Dear Mr Osborne, if you weren’t such a pompous fool, you could help grow Britain’s economy

Every day, pundits and other self-professed ‘experts’ are keen to tell us how to save Britain’s collapsing economy. And now the geniuses at the Taxpayers Alliance (TPA)�- many of whom have never had a proper job in their lives – have produced their great solution. They’ve got some things right – for example, the optimum level of tax for an economy to grow is around 33%. Anything above that stifles growth, anything below leaves the public sector underfunded. But the TPA’s proposals are too complex and too wideranging to be implementable. However, there is one thing the Government could do quickly to boost economic growth – scrap corporation tax.

Like the beard tax and the hat tax of the 1600s and 1700s, corporation tax has outlived its usefulness. In the 2000-2007 Brown boom, tax paid by small companies went up by 132%, but tax paid by large companies only went up by 5%. Why? Because large companies can use all kinds of tricks to cut their tax. So the tax burden falls unfairly on small companies, yet they are the ones that can reduce unemployment and boost growth. If every small company took on just one person, unemployment would fall by over a million, benefits claims would drop dramatically and income tax paid would go up. Corporation tax should be replaced by the Government retaining a percentage of VAT that would otherwise be repaid to businesses. This would slash tax evasion (as the authorities would already hold the money) and make large companies and those�using places like the�Cayman Islands and Jersey as their supposed HQs pay their fair share of tax. Moreover, it would make Britain the best country in the world to base a business, bringing many companies to Britain and creating hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs. You can find out more in my MoneyWeek article Scrap the modern-day beard tax http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/uk/david-craig-scrap-the-modern-day-beard-tax-57636�and you could even send the link to the hopelessly out of�his depth�Mr Osborne