Of course government has to pay the same taxes as the rest of us

One of the things that has sped up road repairs - no, really, they are faster these days - is the idea of charging the people doing the repairs rental for the lanes they’re using while repairing them. True, this means the inisital bid for the work will be higher as we taxpayers have to pay them enough to pay the rent back to us which all seems a bit of a waste. Except having the money flow across the books concentrates minds - especially sa the road repairers get to keep any of that rent if they finish the work early. And, of course, pay more if they are dilatory - more that we haven’t already paid them.

We’ve all also taken this one step further. We charge the Ministry of Defence for the electromagnetic spectrum it uses. Obviously, and of course, they need to be able to run rdios and so on. But we do charge them. Spectrum is valuble, it can be sold to telephone companies for example. So, we up the MoD budget, charge them for the spectru they use and thus concentrate minds on whether MoD needs quite so much of that valuable spectrum.

Then we get to this about this new mansion tax:

Homeowners, rather than occupiers, will be liable to the surcharge and will continue to pay their existing Council Tax alongside the surcharge. Social housing will not be in scope.

Oh no, that’s wholly the wrong thing to be doing. This new tax starts at a house/flat valuation of £2 million and rises thereafter. The idea that we’re putting poor people into housing worth that much is, of course, ridiculous. But it does in fact happen. Less than it used to to be fair - a number of councils have been selling off their most valuable properties in order to be able to buy two and four and five more modestly priced places. Which is the right thing to be doing, obviously. This extra tax on more expensive housing would be a further incentive to do more of that. Therefore the tax should be imposed upon social housing.

Yes, of course, taxing a part of government to send money to government which has been extracted from a government budget is a bit of a rigmarole, rather round tripping even. But money flowing across budget lines does concentrate minds, wonderfully, on the efficient use of assets. Yea, even public assets. Therefore we should do this.

There is another way to put this of course. Whatever it is that they’re doing to us needs to be done to them, good and proper. But that’s to bring ethics into it rather than just efficient public management.

Tim Worstall