A Row!

An Englishman's Castle isn't happy about this post of mine regarding this post at EURSOC. (Christ, isn't hypertext long.) Now, my beef was that their contention that a flat income tax - an idea long cherished by comically rightwing Americans - was a "truly cross-Atlantic idea" was unrealistic, and that further this represented a British conservative tendency to hope that any new members in the EU would form a strategic block with the Tories to remake the union in their image. AEC accuses me of insufficient diligence, citing this Tech Central Station article. Now, I grant that Slovakia and the Baltics have (partial) flat taxes, but that ain't much of a strategic block. And AEC's crack about me being "the left wing Yorkshire Ranter" perhaps ought to be balanced by a mention of the TCS author:

Daniel J. Mitchell is a Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Heritage Foundation and the author of The Flat Tax: Freedom, Fairness, Jobs, and Growth.

Freedom, fairness, jobs and growth? Well, at least they don't underrate their own abilities over at the - ah - right-wing Heritage Foundation. Those would be basically three out of the four main problems of politics, peace being the one not covered, and he seems to think he has them all taped. I also like the characterisation of the Maltese and Cypriot tax systems:

"so attractive that they were blacklisted as part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's anti-tax competition crusade."

I suppose another way of putting that would be "caught letting crooks launder dirty money". Mind you, if you read TCS I think you should consider your wealth at risk. Is this the last paper in the world that still believes the authors of Dow 36,000? They also claim to know who The Smartest Man in Europe is, and unfortunately he says things like this about US politics:

"The U.S. has grown soft. No politician can propose anything that involves sacrifice."

There's also an interesting point here, in the EU's invaluable publication Structures of Taxation in the European Union: those "new Europeans" with their whizzy pro-growth tax structures also lead Europe in - well - heavy social security contributions:

"The low share of direct taxes in the new Member States is counterbalanced by higher shares of social
contributions (+6.9% respect to EU-15) and indirect taxes (+4.1%). Regarding social contribution
the highest share can be found in the Czech Republic (42.4%) Slovakia (41%) and in Poland (40.9%)
while EU-15 average is 31.9%. Lithuania, Malta and Slovenia have the highest share of indirect taxes."