Date published: 2008/02/08
The BBC says:
The Trade and Industry Minister Lord Jones said London's top role in the global finance could be damaged by plans to tax wealthy foreigners.
Lord Jones says the proposals will make it harder to attract top investors and business people to London.
The Treasury plans to charge foreigners who have claimed tax-exempt status on their overseas earnings for more than seven years, £30,000 ($58,400) a year.
This summarises everything that is wrong with the British media. Some minister makes a completely obvious remark and the media goes ballistic (as is made clear in the rest of the article). Digby didn't say it was a bad policy. As with every policy, there are positives and negatives. He just pointed out the obvious fact that some people see it as a bad policy. The fact that no government official or politician can ever mention a potential negative without the media going ballistic is a big problem. It means that every politician continuously has to lie to everyone about just about everything. Politicians perpetually have to pretend that all their policies have no downsides, only upsides (and of course their opponents' policies only have downsides and no upsides).
As it happens, this particular policy could easily end up with the UK being worse off. The Treasury claims otherwise but what do they know. For one thing, they only look at tax receipts, not the bigger picture. The government was goaded into this rather poor policy by the Tories (and the media), so the Tories are partly to blame.
_________________________________________________________
All material not included from other sources is copyright cambridge2000.com.
For further information or questions email: info [at] cambridge2000 [dot] com
(replace "[at]" with "@" and "[dot]" with ".").