Tag: scotland

Posted on by Tim Worstall

The Economic Mistake With The Scottish Payment Initiation System

The Senior Lecturer points us toward another economically flawed idea. That Scotland should have its own, government owned, electronic payments system.

The basic idea of a state owned payments system, well, why not? The idea of a new payments system, well, why not? Nothing like market competition to find out what works after all. It’s the justification though which is flawed here.

Currently in the same way that retailers are
subject to interchange fees for the card
payments they take there is a similar economic
case for the Scottish Government to create a
state-owned not-for-profit Scottish Payment
Initiation Service to reduce the amount of fees
it pays to financial services companies and
increase the tax take.

… See More
Posted on by Tim Worstall

Scotland’s Right To Food – Food Banks Are The Solution, Not Problem

Scotland is likely to add the right to food to the list of things that are to be had by simple existence rather than any effort. This breaches, as do so many of these new rights, any sensible definition of what is actually a right. The discussion also manages to entirely ignore the fact that food banks are an answer to this very point, not a problem nor even symptom of breach. Because, you know, food banks mean that those without food gain some – they enable that right to be fulfilled.…

See More
Posted on by Tim Worstall

Scotland’s Virtue Signalling – Landfill Ban Will Just Bury England

So Scotland has decided – or at least the porridge wogs who run the place have – that landfill will no longer be allowed north of the border. Hmm, OK, well, it’s their country, they’re the government, have at it. Except, of course, they’re not suggesting that they should also carry the cost, themselves, of the more expensive alternative methods of dealing with household waste. Instead it’s all going to be shipped south of the border – what virtue signalling, eh?…

See More
Posted on by Tim Worstall

Interesting Statistic – 87,000 Londoners Paid More Income Tax Than All Of Wales And Scotland

It’s difficult to insist that Britain doesn’t have a progressive taxation system when we get numbers like this. That some 87,000 Londoners paid more in income tax than the entirety of Wales and Scotland. Actually, it’s impossible to insist that we’ve not got a progressive income tax system when we’ve got numbers like this:

In London, the picture is even more stark. The city has 4.2 million income tax payers, but just 87,000 individuals earning over £200,000 a year paid nearly half the £43.8bn

… See More
Posted on by Tim Worstall

Scottish Teacher Recruitment Problems – So, Abolish National Pay Rates

It appears that there are problems in recruiting teachers in Scotland – the answer therefore is to abolish those national pay scales. For quite obviously it is not true that all teaching jobs are of the same value, therefore not all teaching jobs should pay the same amount.

There’s more to it as well – costs of living vary across the country. Therefore a national pay scale isn’t going to provide the same standard of living to the people doing the same job in different areas.…

See More
Posted on by Tim Worstall

Scottish NHS Rations By Queuing – Why Not Do It By Price Instead?

Anything and everything in this world – anything which is an economic good at least – is rationed in some manner. That’s rather what an economic good means, something which is scarce and thus we need some limitation on its use. This is as true of health care as anything else. We also have a system which acknowledges this, NICE. If your treatment is going to cost more than £30,000 per quality adjusted life year then you’re not going to get that treatment.…

See More
Posted on by Tim Worstall

As Scotland Is Finding Out – Higher Income Tax Rates Can Mean Less Income Tax Collected

The basic contention of the Laffer Curve is that a tax rate can be “too high”, meaning that a lower rate would collect more revenue. Note that the insistence isn’t that any lower rate will produce more revenue, but that there’s a curve and it’s possible to be beyond the peak of it. Laffer Effects are when we see the beginnings of this – some people not working so hard, leaving the country and so on, even perhaps not arriving in the taxing jurisdiction.…

See More
Posted on by Tim Worstall

The Education System For The 93% Should Teach Which 1% Interests?

Quite obviously, given the historic interest, the public school system must indeed teach the techniques of safe gay sex under a necessity that doesn’t apply to the state school system. But this insistence upon teaching what is clearly going to be of interest to a minority of the school population, well, how far do we take it? Some minority interests must indeed be catered to. It’s not exactly a majority of Englishman who wish to be able to converse, rather than despise, a Frog but there should still be that place in the curriculum for French lessons.…

See More
Posted on by Tim Worstall

Your Tax Money At Work – Shetland Box On Maps Now Illegal

Certainly, we need government, no one has managed to show that anarcho capitalism works as yet. But unfortunately, once we have government we have the sort of people who like to be in government. This might mean that the deal is not overall beneficial. For example, we’ve one in Scotland who has made it illegal to show Shetland as a box on a map.

Well, illegal if you’re the public sector and you don’t have a good reason to do so.…

See More
Posted on by Tim Worstall

Independent Scotland Can’t Have An Income Tax Higher Than The One It’s Got

We’re told that there’s no way that the Laffer Curve will have any influence upon the ability of an independent Scotland to raise more tax revenue from higher earners by upping the income tax rate. We’re specifically told that this is proven by the work of those associated with Thomas Piketty. This is a dangerous misreading of what is actually being said by those associates. What is actually being said is that in a taxation system in any manner resembling the current one then income tax rates are about has high as Scotland can have them without losing tax revenue.…

See More