NHS

www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2018/03/05/mmt-and-tax-havens/

Murphy is suggesting printing all the money to pay for the NHS, I'd consider £126 billion this year pretty excessive and an inflationary action. Just to make it easier to understand, that is creating/printing £345 million every single day of the year. The problem is that a large proportion of that money would go directly into pay wages, so it's massively inflationary.
To think that he wanted to be a Labour Party economics advisor when he produces this sort of stuff is frightening.
Mark Carney ultimately decides how much is printed.
You decide what you need to buy with your own money.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/10/denied-free-nhs-cancer-care-left-die-home-office-commonwealth

In the meantime the NHS treats people like this.
Is that acceptable to you, primrose, just so tax fraudsters can get away with it?

One purpose of tax is to stop inflation.
"Reclaiming the money the government has spent into the economy. As already noted, it may appear that tax revenue is being used to pay for government services supplied but that is not true: government spending always comes out of funds the government borrows from its central bank. Tax, in that case, reclaims the money spent to prevent excessive inflation. The amount reclaimed is that which is considered sufficient to leave the desired rate of inflation in the economy."

Can you tell me what is wrong with money going into pay, i.e., increasing the minimum wage to £10 an hour?
Employing lots more builders to build the houses we need?
Paying cleaners and careworkers £10 an hour?
They are much more likely to spend the money in the local economy rather than hoarding it offshore.

How about an extra property tax on houses over £5 million?
That might get a lot of Russians and Saudi Arabians to leave London.

I don't agree with MMT, but perhaps I don't understand it properly. If you print the money for the NHS as suggested, what changes to tax would be needed to counteract the inflation? What rates would people pay?
It sounds like you're suggesting you print the money, then take it all back in tax from people to stop inflation.
How's that any different to the average person than now? The outcome is exactly the same. Pay tax. Would it be more or less than people pay now?

What real changes would a £10 minimum wage make? How many people on minimum wage at the moment also receive means-tested benefits that would be decreased?
Wouldn't a large increase in the minimum wage simply benefit people who are middle income already?
Wouldn't it shunt up the median income, meaning that more people would be below the 60% threshold, therefore in poverty?

All these things have been discussed before but these sorts of difficult questions are never answered.

Maybe you should read more taxresearch.

He doesn't answer those questions at all Jen.
Neither do you.

It just shows how easy it is to say stuff that sounds great, but you really only need to think about it for 5 minutes and it all falls apart.

No, primrose. He says you print the money then pay people more, get them building houses, etc., so the money goes round the economy.
Would Toys r us or Maplin have gone into liquidation if there was more money moving round the economy?
The tory government have been doing the same thing, but giving the money to banks instead of businesses. Then it has been kept in tax havens instead of being used in the economy.
If we renationalise the railways and utilities, the money will stay in the system instead of being syphoned off into tax havens.

For the many, not the few, to coin a phrase.

Another very easy way to put more money into the NHS is to stop the cap on NI.
All working people should pay NI at the same rate no matter how much they earn.
Why should someone who earns over £866 a week only pay 2% on that?

inews.co.uk/news/health/man-dies-waiting-ae-dangerous-overcrowding/

Jen, you have not answered the questions I asked you. Actually, you've sort of agreed that this would be massively inflationary - as that is the measure of 'the money going around the economy' and 'the money in the system'.
How inflationary?
How would the tax structure change to combat this?
Or what would the impact of that inflation be?

If tax is simply a method to reduce inflation, not raise revenue, why would changing the NI cap put more money into the NHS? Surely it would simply be a contraction of the economy, using your preferred MMT.

You're contradicting yourself with every post. Do you understand what you're promoting?

Primrose says: "I think a hypothecated tax is the best way to fund the NHS too. Then it's simple to administer, easy to see what you pay for and you know where your money is going. I don't see why politicians are against it. I'd rather the funding was made simple and transparent."
I thought that this was the way to go as well, but having been thinking about it a bit more I have changed my mind.

