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Act Now: A New Economy

A visual representation of the issues involved in a New Economy
"Act Now: A New Economy" by the Common Sense Policy Group is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Years of reducing tax rates on business have failed to deal with regional inequality and poor productivity. We need a New Economy that directs investment to where it is needed most, and funds public services adequately. This requires a complete overhaul of fiscal and monetary policy. Since the global financial crisis, wages have shrunk in real terms but wealth has grown. This continues a long-term trend towards reduced remuneration for work and increased returns on unearned income, which contributes to inequality, injustice and tax-base erosion. Since the high-point in personal taxation in the 1970s, reductions in income, corporation and other taxes have coincided with an increased focus on using income tax as the key means of funding government spending. The policies we outline throughout this report require significant funding, and we show that providing it through responsible capital investments and taxation on passive wealth, carbon production and corporation income advances a new economy that serves the interests of the vast majority of us and stimulates inward investment. The taxes we outline reflect public preferences and point towards viable, productive means of making the economy work for us. We use complex, cutting-edge microsimulation modelling to show the impacts of these reforms on measures of performance linked directly to our everyday experience, providing an overwhelming economic argument for the policies we set out above.

The reforms identified in the report enable us to run Britain as a business. By this we do not mean a country based on unsustainable pay ratios and offshoring labour that leaves most of us in a perpetual state of personal indebtedness and zero-sum competition for work. Rather, we mean a collective endeavour in wealth creation in which investments lead to an overall increase in resources and a distribution of those resources to those parts of our society that need them most in order to function. By addressing the historical anomaly of viewing income tax on work as the sole means of funding Britain, we set out a fairer and popular means of advancing each of our five principles of reform through our New Economy.

Recommendations

The Government should:

  1. Stop perpetuating the myth that rolling back the state produces growth – it doesn’t.
  2. Invest in the structure of Britain in the same way as every business has to invest in order to generate wealth.
  3. Simplify and limit tax increases on income from work given the declining value of that income tax passive wealth and close the fairness gap by ensuring that income from work is no longer taxed at a higher rate than income from dividends.
  4. Increase fundamentally affordable taxes, such as corporation tax, which is paid on profits, not overheads.
  5. Disincentivise through new taxes carbon producing corporate activities that cost us more in the long-term than leaving the resources in the ground.
  6. Remove the enormous number of badly targeted or damaging tax reliefs.