Aye, it’s a cracker today, she’s in vintage form:
With an estimated wealth of £200m, he can afford the very best
consultants. The committee, on the other hand, has just one economic
researcher on any given report, but needs the sharpest armoury of fact
and argument. These under-resourced Commons committees tackling great
issues and multibillion-pound interests urgently need strengthened
power and capacity in Gordon Brown’s constitutional review.
On the one side we have a man with £200 million of his own money. On the other the massed power of the State with £550 billion a year of other peoples’. If Poll thinks that this is an uneven match then perhaps we ought to be thinking about what they’re doing with that £550 billion?
But the committee may have one advantage: City caesars are not used to
challenge or contradiction. Up in their glass towers, rulers of both
public and private companies are surrounded by obsequious courtiers in
a world far removed from the rough and tumble of politics.
Err, sorry? You are realy claiming that businessmen are more isolated from reality than politicians? You mean those people who, when they make a bad decision, can see the money flowing out of their bank account, are less in touch with the world than those who when they make a bad decision race full steam ahead with the proceeds of other peoples’ bank accounts?
It is to laugh.
They will threaten darkly that if they have to pay a fair tax, they
will all flee London, though only some 40 of private equity’s top 200
earners are domiciled or resident in the UK for tax purposes. And
plenty of serious City voices (including Ferguson) say few would
actually go: they prefer London to Dubai, Dublin or Geneva as a
well-regulated place to do business. (Little people’s taxes make it so.)
?? So all this is about 40 people then? Why all the fuss? Further, you’re really rather confusing "doing business" in a place with "domicile or residence" in a place aren’t you? By your very own figures 160 of them, (that’s 80% of them) do the former without doing the latter. So raise the tax rates and have 100% of them do business without paying the taxes, why don’t you?
The public suffers but can do nothing, and the Treasury suffers
whenever once profitable companies offset debt against profit instead
of paying tax.Angela Eagle, one of the Treasury committee’s
toughest interrogators, points out that now Boots has been bought for
£10bn on a £7bn debt, it can offset £500m of debt charges and pay the
exchequer zero – instead of paying tax on the £480m profit it made in
2005. We are all losers every time this happens.
Err, interest paid to someone else is taxed when it reaches the other person. Where’s the net loss?
There is no longer a level playing field. He wants to level down, but it’s time to make private equity level up.
Wondrous: most of the limitations on public companies are there to protect the widely dispersed shareholders. So let’s have the same protections on companies that don’t have those widely dispersed shareholders.
It is to laugh.
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