People object to paying more into general taxation for various reasons but one reason is that they don't agree with various things that the tax money is spent on. For instance some people object to money going towards Trident, other people object to money going towards foreign aid.

I think if we had a separate tax for the NHS the same sort of objections would be made against paying it.
Some people would object to money going towards keeping elderly people alive, some people would object to paying for fertility treatment.
So the same problems would arise as with general taxation.

I can see how people could feel that way Ilovecheese. But I suppose those things they object to the NHS providing will be provided however they are paid for. There are 2 different issues there - how the NHS is paid for and what the NHS does. If I was changing how the NHS is paid for, I wouldn't change what it does at the same time.

I agree that people should not pay any more money to start with - that just complicates the issue for me. I would take it out of general taxation. The NHS costs about half of what the government receives in Income Tax. So I would just split it into 2. If you pay 40% tax rate, you now pay a 20% tax rate and a 20% NHS rate.

Then, if people want extra money to go to the NHS, you simply raise the NHS rate.

The government can put as much money as it wants to into the NHS. It doesn't want to. It doesn't want a hypothecated tax, as that would mean it would stay in the public domaine and not be privatised and sold to its US friends and Branson.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/10/poverty-benefits-families-cuts-austerity-hammond-poor-welfare

The government wuld rather do this to families than pay out enough money for them to feel healthier and not need the NHS.

www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2018/02/26/the-role-of-public-sector-borrowing/

The government can print as much money as it likes.

Any chance of an answer Jen, or do you just not know it. I don't mind, it's just really disrespectful to ignore questions.

Stop being pathetic, primrose.
I've actually been looking at videos of my six month old grandson for an hour.
Didn't realise you required specific answers.
You've also asked so many questions I have no idea what you want replies to.

Unlike you, I have no expertise in finance or business.
Instead I read the experts, assuming they know more than I do.
The latest Taxresearch link seems to me to encompass all the relevant information about why the government can print money to fund public expenditure in terms that most people can understand.

After all, the Tory government has been doing it since 2010.

No need to call me names Jen. It just puts people off posting and I think it's nicer when there's lots of different ideas.

I'm not being pathetic. And Richard Murphy is not an expert, as I've pointed out before. He's just an accountant, not an economist, who contradicts himself frequently. He's been criticised by many people far more qualified than me (like Oxford uni centre for taxation and the IFS). I like reading experts opinions. However, he's a self-appointed expert with a political agenda, which isn't quite the same.

It's not my fault that his arguments contradict each other and you can't explain them. That's a poor reason to be rude to me.

"The government’s Gradgrindian approach also means there’s no easing up on austerity – a policy that is pushing families into poverty and threatens the foundations of the welfare state. After the chancellor sits down on Tuesday, MPs will face a vote to block a plan to restrict free school meals in England to families with net earnings under £7,400 per year. This saves the Treasury £500m but at what cost? A million children living in poverty will go hungry, almost entirely in working families.

Austerity is a political choice; talk of Britain facing a borrowing crisis is meaningless while we remain a monetary sovereign nation and the state debt is mostly owed to domestic creditors. Britain is a trickle-up economy by design."

So we'll just carry on with austerity, shall we, with people dying in hospitals and a million children living in poverty going hungry?

Do you have a personal reason to put down Murphy?

"Richard Murphy (59) is a chartered accountant and a political economist. He has been described by the Guardian newspaper as an “anti-poverty campaigner and tax expert”. He is Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London and Director of Tax Research UK. He is a non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics.

According to International Tax Review Richard was the 7th most influential person in global tax in 2013. In 2016 Richard was in the same journal's Global Top 50 in tax, one of only two people to have been so for the whole five years it had published such a list. In 2017 he was ninth on the same list."

Sounds well qualified to me.
What are your qualifications to be more expert than him?

Pathetic isn't a name; it's an adjective.

www.internationaltaxreview.com/Article/3773353/Global-Tax-50-2017-Richard-Murphy.html

Where are you, primrose?
You've had 20 minutes to respond.