A Place to Stand

Following yesterday's post here are 3 responses:

David Price

Fully support the X-Prize suggestion.

uanime5

While no federal taxes may stimulate the economy there’s no guarantee that the economy will grow sufficiently to make up for the loss in tax revenue.

It would also require all companies to provide private healthcare for their employees because the NHS would be unaffordable.

Bazman

No nuclear safety, no taxes and a prize for the largest marrow with no buyer. What a load of shale.

    I thank David Price for that, it is good to see somebody in Britain willing to look at new ideas on their merits. Bazman is engaged in fact free trolling. Uanime5 is, I believe, greatly overstating in the scare story about needing to dismantle the NHS (I doubt that would even be possible in that sort of timescale). Laffer's proposal is for a short term tax holiday. In the long term if we achieved China's 10% growth not only would the tax base increase 10% annually (doubling in 7 years) allowing repayment even if government spending is only kept flat, but also the ratio of borrowing to GNP drops fast (from around 70% to 35%), making it sustainable.

   The important thing from my point of view was that Mr Redwood did not choose to dispute that all 3 of these are credible ways out of the recession, less painful than years of cuts and far less painful than decades of faux "cuts" which seems to be government policy.

   I assume the reason he does not propose them is that believes, as I do, that they are simply too innovative,  libertarian and incompatible with a massive overgovernment to be acceptable to the current Conservative party.