Whether you are a politician or a voter, do you know what the deadweight losses of tax are?

If not, you cannot start to sort Scotland’s economic and social problems.

That is because the damage inflicted to economies and communities when the wrong taxes are chosen is devastating (currently up to £1 trillion a year in the UK; Scotland up to £72bn). The level of damage, even if it were half as bad as this, is far worse than any worst case scenario that could be inflicted on us by the EU post-Brexit.

Voters need to press their political representatives to move from taxing wages and trade to raising revenue from the rents produced by society itself, or which are provided free by nature. Only then can the enterprises needed to empower communities across Scotland be free to add maximum (shared) wealth to our country.

AGR/LVT please!

The operation of the UK government tax scam, by which capital gains from high value locations rapidly offset, then overtake, the entire lifetime tax liabilities of site (home) owners, is documented in Fred Harrison’s book, Ricardo’s Law.

The unearned wealth extracted by site owners is produced by society as a whole when it invests people’s taxes in amenities.

This travesty, of course, leaves the full costs of state to be borne by others less fortunate. And explains the ‘necessity’ for government-applied Austerity.

Must Holyrood approve and perpetuate such Westminster cons? So far, the Scottish Parliament has exhibited little awareness of the culpability being transferred onto its shoulders from Westminster.

Take, for example, devolved Income Tax. Will the Scottish Government tell us how much Scotland loses each year from the deadweight losses of Income Tax, a tax it now independently champions in Scotland for the first time?

£12 billion (Harrison)? £24 billion (Feldstein)? Or even more?

A meaningful referendum would be one in which the British people were consulted on whether, after Brexit, they wish to be liberated from the taxes that impose £500bn+ worth of avoidable damage to the wealth and health of the nation (Scotland £36bn+).

The only viable strategy for the UK is a reform-led programme that organically restructures the economy to replace rent-seeking with value-adding enterprise. That is, migrating from taxing wages and trade to AGR/LVT. This would re-balance relationships between the regions by eliminating the economic bias that has favoured London for centuries and continues to do so today.

In this SLRG pamphlet the authors describe the post-Brexit era as the first realistic chance since 1945 for all of the political parties to unite behind the one financial reform that would forge a new start for the United Kingdom. That is, the migration from a system of taxation which represses production by at least £500bn a year to Annual Ground Rent (aka Land Value Tax).

Read the pamphlet here Blitz or £500bn.web.

Scotland after Brexit can flourish as never before. Over the past 300 years, the peoples of the four nations laboured under a tax regime which imposed an artificial ceiling on productivity.

Those taxes continue to create havoc in people’s lives. The only viable strategy for the UK is a fiscal reform-led programme that organically restructures the economy to replace rent-seeking with value-adding enterprise. This would re-balance relationships between the regions by eliminating the bias that now favours London. And it would transform the City of London to secure prosperity across the kingdom.

A national conversation is needed to create the democratic mandate that authorises the re-design of the public’s finances. And the leaders of all political parties must agree to work together to eliminate the internal barriers that rupture people’s health and wealth.

The annual UK damage caused by the tax regime amounts to at least £500bn. The palliative policies that are supposed to mitigate that damage have failed.

Twice in the 20th century the people of Britain mandated the structural reform of their finances. Twice the law was enacted. Twice, Parliament failed to honour the “rule of law”. Will Holyrood and Westminster now grasp the opportunity offered by Brexit to bring our nations a new kind of prosperity?

By Ian Kirkwood

Life at the UK margin, including much of Scotland, is blotted out by taxes on wages and trade. It’s why enterprises and jobs hardly exist at Scotland’s more remote or otherwise marginal locations. But this imbalance can be addressed: by instead collecting the site values we all generate together. Because site rental values are high at the economic centre and low at the margin. If these were treated as state revenue, everyone would pay their surplus and no more: life would be revived and enterprises reborn at the margin.

Wages and trade taxes are jealously guarded at Westminster with ‘good’ reason: Taxes invested in London and the southeast automatically boost site values by 400% (e.g. site values were multiplied by a factor of four to five on completion of the Jubilee Line extension).

