Income taxes

How does the taxation of housing fit into how we analyse other taxes and the tax system as a whole, and what can we conclude about how it should be reformed? This was a Keynote Presentation given at the Tax Research Network Annual Conference, at Aston University and online, on 9 September 2021.

The ‘gig economy’ has grown and risen up the policy agenda in recent years. The associated growth in people working through their own businesses and in work happening through platforms highlights difficult questions about when to have boundaries in the tax system and where to put them.

Taxes are often the subject of debate; that is as it should be. But those debates need to be well-informed to produce sensible policy outcomes.

The tax system discourages employment, investment and risk-taking. It needs reform, say Stuart Adam and Helen Miller.

Presentation of "Tax Evasion and the Minimum Wage" at the OECD Economics Department.

At this event we discussed findings from a new report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, which sets out the problems with the current tax treatment of business owners’ incomes and investment and discusses how the government could take practical steps towards fixing them.

I see nothing objectionable in fixing a limit to what anyone may acquire by mere favour of others, without any exercise of his faculties, and in requiring that if he desires any further accession of fortune, he shall work for it.” That, from John Stuart Mill, alongside his conviction that great economic and social advantages would result from a reduction in the number of “enormous fortunes which no one needs for any personal purpose but ostentation or improper power”, has for more than a century been the central liberal case for a substantial and effective inheritance tax.

In a bid to become the next prime minister, both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt say they plan to increase the point at which people start paying National Insurance Contributions (NICs). This move would make the UK’s tax system even more different to those in most other developed countries in two ways.