There’s a lot of noise about the cost of renewable energy. Vast quantities of...
Latest posts
On charitable giving and tax avoidance
Over the past few days, I’ve been really pleased to see the issue of tax avoidance in the news. As far as I’m concerned, tax avoidance has been the elephant in the room throughout the deficit/austerity debate. Here we are desperately cutting budgets while revenue leaks out through the back door through ‘creative accountancy’. Tax [...]
What we learned this week
My favourite postgrowth link of the week is this conversation between a physicist and an economist. For all the fuss about charitable giving, it’s great to finally see tax dodging being debated in Britain. Here are some other countries which need to talk about it a little more. An old NIMBY favourite argument against wind [...]
Plants for a bee friendly garden
There’s been a fair bit about bees in the news this week as Friends of the Earth launched their new campaign The Bee Cause. It’s an attempt to kickstart a national ‘bee action plan’, in response to the steep decline of the British bee and the cost to the economy of having to pollinate crops [...]
Feeding the world in 2050
Between now and 2050, earth’s human population is expected to rise from near 7 billion to 9 billion. At the same time, climate change, water shortages and soil erosion are expected to deplete our agricultural capacity. Meeting that food gap is one of this century’s biggest challenges, and we start with an added complication: global [...]
Should we tax land instead of buildings?
After last week’s post on new approaches to tax, Byron mentioned a land value tax (LVT). It turned up again this week in a book I’ve been reading, so I thought perhaps I should write a bit more about the idea. At present, individuals and businesses pay local taxes on the buildings that they own. [...]
Postgrowth economics and the church
I neglected to mention it at the time, but this Lent saw the launch of the Ash Wednesday Declaration – a call to UK churches to take climate change seriously and incorporate it into their theology. We’ll have to wait and see what difference this particular one makes, but these sorts of declarations or confessions [...]
To think about next time you turn on a tap
This is what a drought looks like in Chad, central Africa: This is what a drought looks like in England: This year the much of south and central England is experiencing a drought. Chances are, the most serious consequence for most people is that they will have to wash their cars with a bucket rather [...]
How to avoid income tax
There has been a fair bit of controversy recently over the government’s decision to cut the top rate of tax in the latest budget. Those earning over £150,000 will now pay 45p for every pound they earn rather than 50p. The politics of giving a tax cut to the top 1% of earners at a [...]
How Google avoids paying tax
‘Don’t be evil’ was the watchword for Google when it founded, but they’re not above a little tax avoidance. The company dodged a massive $3.1 billion between 2007 and 2009, using a couple of well known revenue shuttling strategies. This is a snippet from a large infographic here, which you should check out. It includes [...]
All That We Share, by Jay Walljasper
Think of the word ‘commons’ and you may well imagine a patch of land where one might have grazed one’s sheep in centuries past. Or perhaps you think of the House of Commons. The commons has a broader meaning however, and it is a largely forgotten but highly relevant term. Put simply, the commons are [...]
