Taxing problems

James Walker (Letters, 8 Dec-ember) advocates Scotland following the Danish high-tax, high-spend system.

Unfortunately our problem is not lack of money but the incompetence of those who run the public services, and their political masters.

Why else would Edinburgh Council be frittering away a billion pounds on an unwanted tram system instead of, for example, building houses? Why is it that with ever increasing billions being poured into the NHS, Scotland has some of the worst health statistics in the world?

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Why is it that we can never spend enough money on education, yet more and more of our young people leave school functionally illiterate and unemployable, while at the same time brighter kids are conned into taking useless degrees and finding themselves four years behind in the job market when they graduate?

The requirement is greater efficiency, not higher taxes. The idea of giving even more of my money to incompetents to waste is not one I welcome.

Ian Lewis

Mayfield Terrace

Edinburgh

Professor Sinfield (Letters, 8 December) provides an excellent demonstration of how benefit fraud, wrong as it is, pales to near insignificance compared with the tenfold greater rip-off of the public purse due to tax evasion.

To this we could add the perfectly legal stratagems employed by “tax avoidance consultants” and non-doms.

The scale of the loss to public revenue must be enormous and, unlike benefit fraud, we see very few right-wing moral chest- beaters in the press complaining about it.

One can have no sympathy with fraudsters, but there is a gut instinct of understanding of why someone, whether artisan or professional, might not want to see the results of their hard work or enterprise vanishing down a bottomless pit of state demand.

The very concept of tax is in the end the problem itself. Tax is basically the state theft of lab-our; it either leads to avoidance, evasion or less of the item being taxed produced or exchanged, the classic example being the infamous “window tax” which led to the bricking up of windows. To stimulate the economy in this time of deep recession and to secure an unavoidable public revenue stream, we need to consider a method of raising public revenue that is fair and is tax consultant/non-dom proof.

We can easily find sure ground for this, because it is the very ground under our feet that provides the answer, in the form of its 100 per cent societally created desirability factor, its land rental value? (LRV).

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Unlike any tax percentage rate, a 100 per cent collection rate for LRV is fair and would end the really big rip-off from the public purse. Since the need to use tax would disappear, so would tax avoidance.

Ron Greer

Blair Atholl

Perthshire