The Financial Times has featured the ASI's comments on the 2016 Budget twice. The first article covers Executive Director Sam Bowman's comments on the changes to business rates:
Sam Bowman, at the Adam Smith Institute, said business rates were mostly a tax on landowners, rather than on firms.
“Even though firms write the cheques, when business rates are cut, rents rise in proportion, so firms are no better off, but landowners are. Reducing rates for small businesses only makes this problem even worse,” he said.
Mr Bowman suggested the “distortion” in the system which now benefited small firms, which were generally less productive than larger companies, risked the “Italification” of British business.
The second article features Sam's comments on the Chancellor's promises to achieve a budget surplus by 2020:
“At the current rate of cuts, he will now need to find £31bn of cuts or tax rises in the year 2019 alone to deliver his surplus,” said Sam Bowman, executive director of the Adam Smith Institute, a free market think-tank. “In all likelihood he does not expect to be in the job by then and does not mind handing the problem to someone else.”