uk government

Business + Gov. Leeching = Job loss

by Michelle Minton on March 4, 2009

in Economy, Nanny State, Personal Liberty

As I blogged about earlier many states in the US,  facing budget shortcomings of their own making are looking at beer and wine tax increases as a way to make some cash. One of my assertions, beside the fundamental stupidity of penalizing production and wealth creation, is that such tax increases will hurt employees and pubs hardest. To back that up we can take the UK as an alistairdarlingbarredexample—they are experiencing the roosting chickens of Chancellor Darling’s 2008 beer tax in the form of 20,000 lost jobs and 2000 pubs closing. That’s just in 2008.

American lawmakers should think very carefully before following the same principal as the Brits who, let’s face it, have a much stronger relationship with their pubs. As a result of taxing this industry, England is loosing its small pubs, many family-owned and many that have been part of communities for decades.

And these British barflys are not happy…well, they are even more surly than before.

Compared with the history of brewingalistairdarlingbarred2 in the UK, America is barely in its infancy and already we are beginning to make a name—our small craft brewers and brew-pub concoctions compared alongside the masters of Belgium. Regulators need to understand that bloodletting businesses is not only wrong, it won’t help them keep businesses in their state, it won’t increase their tax revenue, it won’t help them stay in office.

German Finance Humor

by Iain Murray on December 10, 2008

in Bailout Watch, CEI Projects, Economy, Regulation

When the Germans are laughing at you, things are in a pretty serious mess. That’s the case with the British version of the bailout, which the German finance minister has just ridiculed:

Criticising the UK government’s decision to cut VAT from 17.5% to 15%, Mr Steinbruck questioned how effective this will be.

“Are you really going to buy a DVD player because it now costs £39.10 instead of £39.90?” he said.

“All this will do is raise Britain’s debt to a level that will take a whole generation to work off.”

Saying the UK government was now “tossing around billions”, Mr Steinbruck questioned why Britain was now closely following the high public spending model put forward by 20th Century economist John Maynard Keynes.

“The switch from decades of supply-side politics all the way to a crass Keynesianism is breathtaking,” he said.

“When I ask about the origins of the [financial] crisis, economists I respect tell me it is the credit-financed growth of recent years and decades.

“Isn’t this the same mistake everyone is suddenly making again, under all the public pressure?”

Given that so far Henry Paulson and his Treasury team have seemed to take their cues from the Brown government approach, one hopes that Herr Steinbruck will turn his attention to the Bush-Obama policy approach soon. We could do with a Teutonic laugh.