2009-11-30
Tax
text 11:53:35
What if we threw out of all of the existing [personal] taxes, allowances, credits, and bands, and replaced them with a aflat 35% income tax?
I’d be interested to see if anybody’s actually run the numbers and modelled this.
Flat taxes aren’t exactly a new idea, and they’ve been tried, notably in the Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia). They’ve been proposed for the UK, and criticised, too, for cutting the overall government budget (albeit at a 22% above £12,000 rate, not 35% (on everything, presumably, which would surely only increase the size of the poverty trap)).
In the end, though. it just seems like so much geek-friendly “wouldn’t it be great if…” reinvention, when the real world just doesn’t work like that.
