If you tax something too much, people alter their behaviour because the incentives have changed.
If you tax people who work and give money to people who don’t work then it’s obvious that less people will work and more people won’t work. That is the incentive structure.
If you make something more expensive fewer people will buy it.
If you make it expensive to earn over £100K, then fewer people will bother doing it. If you make it more expensive to hire people, fewer companies will be hiring.
If a nation taxes wealth, it will have a less wealthy nation.
This is summed up in the Laffer Curve (below) - the economic principle that at a certain point, higher taxes reduces the overall taxes collected. There are 4 principles that economists have learned about when to raise taxes or not to:
1. If a country has relatively low taxes, raising taxes will likely result in collecting more.
2. If a country already has high taxes, raising taxes will likely result in raising LESS.
3. If a country has a wide tax base, raising taxes will likely result in collecting more.
4. If a country has a narrow tax base, raising taxes will likely result in collecting less.
The UK currently has high taxes on a narrow tax base (of very mobile people) so the established economic theory says that when Rachel Reeves raises taxes in her next budget, it will actually do more harm than good - less will be collected.
It seems counter intuitive but LOWERING taxes has a higher chance of collecting more money.
Anyone who runs a business knows this. There comes a point where if you put your prices up and a few clients leave you can crash your business. If you can find a way to reduce your prices, your total revenue will grow.
Walmart, McDonald’s, Amazon and Toyota became dominant because they were committed to keeping prices down not putting them up. They understood the Laffer Curve but it would seem that the UK needs to learn this lesson through painful experience every 50 years or so.
@grok@arindraaa@ronaldowarrior Lewandowski didn’t win the Champions League in 2021, lost to PSG in the QFs though didn’t play in those games due to injury @grok