Marvellous: we get an extra dose of Polly today! She’s on the subject of why charity won’t in fact solve all the problems of the world.

Gordon Brown has encouraged giving with new tax breaks. If the rich
tire of one of their homes, which has no doubt risen vastly in value,
they can give it to charity and pay no capital gains tax. Ditto any
shares they donate.

That seems entirely fair to me (unless I’ve misunderstood this): as the donors are not in fact making a capital gain it seems logical that they’re not taxed upon one, doesn’t it?

But are tax breaks a good idea? All that capital gains tax would
otherwise go into the exchequer to be spent according to the democratic
decision of taxpayers.

Here she’s clearly and obviously correct. As we know, indeed, as any fule kno, money that’s spent without passing through the holy hands of the State doesn’t do good things. Cannot, by definition: good cannot come from evil acts, after all.

Instead the taxpayer sees their own money purloined and spent at the whim of the giver.

Err, no, we really do need to make this distinction here. Not taxing something is not the same as purloining tax money. To insist that it is means that the personal allowance, those few thousand each year that we’re allowed to earn without being taxed, is stealing from the Treasury.

Every time anyone donates to a cat sanctuary or cruelty to dogs in
Japan, the taxpayer is obliged to contribute another 28% on top,
willy-nilly (and often nilly). So long as they fulfil the very basic
requirements of probity, registered charities may cover a multitude of
crankiness and inefficiency: cut-throat wasteful competition between
near-identical tin-rattlers, advertising campaigns that distort
important social issues; or empire building charity managers with
little genuine assessment of their outcomes. Of course many are
excellent, but, good or bad, the taxpayer has to pony up that 28% extra
for every pound put in a tin.

This is simply the recycling of the tax money already paid: you earn, you pay tax: if you donate to charity, the tax you’ve already paid is passed to the charity. The net effect is that donations are made out of your pre-tax, not post-tax, income. This realy is not the same as stating that the taxpayer is subsidizing all of these charities.

Donors with their hefty cheques can cause serious trouble for good
charities doing difficult, skilled work. Masters of the Universe are
used to running the show themselves in their own companies, and they
think they know best how to run any organisation. Sometimes they do,
but sometimes the cash comes at a high price. Once they’ve got all the
"toys", the danger is that using their money to run poor folk, their
schools, their estates or their children is just the most fun toy of
all.

Could sombody tell me in what way that paragraph does not apply to bureaucrats and the agents of the State? Well, except in the obvious one, that at least the MotU are spending their money, not someone else’s?

There is no evidence that charities spend money better: indeed
researchers are too polite to conduct the sort of thorough,
value-for-money scrutiny of charities that the state is subjected to.

This is where we should all break into hollow laughter: I seem to recall that Sure Start was in fact audited for effectiveness and failed such a test, dismally. Pol’s reaction was to call for more to be spent. This is value-for-money scrutiny?

They could shame the non-domiciled, the private-equity tax evaders, the
trust fund inheritance tax cheats and their whole wicked tribe of tax
advisers bent on denying the state as much money as possible.

Polly, if you have evidence that private equity types are evading tax I do hope you’re going to present that to HMRC. It is illegal you know, to evade tax.

They could advocate a top tax rate of 50% on earnings over £100,000.

They would? You mean they wouldn’t ever think about Laffer Curves and such? They wouldn’t, having thought through the Laffer Curve and decided that 50% would not in fact bring in less revenue, then look to dynamic scoring of tax policies?

That would only affect the top 1.5% of taxpayers and it would bring in £4.5bn every year.

No, it wouldn’t. Behaviour, and thus revenues, would change.