Arthur Laffer
Chairman, Laffer Associates
Cut the 50p tax
Reducing the burden which government places on the economy, through tax cuts, is the surest way to promote growth. I have never heard of a country that taxed itself into prosperity. Yet Britain last year raised the top rate of income tax from 40 per cent to 50 per cent. For more economic growth, and more tax revenue, this rate should be lowered immediately.
This paradox — lower rates, but higher yield — has been demonstrated time and time again, the world over. Between 1980 and 2007, the US cut tax rates on every form of income, the highest, the lowest and all those in the middle. The result was that the rich paid more, even if their tax levels were reduced. Let’s take the top 1 per cent of earners. Over this 27-year period, their contribution to the income tax collected in America doubled from 19.5 per cent to 40 per cent. The same dynamics applied in Britain: when the top rate of income tax was lowered to 40 per cent in 1988, the share of income tax collected from the richest 1 per cent rose from 14 per cent then to 27 per cent last year. Raising tax rates on the rich is about as bad an idea for the UK as I could imagine.
The government doesn’t need to do something. It needs to undo much of what it already has done. If you want poor people to do better, create jobs, not welfare — and to do this make taxes lower, not higher. ‘The best form of welfare,’ in the words of John F. Kennedy, ‘is still a good high-paying job.’
Louise Cooper
Senior financial analyst, BGC Partners
Plan not to plan
In its growth review last year, the government declared that its aim was ‘to achieve strong, sustainable and balanced growth that is more evenly shared across the country and between industries’.
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