Eeyore wrote:

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

If the tax on home fuel and gas and on industrial fuel was te same as
that on road fuel, no one would accept a house that was anything else
than insulated to the sort of standard you might see in central Canada.

Taking government spending in toto, that's no different to offering free home
insulation upgrades. The money simply gets there by a slightly different route.


It is, and it isn't.

Taxes are easy to apply because we have mechanisms in place to do just
that. If yu spal a big fuel tax on the ol companies, you hav few easily
monitrable targts.

Subsidies need to be applied for, and have a hugely wasteful extra
bureaucracy to administer them. I have seldom found any goverment
handouts that need to be applied for to be worth the trouble of
applying for them.

OTOH every time petrol goes up another 5p a liter, I am acutely aware of
how much it costs to fill the tank, and teh idea of a cheaper to run car
looms even higher in my list of things to be considered.


Taxes, subsidies, thay all amount to the same thing in the end.


Yes and no. We do NOT have a mechanism to distribute subsidies to every
man, women company and child, in place. We DO have a mechanism to tax
every man woman and child, and company, in place.

In particular by scrapping taxes on savings and wealth, and labour, and
putting it all on CONSUMPTION via the VAT system, we have a perfect
opportunity to move towards a highly employed society, that exhibits
extreme thriftiness.


Graham