“Both ground-rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Though a part of this revenue should be taken from him in order to defray the expenses of the state, no discouragement will thereby be given to any sort of industry. The annual produce of the land and labour of the society, the real wealth and revenue of the great body of the people, might be the same after such a tax as before. Ground-rents, and the ordinary rent of land, are, therefore, perhaps, the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them.”

The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776:Bk.V: 370.

Following the SLC request for submissions on Land Value Tax, our tax expert Mark Wadsworth has prepared a document outlining how MSPs can use devolved tax-varying powers today to boost the Scottish economy by over 9% without collecting any extra revenue.

Scotland’s Path to Prosperity

Scotland’s Path to Prosperity (link to pdf) is published today. Our detailed and fully costed document is a prescription for turning around the perpetual Scottish deficit that is currently the sole future offered to Scots by pundits.

The document not only includes detailed costings but also fully explains the method of assessment and collection of a locally collected levy on site rental values (which we prefer to call Annual Ground Rent, after Adam Smith) to replace a proportion of devolved Income Tax.

The positive outcomes of such a bold move by MSPs would be many. The stream of value generated in Scotland by the combined efforts of society is found in the rental value of all land. Today site owners pocket this wealth, despite wide recognition that they do not generate it.

Adam Smith described how collecting [Annual] Ground Rent (aka LVT) would mean that people would be as well off after its collection as before. Mark Wadsworth shows in figures how and why Adam Smith was right! The reason is that the AGR/LVT levy is immune to deadweight losses (devastating economic damage inflicted by taxes on wages and trade).

We now present that option before MSPs – and all Scots – in a clearly written and fully explained but brief report. Please read it, place it in the hands of your MSP and demand that this policy option be fully debated at Holyrood.

MSPs, it is the duty of government to collect as revenue the surplus produced by society that is the rent of land. Devolved powers allow you to immediately migrate to collecting about one third of that surplus. By collecting that revenue directly from economic rent instead of indirectly by existing taxes, you will undo about one third of the economic and social damage inflicted on Scots by Westminster taxes. Please look carefully at the option before you to turn Scotland around. Our economists and tax experts are keen to explain further and face to face. Please contact us at info@slrg.scot.

Roger Sandilands
Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of Strathclyde

VAT is not just a tax on consumption. It hampers and destroys wealth producing enterprises. Producers have to cover their costs otherwise they go out of business. VAT forces some of them out of business; the survivors were/are able to pass on the VAT to consumers, rich and poor alike. VAT is thus a regressive tax.

But, in line with the ATCOR principle (All Taxes Come Out of Rent) VAT, like all other taxes on wages and trade, depresses business and so depresses rent too. It is not just a matter of the Laffer Curve effect on revenues, but also of the deadweight effects on GDP.)

For this reason, the recorded size of AGR/LVT, in the national accounts, is a relatively very small proportion of GDP. This false accounting is compounded by the statisticians’ practice of conflating land with capital and hence recording business “profits” as a return on “capital investment”, whereas much of it is actually land rent.

Critics of  ‘LVT’ commonly cite this as a reason why it is not possible to finance a modern state in which government spending is, say, 40% of GDP.

The reduction of taxes in favour of AGR/LVT will reveal the true size of actual rents. And not only that. It will also increase them. This makes possible not only a full and fair financing of the functions of state, but also increased economic activity. This yields, year on year, an even greater potential volume of rent available to the state, to spend on behalf of the community that creates it as the social surplus.

Land owners at Westminster designed the current UK fiscal arrangement by which over one third of our socially produced surplus (the red slice) is reserved for site owners. Not only does this explain our starved public services, but also inequality, social exclusion/disintegration, cultural damage and premature deaths at the margin.

The mechanism by which this monstrous theft from the public purse can be recovered is Annual Ground Rent (less well described as Land Value Tax).

Holyrood can make a start now by swapping devolved Income Tax for a locally collected Annual Ground Rent, which would also replace the Council Tax, Business rates and LBBT.