Taxing Away Prosperity: UK, New Zealand versus Hong Kong.

In one of my stupid moments – sadly, I have them – some time ago I ended up defending the English economy on Twitter.

 

I know – what was I thinking?  

 

It didn’t start out that way, indeed, the debate was over how Cunliffe was a Keynesian zealot, but then someone tweeted in and changed the course of the thread and suddenly I was into a nonsense relativistic debate comparing UK to Spain, Greece, etc, which then somehow changed to I was advocating the UK economy was something other than crippled. Albeit they do seem to have made some admirable progress via cutting government expenditure, with the UK economy projected to finally September this year surpass the size it was pre the GFC in 2008 for the first time, it is yet a moribund, debt laden economy, struggling under low growth, tax and regulation: perhaps the nature of the impossibility they face can be best shown by a single photo:

 

On the left is the UK’s various taxing legislation, on the right, the little thin blue book, that’s Hong Kong’s. There’s a whole bunch of hooks in applying causation, but I’m unsurprised that according to the International Monetary Fund Hong Kong’s GDP per capita in 2013 was $52,722 international dollars, sixth highest in the world, compared to the UK’s $37,307 way down in twenty first place.

 

New Zealand? We’re back further in thirtieth place on $30,493. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact of on a total population which could be lost in a single suburb of Hong Kong, our Income Tax and GST legislation looks like this:

 

 

I’m also unsurprised that the gross government debt as a percentage of GDP – per IMF - is as follows:

 

Hong Kong:    32.4%

New Zealand: 38.2%

UK:                 90.3%  (Wow.)

 

For the Leftists, statists of all hues - including too many Tories - who believe in the big brother tax surveillance state: as one of the sharpest minds in the twentieth century said, you can ignore reality for so long, but you can’t ignore it’s consequences; one of those being the cult of redistribution - cult, because irrational, yet chanted like a mantra - funded by taxing away my liberty, privacy, and right to be left alone, creates only a cycle of dependency and poverty.

 

Tax destroys the free society philosophically, and ‘after’ that, destroys our prosperity economically.

To the politicians reading this: just f***ing stop it.