young people. Yet they have failed every time. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy regularly repeated that “the French social model has protected us from the crisis”.