tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22490286.post3684091961728485592..comments2009-12-16T22:35:09.090ZUnkie Davehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11814294366274836021noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22490286.post-81312987568536422672009-12-16T21:49:37.838Z2009-12-16T21:49:37.838ZI got sent a copy of that TASC submission, and I&#39;m sorry to say I don&#39;t find it very plausible. It&#39;s extremely useful that they&#39;ve enumerated all of the tax reliefs (although they seem to be quoting the report of the Commission on Taxation), but they don&#39;t provide any breakdown of savings that would be made by axing each of them.<br /><br />They&#39;re not just talking about property-based reliefs either, but of tax credits availed of by ordinary workers. If you removed or decreased the employee tax credit, say, or the one-parent family tax credit, you&#39;d surely have to compensate affected earners in some other way, or you&#39;d effectively be raising taxes on low earners.<br /><br />Maybe their €2.2bn figure is the magical threshold at which tax credits start to benefit higher earners only, but I don&#39;t see any evidence that they&#39;ve done such an analysis - they seem to have just taken a &quot;European average&quot;.<br /><br />Perhaps I&#39;m missing something, but from my reading this is not a particularly helpful submission. It would have been very useful if they had enumerated property-based tax reliefs and other reliefs that only benefit higher earners, and shown the savings to be made from scrapping each of these.ryanohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12155915437917113189noreply@blogger.com